Sony Walkman D-E307CK Personal CD Player
Out of stock |
Similar in Portable CD Players
- Anti Skip Buffer: 10 sec.
- Overview
-
Reviews
-
Compare Prices
User ReviewRead All Reviews »
The most i've ever gotten out of $120
Pros
Made it through nearly all of my college career
Cons
It broke (after much abuse)
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
My best friend for almost 4 years. It was a good Cd player.
Well, yesterday marked the day that my Sony Discman broke. I've had it for almost 4 years, and it has weathered countless walks across campus rattling around in my backpack, and has seen many late nights at the Kettle or the library while I study. It's been a pretty tough guy.
It received a fatal blow to the headphone jack the other day when it fell of my bed, and now plays tunes to only one of my ears.
In any case, it's been a very good cd player. It has 10 seconds ESP, which at the time was the best available. It has a line out, a nice feature if wiring into a home stereo. Resume is a very nice feature. you can stop your CD player, and when you restart it, it picks up right where you stopped it. (Yeah, the CD player I bought to replace it has resume, but it picks back up at the *beginning* of the last song you played, kinda annoying)
Let's see, what else. The lid is spring loaded so it opens up all the way automatically. It has a heat resistant lid, also, there is a connector right next to the headphone jack presumably for an optional in line remote control, which I never really looked into, but a good idea. It also sports some features I never use, such as repeat play, random, program mode, and this thing called AVLS. This is something Sony designed that kinda normalizes the volume sent out so you don't damage your ears. I just try not to turn it up too high. The battery life is roughly ten hours.
Well the tricky thing about battery life is that the manufacturers have to find out some way to reduce power consumption, so in more recent models (with battery life approaching and even surpassing 30 hours) to increase the life they decrease the power the unit sends out to the headphone jack. Pretty tricky. Most people don't really miss it because they use cheapo $15 headphones, but try to plug a set of $100 Sennheisers and you have a problem, not enough juice, makes your sweet cans sound like sweet crap. Amazingly enough there are such things as headphone amps out there to fix this.
In any case this Sony had good juice to my headphones...rarely went above halfway on the volume control.
Complaints:
1)I've dropped it many times and the only complication is that the laser would rarely get out of line. When this happened, you could hit play, the CD would spin up, and then a funny little whirring noise would emit from the player, then it would just shut off. I could fix this easily by sliding the little moving caddy the laser is mounted on over a notch. It would then read correctly.
2)The ESP was almost always very effective, but sometimes such as when I was walking and had it in my backpack, after a while it just couldn't keep the memory buffer full and would start to skip. This unit wasn't meant for jogging. Keep in mind that when this discman was designed that was the best you could hope for, and otherwise the ESP works well. It takes a decent jostle to make make it skip even with the ESP off.
3)As reported in a couple of other reviews, on the center spindle there were some plastic pieces that broke off. This didn't seem to affect the player's performance at all because the ball bearings on the spindle that actually hold the CD in place are still intact.
4)The LCD is not backlit
I have since taken this CD player apart. Its guts are sitting on my desk right now. The line out still works great, so I'm thinking that I'm gonna make a funny little dasktop cd player out of this, with no lid and guts exposed. It looks kinda cool cause nothing is covering the CD, like a record player...
It received a fatal blow to the headphone jack the other day when it fell of my bed, and now plays tunes to only one of my ears.
In any case, it's been a very good cd player. It has 10 seconds ESP, which at the time was the best available. It has a line out, a nice feature if wiring into a home stereo. Resume is a very nice feature. you can stop your CD player, and when you restart it, it picks up right where you stopped it. (Yeah, the CD player I bought to replace it has resume, but it picks back up at the *beginning* of the last song you played, kinda annoying)
Let's see, what else. The lid is spring loaded so it opens up all the way automatically. It has a heat resistant lid, also, there is a connector right next to the headphone jack presumably for an optional in line remote control, which I never really looked into, but a good idea. It also sports some features I never use, such as repeat play, random, program mode, and this thing called AVLS. This is something Sony designed that kinda normalizes the volume sent out so you don't damage your ears. I just try not to turn it up too high. The battery life is roughly ten hours.
Well the tricky thing about battery life is that the manufacturers have to find out some way to reduce power consumption, so in more recent models (with battery life approaching and even surpassing 30 hours) to increase the life they decrease the power the unit sends out to the headphone jack. Pretty tricky. Most people don't really miss it because they use cheapo $15 headphones, but try to plug a set of $100 Sennheisers and you have a problem, not enough juice, makes your sweet cans sound like sweet crap. Amazingly enough there are such things as headphone amps out there to fix this.
In any case this Sony had good juice to my headphones...rarely went above halfway on the volume control.
Complaints:
1)I've dropped it many times and the only complication is that the laser would rarely get out of line. When this happened, you could hit play, the CD would spin up, and then a funny little whirring noise would emit from the player, then it would just shut off. I could fix this easily by sliding the little moving caddy the laser is mounted on over a notch. It would then read correctly.
2)The ESP was almost always very effective, but sometimes such as when I was walking and had it in my backpack, after a while it just couldn't keep the memory buffer full and would start to skip. This unit wasn't meant for jogging. Keep in mind that when this discman was designed that was the best you could hope for, and otherwise the ESP works well. It takes a decent jostle to make make it skip even with the ESP off.
3)As reported in a couple of other reviews, on the center spindle there were some plastic pieces that broke off. This didn't seem to affect the player's performance at all because the ball bearings on the spindle that actually hold the CD in place are still intact.
4)The LCD is not backlit
I have since taken this CD player apart. Its guts are sitting on my desk right now. The line out still works great, so I'm thinking that I'm gonna make a funny little dasktop cd player out of this, with no lid and guts exposed. It looks kinda cool cause nothing is covering the CD, like a record player...
