Home > Consumer Reviews > Pioneer PD-F958 101-CD Changer

I was deciding between this one and Pioneer's 25 CD changer -- I'm glad I went with this one. Having 100 of your favorite cd's playing in random mode gives a 1,200+ song mix without the reception problems, bad album choices, and long commercial breaks of FM radio. Plus, you can press "Random" again to skip a bad song. The cd title display is nice when you don't know what cd the current song is from. Of course you can also listen to any individual cd(s) you want or program a mix (see below). You can mark up to 20 songs while playing by pressing the "Best" button.

Missing features that kept it from being a 5 - a "Delete" button to mark lousy songs while playing to skip in the future. Volume buttons to control a Pioneer receiver (the receiver's remote only controls a small subset of the cd player's controls, so I still have two remotes when just listening to cd's). Programming should be improved -- except for "Best", it forgets your programmed track lists any time you switch modes (you can shut off the power, but if you want to listen to a cd outside the program, you either have to stop and add it to the program or else lose your program) (there are also three "Custom" lists that are remembered like programs should, but these can only list full cd's, not individual songs).

Overall, the track programming costs it a star, but it's made my stereo much, much more enjoyable, completely blowing away the single cd player I had used. I'm enjoying cd's and hundreds of songs I'd been pretty much ignoring for months or years.

Let me start this review by saying that I had the send the cd player back to Amazon because the arm that retrieves the CDs for play did not retract completely and would hit each CD as it went by. It would also jam the machine. After a few plays, I realized the problem was not going to go away. I sent it back but I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of my replacement.

Loading the CDs was a snap, entering the titles was a little tedious(fortunately, I had only loaded only a handful of CDs before discovering the problem), programming the various custom modes was a breeze and the random play was great. The single play slot was easy to use, although you have to remember to use the separate controls for that.

The remote is a little small, but I really did not use the remote very often, other than to program the custom modes, which as I noted was easy.

The player could use a delete feature to skip over bad tracks, but of course, the beauty part of the player is that you are always going to hear a song out of the blue that is totally unexpected and even the bad tracks sound better like that.

All in all, I was very happy with the player and can't wait for the replacement to arrive.

I am happy this 100 + 1 CD Juke Box style player overall. It plays really well & I have had no mechanical problems thus far. It is somewhat cumbersome to program & I have to refer back to the manual not infrequently. But in general this a nice unit & I am glad I have it, the remote is easy to use once you understand what you are trying to accomplish from the directions.