Sony Walkman D-E405 Personal CD Player

The D-E405 is exactly the same thing as the D-E401 except it also comes with a Nicad rechargeable battery pack that lasts about 5 hours on a charge and a wired remote control that plugs into your headphones. You can start/stop/pause your player or change tracks or volume with the remote. These are the only differences between the D-E401 and D-E405. Here's my review of the Sony D-E401 and D-E405:

This is a really good portable cd player. It has been discontinued for a while now, but you can sometimes find them used on Ebay.

Sound: This cd player sounds a lot better than most of the new ones that you can buy brand new right now. The reason is they sacrificed sound quality/volume output on the new models to increase battery life and skip protection. The Sony D-E401 and similar models have a 15mw/ch amp. The new Sony's have 5mw/ch and the Panasonic's are 8mw/ch. If you have good headphones that suck a little more power than the average ones you will appreciate the output on the older Sony players. The sound is clear and detailed. Don't use the megabass or groove settings, they sound terrible with most music unless all you care about is bass and in that case you don't care about sound quality anyway.

Durability: These players usually last quite a long time if you take care of them. Even if you don't take care of them they usually hold up pretty good. Mine has been dropped lots of times over a couple years and has held up pretty well. The build quality doesn't feel great, the lid is a little bit loose, but it can still take a lot of beating. Maybe the loose lid absorbs impact from the ground better?

Skip Protection: This player is outdated so the skip protection is nothing compared to the newer players. The new ones will take lots of banging around without skipping and this one won't. You can walk around with it in your hand without turning on the ESP and it won't skip. Also try not to use the ESP if you can, cause it adds white noise to the sound. In most cases the cd player is stable enough to not skip without ESP. It's also decent on scratched cd's. It's not as good as most Panasonic players for playing scratched cd's, but it's better than most others.

Battery Life: As I said, this player is outdated and the new players have sacrificed sound quality to give you much longer battery life. That way you can listen to the poor sound quality for a lot longer! :-) For my use this cd player has long enough battery life. It's rated for about 16 hours on 2AA's, but I use a NiMh rechargeable battery pack that lasts about 9 hours on a charge. It can be rechargeable thousands of times so it holds up pretty good.
It's a good idea to get rechargeable batteries for any cd player that doesn't already have them.

Features: This cd player has just as many features as the newer players. It has resume play, so you can stop the cd and then start playing it from the exact same spot it was at before. The resume play will still work even if you take out the batteries after stopping the player. Also, there is a switch to turn resume on and off. This cd player also has the regular features like 22 track programming, shuffle play, repeat play, one track play, intro play and repeat 1 track. I find most of these useless except maybe the program feature. You can program it while it's playing so you don't have to stop the music to program it like you have to on most cd players. AVLS is a useless feature that lets you flick a switch that keeps the volume from peaking high enough to hurt you ears. I think it sets the volume way too low, and it also makes the volume flunctuate a lot. It just really sucks. The LCD display is really easy to read and has a battery gauge so you can estimate how much play time you've got left.

For most uses this is a great player. It's bulkier than the newer players but it's not really big. I think it looks nice. If you find a used on in good shape for a good deal pick it up. The new players are gonna get worse before they get better (at least in terms of sound quality).