Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony CDPCX455 400 Disc MegaStorage CD Changer

After some deliberation, we decided to purchase this 400 CD player to consolidate about half of our collection. I assumed (perhaps to my fault) that like my computer, when I inserted a CD into it, the player would know the title, artist and song list for most (but not all) of the CD's -- NOT SO -- not even close! Of the 400 entered into the system, only about ten (yes 10!) CD's actually had any information come up at all. For all of the rest, you must enter the title and artist - cannot enter song name (not that you'd want to with that many CD's) - but I had no idea how much time would be needed to enter in all of those titles, even with the keyboard used.

Now I should say that I'm actually pretty good with electronics and can pretty much figure most things out on my own, so this is not the ranting of a ludite who can't get the thing to work. If given the opportunity to do so again, I would look for something else altogether. This was a bad decision for someone with a lot of CD's, especially if you're limited with your free time. I also agree with the other folks who said that 20 characters is too few and I'm really disappointed that you can't enter a title, artist AND genre. But what I'm most upset about is that it took me days (a few to several hours each day) to get this fully programmed and loaded.

Buyer beware! Seriously.

This unit works great. It was a happy day when I got rid of the old CD towers! What really makes a difference is if you get more than one and get them working together with personalized play lists and shuffling between them so there is no delay between songs. Many of us have more than 400 CDs and are not done buying them, yet. IPODs give us great portability but on a goood sound system mp3's do not have the richness and depth of a wave file on a CD. I also highly recommend you get software (don't bother to key in titles) that will actually do an inventory through the internet of all your CDS after you load them, label them and yes even download a picture the CD cover. I am not allowed to give you urls but you might want to google Panther Studios.

I have FIVE of these changers and no problems at all. In fact, I have them connected to a computer program which allows me to shuffle across all five changers. Soon, I'll be purchasing my sixth changer with no worries or hesitation. Why waste time ripping CD's into your computer when you can hear the full, 16-bit linear sound from CD's? There's no comparison.

Word to the wise. Wait if you can and hope for a better product. Technology will leave this one by the wayside shortly.

This could be a much better product. Take your standard CD player from any modern computer add a 400 cd carousel and ship it. Basically that is what Sony did.

With all the technology available they should have some way to download play list directly to the machine. Who wants to type in the Artist Label for 400 CD's? If you don't play the machine in 30 days all of your information is gone.

I only wish I had gone to Electrical Engineering School. This product would be so much better.

Sony is the only one I could find with a mass storage CD player but that's okay since I was replacing an 8 year old Sony mass storage unit. Unfortunately, the first one AMAZON sent me was defective. They could not have treated the situation better though. They immediately sent out a replacement and had UPS pick up the defective unit. The replacement works great. Sony could improve this unit a lot by having the "store bought" CD's display individual song titles. That is done on the MP3 copies that you install into the unit. Other than that, I find the unit just what I need. The MP3 capability is the biggest single improvement over the old unit I had. It takes a lot of time to convert a bunch of CD's to one but that's not the unit's fault and it's well worth the effort for the sake of increasing storage capacity.