Home > Consumer Reviews > Pioneer PD-F1009 301-Disc CD-File Changer

I had a Sony 200 disc unit a few years back that dropped disks often. I read the reviews and determined that the problem still exists, so I opted for this Pioneer unit. I have had it running 3 months now and have not has any problems. Audio quality is average thru the RCA cable. Ya gotta get the optical cable for premium sound. You might consider an upgrade to play MP3's or DVD's - I saw no need for those features, considering the added cost. I highly recommend this CD unit! A great buy!

I needed to replace my Sony 200 disc changer because it skipped all over the first two tracks on every cd. The Pioneer is reliable, sounds great and can play every track on every cd. I like the extra slot for individual use. Keeping track of what's in the changer requires making a list or cataloging the cd covers.

I had a Technics 111 changer, but needed to get one that held more CDs. I read reviews on this one (Pioneer), and despite many that said the sound was awful, I figured I have an awesome (expensive) tuner so I should be okay. WRONG!!! I have to crank it full blast to even hear this thing; even then the quality of sound is poor - like a child's toy! Pioneer itself even says to make a changer which features storage of mega CDs something must be sacrificed. In this case, it is definitely the sound! I'm so glad I still have my Technics (I wish they still made them!) which I have kept using instead of this thing. Still needing more, I just puchased a JVC. The JVC is MUCH better, sounds great! When I tested the JVC, I turned my tuner medium loud - the tone was great, clear ... then I played the same discs in the Pioneer and at the same level of volume, I heard absolutely NOTHING on the Pioneer. BIG, BIG difference! If you just want to STORE your CDs, buy the Pioneer, but if you want to LISTEN to your music, don't waste your money on this thing!!
P.S. I have an almost new 301 Pioneer if you're interested . . .

I should have paid more attention to the negative reviews before ordering this unit for my wife. We needed to replace an old Fisher 150 CD player that worked great for over 10 years but recently started to jam. That brand is no longer available, so I searched for a substitute.

Our old player, from the mid 1990's, stored a category, artist, and title each time you loaded a CD. You could search by any of the above. It was easy to play all your Christmas music, or all your Beatles CDs, or find a CD titled "Sound of Silence". We really enjoyed those features. Sure, it took a couple hours to load our entire CD collection and enter the information, but the payoff was thousands of hours of musical enjoyment.

I had read from other reviews that the new Sony 300 and 400 CD changers let you enter only one label for each disc, forcing you to choose between genre, artist, and title. That was a big step down from being able to enter all three. Imagine my disappointment to discover that this Pioneer product doesn't let you enter any text at all. If the CD happens to have CD+Text on it (or you don't mind burning a new copy of each CD in your collection with the text added), the Pioneer will display the text, but you still can't search and select music in a convenient way. You can set up a list of favorites, but the programming is all by disc and track number.

On the positive side, loading CD's is wonderfully easy. The unit works smoothly and quietly. I don't understand why anyone with the engineering talent to design a carousel mechanism that works this well would cripple it by forcing the user to select from 301 CD's solely by disc number. Such a user interface would be appropriate for a 5-disc changer, not one this big.

Sadly, I'm going to have to return this product. We're going to join the modern world and load all the old CD's into an MP3 player (an iPod or maybe a computer) instead.

With a library of over 400 CD's and my 5 disc Yamaha acting squirrelly, I felt the time had come to solve both problems. Since I had good experience with the Pioneer DV-F727 300+1 DVD player, the equivalent CD magazine player seemed a good bet and,so far,this has been the case. Although I'm still not quite finished loading it, the controls readily allow one to access the last empty slot and, if you should want to remove a disc to play in an auto or other player, it is easy to retrieve/play/return it.
One caveat is Pioneer's recommendation that, if the device must be moved, it should be unloaded/reloaded rather than be transported full. I suspect that stuffing bubble wrap on top of the internal carousal full of discs and then handling it gently would obviate the need to remove the discs and carry them separately with the problem of providing physical protection for them.
A second unit can be combined to provide a total storage of 600+2--which implies I could increase my library by another 200 discs. I haven't gathered up the nerve to broach such an idea to my wife.