Sony Walkman D-NE300 Personal CD Player
- CD-R/CD-RW Playback: CD-R
- Bass Boost: With Bass Boost
- Anti Skip Buffer: G-Protection By Sony
- Supported Formats: MP3
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Really Good CD/MP3 Player!
Pros
Long Battery Life, Excellent Sound Quality and Skip-free.
Cons
LCD characters are very small to read. No Backlight.
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
If you can still find them, they are worth your money. SOUND QUALITY is like no other. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
I got this model D-NE300 on clearance at Circuit City for $40 and boy, I was lucky to have bought it. I like listening to music a lot and with all the small players out there, I still prefer ones based on CDs be it MP3-capable or not because MP3s still sound pale compared to regular CD music.
The GOOD:
List of features (found on the cover)
- Battery life is up to 80+ hours
- Plays regular CDs, MP3-CD and Sony's proprietary ATRAC3/plus
- Dot matrix LCD with 3 lines of information
- Parametric Equalizer
- G-Protection Anti-skip system
The player comes with an over-the-ear headphones with model no. MDR-027. For testing sound quality, I used my Life for Rent album by Dido and a collection of Erasure CDs. I found these CDs to be perfect for testing the Sonic quality of players I have had as they cover the whole spectrum with Dido big on low-frequency, bass-heavy music and also strong on vocals. Erasure on the otherhand employs a lot of synthesizers in their music ranging from analog to digital ones and you have a lot of strings, whistles and bells.
As far as sound is concerned, I strongly believe having owned various Sony and Panasonic CD players over the years that Sony always sets the standard year-after-year. Competitors making flash-based and hardisk-based MP3 players should at least imitate the Sony sound. It is almost insane to think that the less than $50 portable CD players from Sony beat the $150+ players from Samsung, Creative and I-river by an extremely wide margin on SOUND QUALITY. The player has a parametric equalizer that give pre-set choices such as soft, active, heavy and a customizable one from low, mid to high frequencies. When you find the right equalizer for your taste, you will feel the sound is just like heaven. The Dido and Erasure CDs sounded so natural and live it is like you are in a concert. There is an overall balance in the low, mid and high notes. The mid-range and treble were silky while the bass was not punchy and overpowering but mellow and warm. The perception of excellent sound is also due to the high quality headphones that came with the unit which are still made in Japan. I have a Sennheiser HD-497 and I can't tell the difference.
The controls are all laid-out very intuitively on the top cover and are very easy to learn. Hold the menu/display options and the screen changes to a menu-tree that gives you options. If you can operate Windows XP on a PC then navigating the menu button is as easy as ABC. The battery-life is awesome and I was able to obtain 45+ hours on two Energizer AA batteries.
Lastly, the player reads MP3s and ATRAC CDs fast. By the way, the ATRAC sound is superior to MP3. ATRAC converted CDs sounded clean, loud and clear. My experience with MP3s is that the music always had artifacts of "hiss" and "scratchy" sounds. I use Musicmatch to convert to MP3, so I don't know if it is software-caused. Anyways, teh Sonic stage (updated to ver. 2.3) was very easy to use and converts in a breeze. One CD typically takes me 7 minutes to complete. It maybe wise to do ATRAC conversion if you are just starting to build a collection.
The BAD:
Hardly anything I can think of, except perhaps for the small dot matrix characters which are harder to see under the shade. It might well benefit Sony in the future if they can put backlight to their LCD displays.
OVERALL, this model if still available (I know it is an old one) is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Never cut yourself short on sound quality when buying portable music devices. It is because of listening to music that you buy those anyways and SONYs do mean "LIKE NO OTHER" when they say so. It is like the performance of a BOSS music system but the price of those Walmart cheapos.
The GOOD:
List of features (found on the cover)
- Battery life is up to 80+ hours
- Plays regular CDs, MP3-CD and Sony's proprietary ATRAC3/plus
- Dot matrix LCD with 3 lines of information
- Parametric Equalizer
- G-Protection Anti-skip system
The player comes with an over-the-ear headphones with model no. MDR-027. For testing sound quality, I used my Life for Rent album by Dido and a collection of Erasure CDs. I found these CDs to be perfect for testing the Sonic quality of players I have had as they cover the whole spectrum with Dido big on low-frequency, bass-heavy music and also strong on vocals. Erasure on the otherhand employs a lot of synthesizers in their music ranging from analog to digital ones and you have a lot of strings, whistles and bells.
As far as sound is concerned, I strongly believe having owned various Sony and Panasonic CD players over the years that Sony always sets the standard year-after-year. Competitors making flash-based and hardisk-based MP3 players should at least imitate the Sony sound. It is almost insane to think that the less than $50 portable CD players from Sony beat the $150+ players from Samsung, Creative and I-river by an extremely wide margin on SOUND QUALITY. The player has a parametric equalizer that give pre-set choices such as soft, active, heavy and a customizable one from low, mid to high frequencies. When you find the right equalizer for your taste, you will feel the sound is just like heaven. The Dido and Erasure CDs sounded so natural and live it is like you are in a concert. There is an overall balance in the low, mid and high notes. The mid-range and treble were silky while the bass was not punchy and overpowering but mellow and warm. The perception of excellent sound is also due to the high quality headphones that came with the unit which are still made in Japan. I have a Sennheiser HD-497 and I can't tell the difference.
The controls are all laid-out very intuitively on the top cover and are very easy to learn. Hold the menu/display options and the screen changes to a menu-tree that gives you options. If you can operate Windows XP on a PC then navigating the menu button is as easy as ABC. The battery-life is awesome and I was able to obtain 45+ hours on two Energizer AA batteries.
Lastly, the player reads MP3s and ATRAC CDs fast. By the way, the ATRAC sound is superior to MP3. ATRAC converted CDs sounded clean, loud and clear. My experience with MP3s is that the music always had artifacts of "hiss" and "scratchy" sounds. I use Musicmatch to convert to MP3, so I don't know if it is software-caused. Anyways, teh Sonic stage (updated to ver. 2.3) was very easy to use and converts in a breeze. One CD typically takes me 7 minutes to complete. It maybe wise to do ATRAC conversion if you are just starting to build a collection.
The BAD:
Hardly anything I can think of, except perhaps for the small dot matrix characters which are harder to see under the shade. It might well benefit Sony in the future if they can put backlight to their LCD displays.
OVERALL, this model if still available (I know it is an old one) is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Never cut yourself short on sound quality when buying portable music devices. It is because of listening to music that you buy those anyways and SONYs do mean "LIKE NO OTHER" when they say so. It is like the performance of a BOSS music system but the price of those Walmart cheapos.
