Sony Walkman D-NE500 Personal CD Player
Out of stock |
Similar in Portable CD Players
- CD-R/CD-RW Playback: CD-R/CD-RW
- Bass Boost: Without Bass Boost
- Supported Formats: MP3
- Overview
-
Reviews
-
Compare Prices
User ReviewRead All Reviews »
Sony D-NE500 - After A Year's Ownership
Pros
Wheel/joystick interface, equaliser, CD/RW, MP3 playback, CD Text support.
Cons
Weak output, poor battery lid design, won't save any settings except EQ when battery replaced.
Recommended it?
No
The Bottom Line:
There are better players out there, with better sounding. A set of rechargeable batteries and a player running off two AA cells recommended - better driving power for headphones.
The Sony D-NE500 would've been a truly good player if it wasn't for Sony's conservatism and somewhat careless treatment of features.
The user interface is decent, it has the typical Sony joystick/scroll wheel that are common for professional-line Sony equipment. The player came with a remote and a simple belt-mounted plastic clamp for the player (it is not, however, a case, as the product description states). Both the remote and the player itself have "hold" buttons. The user interface is comfortable, the playing title as presented by the LCD display is scrollable, and the LCD can display a good amount of information.
An AC/DC adapter is a separate buy.
The player reads ID3V1 and ID3V2 tags (though it doesn't recognise anything except the basic European Latinic characters, no Japanese or Hebrew or Cyrillic, UTF-8 is ignored completely and painted as dashes) and CD-Text.
Disc read times, even when reading a CD with several hundred files, are good.
CD-RW discs are all readable pretty well, though it depends on a particular CD-RW make just how well it'll be read after multiple erases. Full erases are recommended for CD-RWs, or the player may not read the disc.
The player has a proper equaliser (though of somewhat limited usage because of the player's lowpass frequency).
M3U playlists are supported.
Gapless playback is supported only for ATRAC files, which apparently has to do with Sony trying to promote its proprietary format.
The D-NE500 had no trouble reading VBR MP3 files; it does tend to skip and inject noise on scratched CD-Rs or poorly erased CD-RWs, but MP3 playback is almost always stable. The anti-shock protection depends on the battery charge remaining; the player almost never, except if the battery's nearly dry, skips even on a bump into a person in a Metro train.
Now, the problems.
The battery lid is inside the disc compartment itself; if Sony engineers' concern was the battery lid's exposition to shock and mechanical damage, they could've made a simple rubber lid, and mount it externally. As it is, especially on bumpy roads and in public transport, it can be very annoying to open the case, remove the CD, open the lid, remove the battery, pop in the replacement battery, etc.
The CD player runs off only one AA battery. With a regular AA battery having only 1.5 V and 2500 mAh, that leaves very little current for driving headphones. That is the major design flaw of the player - most headphones, even ones with 32-Ohm impedance, require about twice as much (hence most CD players feeding off two 1.5V batteries, and digital audio players having 6-12V batteries). Without a headphone amplifier, this CD player has a very bleak sounding with hi-fi headphones, clipping at 8/10 the volume bar. A headphone amplifier is a must for any believable sounding.
The headphones that came with the player don't do it any justice. They don't do justice to anything other than an old tape player or radio.
The player has only one headphone jack which works as both the headphone output (when under load) and as the line out (when not loaded). When driving headphones, frequency response is automatically limited to 40-18000 Hz; when working in line-out mode, it goes up to 20Hz~21 KHz (tested with Soundcheck CD, also with sine/square/saw wave tones and white/pink noise).
The only settings preserved across battery replacements are those of the equaliser. The button-press beep and light, obnoxious and unnecessary extras, are always turned on after battery's been replaced. Now, with the little memory space that simple settings take (basically an on/off state register), could Sony spare a few additional bits to store all settings? Volume is also reset to lowest on battery replacement.
After a year of use, the player started "losing" its left channel unless its left side (where the headphone jack is) was pressed/clammed in a certain way.
In summary, this is a decent starter player, with a comfortable user interface, a good gift for maybe an elderly person, but not an audiophile's player (not without a headphone amplifier) or a player that's a delight to listen to. The beep and the light can also be "accessibility features" that could be of like to an older person or a kid (at least the first couple months of use...), but they're simple annoyances to anyone else (Sony seems to have taken them off their newer models of CD players). The player does have a good (though not as exceptional as Sony claims) battery life, so it could be liked by somebody who doesn't yet have his set of rechargeables. But, there are much better alternatives with better sounding and less annoyances in the same price range, CD players made by Panasonic/Technics, IRiver, etc.
The user interface is decent, it has the typical Sony joystick/scroll wheel that are common for professional-line Sony equipment. The player came with a remote and a simple belt-mounted plastic clamp for the player (it is not, however, a case, as the product description states). Both the remote and the player itself have "hold" buttons. The user interface is comfortable, the playing title as presented by the LCD display is scrollable, and the LCD can display a good amount of information.
An AC/DC adapter is a separate buy.
The player reads ID3V1 and ID3V2 tags (though it doesn't recognise anything except the basic European Latinic characters, no Japanese or Hebrew or Cyrillic, UTF-8 is ignored completely and painted as dashes) and CD-Text.
Disc read times, even when reading a CD with several hundred files, are good.
CD-RW discs are all readable pretty well, though it depends on a particular CD-RW make just how well it'll be read after multiple erases. Full erases are recommended for CD-RWs, or the player may not read the disc.
The player has a proper equaliser (though of somewhat limited usage because of the player's lowpass frequency).
M3U playlists are supported.
Gapless playback is supported only for ATRAC files, which apparently has to do with Sony trying to promote its proprietary format.
The D-NE500 had no trouble reading VBR MP3 files; it does tend to skip and inject noise on scratched CD-Rs or poorly erased CD-RWs, but MP3 playback is almost always stable. The anti-shock protection depends on the battery charge remaining; the player almost never, except if the battery's nearly dry, skips even on a bump into a person in a Metro train.
Now, the problems.
The battery lid is inside the disc compartment itself; if Sony engineers' concern was the battery lid's exposition to shock and mechanical damage, they could've made a simple rubber lid, and mount it externally. As it is, especially on bumpy roads and in public transport, it can be very annoying to open the case, remove the CD, open the lid, remove the battery, pop in the replacement battery, etc.
The CD player runs off only one AA battery. With a regular AA battery having only 1.5 V and 2500 mAh, that leaves very little current for driving headphones. That is the major design flaw of the player - most headphones, even ones with 32-Ohm impedance, require about twice as much (hence most CD players feeding off two 1.5V batteries, and digital audio players having 6-12V batteries). Without a headphone amplifier, this CD player has a very bleak sounding with hi-fi headphones, clipping at 8/10 the volume bar. A headphone amplifier is a must for any believable sounding.
The headphones that came with the player don't do it any justice. They don't do justice to anything other than an old tape player or radio.
The player has only one headphone jack which works as both the headphone output (when under load) and as the line out (when not loaded). When driving headphones, frequency response is automatically limited to 40-18000 Hz; when working in line-out mode, it goes up to 20Hz~21 KHz (tested with Soundcheck CD, also with sine/square/saw wave tones and white/pink noise).
The only settings preserved across battery replacements are those of the equaliser. The button-press beep and light, obnoxious and unnecessary extras, are always turned on after battery's been replaced. Now, with the little memory space that simple settings take (basically an on/off state register), could Sony spare a few additional bits to store all settings? Volume is also reset to lowest on battery replacement.
After a year of use, the player started "losing" its left channel unless its left side (where the headphone jack is) was pressed/clammed in a certain way.
In summary, this is a decent starter player, with a comfortable user interface, a good gift for maybe an elderly person, but not an audiophile's player (not without a headphone amplifier) or a player that's a delight to listen to. The beep and the light can also be "accessibility features" that could be of like to an older person or a kid (at least the first couple months of use...), but they're simple annoyances to anyone else (Sony seems to have taken them off their newer models of CD players). The player does have a good (though not as exceptional as Sony claims) battery life, so it could be liked by somebody who doesn't yet have his set of rechargeables. But, there are much better alternatives with better sounding and less annoyances in the same price range, CD players made by Panasonic/Technics, IRiver, etc.
