Sony Walkman D-NF610 Personal CD Player

The Sony D-NF610 is an outstanding little device - great sound, terrific features and amazing battery life. The software provided with the player allows you to fit a HUGE number of CD's on one ATRAC MP3 disc - I loaded more than 25 on one disc before getting bored with shuffling discs in and out of the drive. It's hard doing a table on contents for more than 25 CD's also...

The basics are excellent and the details almost (but not quite) live up to that. Most of these are pretty minor complaints, mind you, but once you get over how great the player sounds and how much music fits on one disc, living with it and making discs exposes a few little flaws.

First of all, discs that are recorded using the ATRAC coding method will only play on this player or another that decodes ATRAC. They will not play on your home CD changer or car CD player even if those devices read ordinary MP3 discs.

The ATRAC ripping/recording software provided by Sony is easy to use, although it lacks flexibility. You cannot stop in the middle if a session, for example: if you close the program everything you have cached will be lost. It takes four or five minutes to 'read' a CD into the program and there is really no way to save what you have read into the program other than writing it to a CD. Another annoyance is that the software is supposed to know the name of the album and the track names (actually look them up on the internet) and to enter those automatically for you - in my case it rarely seems to work, which means that I have to enter them manually. Not a big deal, but if you're doing a collection of 25 CD's, that can be a lot of typing. You can record without doing this step, but the album and track name will not display while playing.

The unit has great sound. It is unusually shock resistant when playing ATRAC MP3 discs - the disc only spins at the start of a selection and, once the track is read, it stops. I have experienced some jittering with classical music when playing discs on a motorcycle, but it's not consistent. Battery life (at least with ATRAC MP3 disks) is measured in weeks rather than hours. I don't mind the headphones that came with it, but they're probably best used at the gym. I've also used some good quality, but inexpensive, Sennheiser headphones with mine and they sound great. The bass boost REALLY boosts the bass!

Controls on the unit are pretty simple. There is a four way button for play/pause, stop, last track and next track. It's a little indistinct - hard to tell which way you're pressing exactly and sometimes you get the wrong function.

There is a mode button that allows you to choose between play modes (shuffle everything, shuffle by folder [album], single track, etc). Other buttons choose next folder, last folder and there is a radio on/off/band select button. I live in a relatively rural area, so the radio doesn't work exceptionally well, but I expect that in an urban area it would work well. The TV band is pretty worthless, unless you're really hooked on broadcast TV. The weather radio is a brilliant option in those areas with a strong weather signal (kind of wimpy in my neighborhood). The jog dial selects between tracks within a folder, but it's kind of hard to use unless you're blessed with great eyes.

One the whole - a great little device for $90. Great sound, lots of features, almost perfect (particularly if you're patient) and a great value.