Sony Walkman D-E330 Personal CD Player

With five daughters in the house, and each one wanting to listen to their own music, I find myself buying portable CD players more often than I do gallons of milk.

During my travels I noted that the products available overseas are not always the same as here in the States. Enter Sony's DE330 portable CD player.

While many manufacturers have improved their quality of portable cd players over the years, Sony started at the top and has only gotten better. Offering a wide variety of products covering a broad price range, Sony sets the mark for product durability and quality.

We have a HUGE problem at our house. All of these portable devices somehow jump off of the shelve or desktop and crawl under a haplessly tossed towel or shirt on the floor. The next thing you hear is a crunch, shortly followed by female bellowed guttural utterances.

While the D-E330 has a plastic case, it is well built and sturdy. Sony has applied their lessons learned and engineering advances in making this device strong and light weight.
I have found myself cursing after stepping on it. I just knew I was going to have to order a new one – but there were no cracks, and the player functioned normally!

The standard case is what Sony calls Frost Blue. This is an eye pleasing color that the teenagers think is "cool". You can also get these in Candy Pink and a stomach retching Citrus Green.

When I am allowed to use this player, I find that I can easily utilize all of the function buttons. Yeah – I am the guy whose fat fingers usually hit two to three keys on the keyboard at a time. There is the necessary Open tab, as well as the single use Stop and Hold functions. The volume is adjusted by two up and down arrow buttons. Sony's Digital Mega Bass? is stepped up by a Sound button push it once for the initial increase, a second time for another jolt and a third to return to normal. There is a ramp style display that shows how much bass is applied. Navigating a CD is easy by using the Previous track/Rewind {press quickly and the previous track plays, press and hold and it rewinds} and the Play/Skip/fast forward {press to play, once playing press to skip, press and hold to fast forward}. The Menu button allows you to set repeat CD, repeat current track, shuffle, or any combination of these.

The display is large enough for these tired eyes to see. It is also recessed and covered by a thick plastic slab to help prevent it form getting busted. Displayed settings include bass, track time, CD length, battery strength, repeat functions.

Another item that seems to get replaced far too often are headphones. I guess it has something to do with the constant assisted (and violent) removal by one's sisters. I did get to try out the supplied set with the D-E330 before I had to go get a new set (haha – I now keep several sets stashed under our bathroom sink). Sound reproduction was extremely crisp and enjoyable. Of course the girls think that I am damaging the player by listening to Chopin. But what do they know? They still can not explain how a cd player can crawl. I think that WILL BE the NEXT science fair exhibit by THEM!

This Sony Walkman player has an advanced reading laser. Couple that with their ESPMAX™ technology and you have a cd player that hardly ever skips. In fact, since it stores 40 seconds of music before playing, the D-E330 will read almost any scratched cd. I have a Little Caesar (LA band – heavy metal) that I can now longer play on my component system or in our car. But the D-E330 spits it out nicely.

In other reviews I have mentioned how it seems that my daughters eat batteries. To them it is like a Butterfinger? or Three Musketeers? bar. But Sony has managed to tighten down the juice hungry electronics in their D-E330. A pair of AA batteries will last nearly a week. Sony rates them at 33 hours constant use. I figure that that is about the same amount of time that these girls use them up. Een with the expanded battery life, I went out and got rechargeables and two ac adapters.

Okay, now for the not so good stuff. Sony's D-E330 will read all cd formats but not MP3s. Additionally, it does not come with an ac adapter (4.5 volt). And you can not use the excellent reading ability of the D-E330 except to listen. There is no digital output on this device. Sure, you could transfer analog from the headphone output, but why not just record a song from a speaker? This is my one biggest gripe about this guy. I sure would like to copy my scratched cds before I get much older.