Sony Walkman D-EJ611 Personal CD Player

***OLD***This past Sunday, I decided that I needed to spend the eighty dollars that I had saved. I decided on a new portable CD player, because, well... I just felt like it. I perused the racks at Circuit City, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, H.H. Gregg, and finally, K-Mart. What I stumbled upon was pure gold.

The Sony CD Walkman D-EJ611 is a godsend in the world of overpriced, gimmicky, unreliable CD players.

Before now, I had limited myself to below sixty dollars for a portable CD player. Why? To avoid the gimmicks and paying too much for something I am going to use once. This CD player changed my mind with one press of a button. I put all my previous CD players through my own little tests and quirks. (After awhile, my first ESP portable was able to run with the lid open!) I find the little piece of plastic that manipulates the circuit, and I test the ESP by physically holding the CD in place. My former CD players, including the second-most-recent one, a Sony with ESP squared, (which I was dismayed to find only had seven seconds of protection), all have tested below seven seconds. I found one player that got to forty. The current Panasonic model boasts a whopping 40 seconds and that's a 45 dollar model.

I opened up this player, popped in my burned copy of Meat Loaf's "Bat Out of Hell" CD, and waited for exactly a minute. I then began to shake the player violently. Not one skip. I then opened the player and found the circuit manipulator, luckily right in the front. I used a pen lead to push it in, and played the CD for a full minute. I then held the CD so it could not move. After a complete 43 seconds, MEat Loaf stopped howling in my ears, and I was amazed.

This model of player is an ingenius design. I find that Sony has tougher and better designed players than Panasonic, Sony's are more for sport than relaxing with headphones in a nice stable easy chair. My reason for skip protection is that I am a die hard biker. I bike almost everywhere, and just as the first thing you do after you start the car is tune the radio, I always have my CD player in the pocket of my cargo pants. Unfortunately, some of the CD players I have had have had buttons in bad places. Most of these were cheapo-depot throwaway brands such as "Classic" and "Lennox Sound". (The latter's "skip-protection" didn't use it's memory to store good music, it stored the SKIPS and played them back. ugh.) I put the Sony in my pocket, and walked around the rest stop we had stopped at (we were on a trip). I then proceeded to give myself a hernia by running back and forth on the sidewalk of the stop repeatedly. That player didn't skip once, but boy was I balled. Literally.

Another nice thing about this model, or ANY relatively recent model of Sony, is the player's ability to read through just about anything. I put in my CD of Ren and Stimpy "You EEdiot", which had been scratched to a T, and played the most troublesome track, "Smokin'". Whereas my less recent Sony ESP squared played it with the "chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck" effect you get when you do this, the quirk was minimal, and again, I was amazed.

There was ONE thing I found at fault, and this takes off major points, because this was one of the reasons I bought a new one. Sony seems to take it on their own to fight hearing loss in America. On any new player I have heard, when you turn the volume up past eight and one third, the bass begins to fade, replaced with ear splitting treble. The CD I was listening to (the aforementioned Meat Loaf CD) only compounded this, the cymbals were almost unbearable. Imagine sitting inside a Subaru Forester SUV in the backseat with a self-induced hernia, trying desperately to hear Meat Loaf over Nat King Cole played through the sound system, only to have the ever-important BASS cut out at a level at which the announcer in "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" is audible. Ladies and Gentlemen, I have submitted my only complaint about this CD player, which is not saying much. Sony has not yet ceased to amaze me. The only place they seem to fail is sound quality, and that's only in certain models. Headphones, for example. The Sony MDR-201 pair of Headphones, with volume control failed to be reasonably audible in a very rickety city bus, whereas the smaller version of those 'phones performed reasonably well. The pair I stick with is the Freestyle model, the behind the ear kind. These work well, because they push the phone nearer your ear canal, thereby making the sound coming out of them audible (with BASS!) while hurtling away from the Dayton Mall in a loud, clunky diesel bus.

At this point in time, I can't see myself saying any more than, buy this player. It is durable, rugged, affordable, very shock resistant, and it'll last you long enough to justify the eighty bucks you paid for it.***OLD***

Alright, it's July 4th, 2001. I have sold the Sony player and bought a Panasonic. In short, the Sony player began acting up, the skip protection became quirky when riding my bike, it would skip after about 20 seconds, whereas before it would go forever. Another problem, the volume control. Sony seems to want to fight the crusade against hearing loss. The switch under the battery cover that turns off the AVLS is pretty much useless, as Sony limits the bass at high volumes. The bass is replaced with treble, and the CD's I burn are horribly butchered.

I sold the Sony, and bought myself a $50 Panasonic SL-SX280. Please ignore what I said before about 80 dollar and above models, buy Panasonic. Sony is cheap and they don't make their CD players for heavier use. Panasonic has better error correction (plays through EVERYTHING I have thrown at it short of cracked discs) and they have much better sound. I'll say this: the battery usage on the Sony and the Panasonic are great. The newer players are much better at handling power usage, and I have gone 2 weeks without changing batteries in both these players.

Thanks.