Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony D-NE710 ATRAC3/MP3 CD Walkman Portable Disc Player

First, let me say this player is the best one I have ever owned. Now that doesn't mean a thing unless I explain that I've owned about 8 portable CD players, and this is my 3rd mp3 CD player.

I got this player to listen to books on CD while at work (often times converted to mp3 or Atrac so that I don't have to change CDs.) As such I often push the envelope of compression and at times I'll have 400+ mp3 files on one CD. I've found you can really tell a lot about how well the player is made by using it under these extreme cases, so here's a feature list and my thoughts on each feature.

Batteries:
A definite plus. If you have regular CDs, this player will last about 30 hours, and with mp3/atrac you get that near 100 hours of play time on 1 set. Oh, and using NiMH batteries work great with this player, I highly recommend adding a set and a 1 hour charger. It took a week before I had the battery meter go down one notch, but it went down quite quickly after that. Also, it should be noted that this player uses a technology where it conserves power by using the spinning down CD to recharge an internal battery. Really cool to show your friends.

Atrac:
This was a surprise to me.

Atrac is a proprietary format (used with mini-disc) and it offers better compression than mp3. The software that came with this player will convert from mp3 to Atrac, but it is painfully slow. On the other hand, if you are ripping a CD for the first time, converting to Atrac is faster than ripping to mp3 by a factor of 1.5. The part that was disappointing was that you couldn't save your CD and add more files at a later time, it had to be done all at once.

The sound quality is the same, and quite frankly my advice is this; if you already have mp3s, just burn them on a CD. However, if you have a bunch (10 or more) CDs that you want to put on a single CD use Atrac (but remember it is only compatible with Sony players.)

Something else to consider is that there is no equivilent tool for Linux users, which is a real shame. If Sony was to support Linux, then I'm sure there would be easy ways to re-configure the software to better suit those power users

Overall, I rate this feature a mixed bag.

mp3:
Perfect. Quite a surprise, as my mp3s are often variable bit rate and on the high end of compression. Other players have trouble at the level of compression I use, not knowing when a track really ends, this player worked perfectly. One annoyance, sometimes there's a 1-2 second gap when loading the next mp3.

Random mode:
Good algorithm. I've had players that would play the same song 3 times in a row, because they didn't have a good method for choosing a random song. This player doesn't do that at all. Another plus for the Sony developers.

File System:
If you're like me, you like a nice, organized file system to order things. This player works great with folder and such. The only downside is sometimes folder names get cut off due to the display, so put the disc number first if you want to see it using the jump wheel. Also it is alphabetical, case sensitive, so don't be surprised if Zebra comes before aardvark. Finally, as adding leading zeros is automatic for me, I don't know how this player will work without them, so make sure you leave them on (not needed for Atrac.)

Oh one more thing, because I may have hundreds of files on a CD I was expecting a long time to load the CD. However, this player loaded it quite quickly, a very nice surprise.

Resets/Resume Mode:
This is another annoyance with this player. Every once a while it will reset and you'll loose your place in a CD. This happens so infrequently though, one shouldn't worry about it. On flip side, this player remembers where you were when you stopped, so you can always pick up right where you left off (even in the middle of a track.) Very cool. Another plus.

Durability:
This player is solid. I have no worries about it breaking like my Panasonic did. It's quite rugged, and will take some real abuse.

Remote:
Remotes on these types of players are inline with headphones, so you don't have to mess with the unit to skip past a track or such. This player has the spot for a remote, but it doesn't come with one. I contacted Sony about finding one, as it would make this player even better, but I didn't get a response. I'd really like a remote for this player, it is one of the only things I can find lacking with it. The remote is included in the next step up, but that version has no controls on the player it's self.

Summary:
If you have the money, this player will satisfy even the most discriminating user. I have been using it for two months, and love it. The only thing that could make it better is a remote, and some improvements with the software. Overall, definitely worth the money, and the +5 rating.

this is my first time reviewing anything online, and the reason i feel compelled to do so is because i think that this discman is an absolute must for anyone out shopping for an mp3/cd player (Especially one for the car). i have spent quite a bit of time researching for the best cd player out there, have owned quite a few, and without a doubt this is the best one. where to start... the battery life is fantastic at 95 hours for two AA's. it's wonderfully slim and sexy, stylish and elegant in all the ways good electronics are. sound quality is great... some other discman's (panasonic), seem to sacrifice sound quality or the volume tops off at a level you cannot hear over the subway roar (not this one, this will break your ears at full volume...break them). it features fantastic antiskip... the thing will put the current song in memory after 10 seconds and stop it from skipping, making skipping virtually impossible (ie: you can hurl it at a homeless person and it will not miss a beat). the ease of switching between songs in mp3 or atrac form is unsurpassed. the id tagging here is perfect, but the big news, and the thing that makes me absolutely enthralled with this device is the jog dial. not to exaggerate, but the jog dial is the greatest invention since the typewriter... and more useful than water or air. it allows you to easily roll your way through hundreds of songs or folders in seconds. it is so simple that i am shocked other companies havent thought of this sooner. in many other players you have to tap a button a hundred times to get to the song you like... doesnt that suck? no one likes tapping!! here you roll, and its much faster and easier and looks cool as hell. what else to say? there are no problems with this discman...its perfect... it looks great, the buttons all make perfect sense in their placement, it works better than any discman i have ever seen or read about.... and if youre looking for the best you cannot do any better (Serisouly, even those more expensive ones out there arent more functional.... sure they look like miniature ufo's...but they dont have no jogdial).
enjoy it.

After using this device for several months now, I will make the following quick comments:
1) This _IS_ an mp3 player. I was almost deterred by another review that stated the contrary. It plays mp3s quite nicely.
2) The atrac format is great. You can fit 24 hours of music (1.28GB of mp3s) onto one CD without losing sound quality. (I did notice a sound quality difference when I accidentally had the program set to AtracPlus.)
3) The one negative side to the atrac format is that it can take about five hours to convert/burn a CD (this on a fairly high-end computer). Let it run overnight, and you wake up to a nice new CD.
4) The battery performance is amazing. The walkman must have some sort of memory, because I noticed that the atrac CD is not always spinning. This would explain the long-life, as well as the complete absence of skipping. You can juggle the thing and not hear a skip.
5) Good jog dial and display, although they could eliminate the CD and folder icons that take up character space when switching folders.
If you own lots of CDs, this is a great way to store a lots of music on one disc. I recommend it.

For a while, I had wanted to purchase a MP3 CD player. I weighed this option against others such as hard drive-based Nomads and iPods, as well as memory card-driven devices. I felt that a CD with MP3s burned onto it was the best option. For one, I feared that hard drive units had more potential to break down, and they tended to drain batteries like demons, not to mention that they are rather expensive. While the memory card concept was nice because it lacked moving parts, the standard 128 meg option was hardly better than a plain CD. Hence, I went with the MP3 CD setup because it was a happy median in terms of cost and capacity.

I chose the Sony D-NE710 player. No regrets here; this is definitely the one. Let me tell you what's so great about this player:

- High capacity
With standard 128 kbps MP3s, you can easily fit 150 or more on one CD because you are limited only by the 700 meg capacity of the CD. To put that in perspective, one CD I burned of 175 songs amounted to over 12 hours of music! And that's just with MP3s, mind you. Sony's proprietary ATRAC/ATRAC3 format is another option you can use (standard ATRAC is comparable to MP3, whereas ATRAC3 is designed to be a super-compressed storage method). While the sound quality is beneath that of the MP3, you can cram over twice as music on a single CD using it. Needless to say, you're getting about 12 albums on one disc. Only real drawback is that for all methods, when you insert a disc into the player, it has to sit for several seconds to read and analyze it - but this makes navigation of the disc far easier later on.

Also, the audiophiles will whine and complain that the tracks are inferior to the original recordings, but when don't they? If your ears can detect the difference between a CD and a 128 kbps MP3 file and it drives you batty, this isn't the player for you. Needless to say, for the vast majority, this is not a concern.

- Very long battery life
The Sony D-NE710 offers over 40 hours of battery life, which puts it ahead of many standard CD players! The secret is that the player only spins the CD when it needs to read parts of the song into memory. It then powers down the spinning mechanism. On average, it does this at the beginning of every song, and then about 2 minutes intervals within it. On a six-hour road trip, the battery life meter had not lost a single bar. Because of this, I also anticipate that the motor mechanism will be long-lived in this player. The only consequence is that there is a 1-2 second pause in between songs while it spools the next track into memory.

- Good controls
The player also makes it pretty effortless to navigate the huge quantity of songs you can burn to a CD. Tracks can be sorted into folders. The + and - buttons allow you to move in and out of folders, and the round jogdial allows you to quickly turn to the track you want to hear. Press enter to listen to it. Simple as that.

I've already stated the drawbacks above, but there are a few others. First, the included headphones aren't worthy of the cost of the player. Sony should have bundled a higher-end model with this player. Second, the jogdial seems rather loose and not as quite solid or well-built as the rest of the player. Third, people have voiced concerns that it takes a LONG time to convert MP3s to the ATRAC format, but this is true of all conversions like this. In reality, you're taking compressed MP3 files, uncompressing them to WAV files, and then recompressing them as ATRAC files. In the end, I don't really see this as a drawback, rather as a necessary evil. And since the player supports MP3s (in bitrates like 128/192/256 kbps etc, but not variable bitrates), it's again not an issue.

In the end, the Sony D-NE710 is a great player for your money. Highly recommended.

I am in love with it.

Good:
1. long battery life -- my last set of battery last about 2 months and I use it daily.
2. Jog dial -- easy access to my collection
3. Sounds quality -- A++
4. Tiny Size -- in comparison to many other mp3 CD players
5. Price -- relatively cheaper than others
6. Durable - I dropped it a bunch of times and it still works good as new. AND IT DOESN"T SKIP AT ALL!
7. Style -- good looking thing
8. Sony -- it's Sony...Do I need to say more?

Cons:
1. Ugly headphone...i upgraded mine to the street style and it's much better.

Enjoy the fun.