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

I took this CD Player on a backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon. I walked 40 miles while listening to it. It never skipped once. It was stuffed in my backpack while walking. With all of the shifting around, it NEVER changed its volume,stopped or skipped a track from a accidental button press.

This is the first portable MP3/CD player that I've owned and am more or less pretty happy with it. Has most of the features that I could possibly want. So far I've only used CD's and MP3 CD's and they play and sound great. Really impressed with the battery life as well. And it is light enough for me. Any more slim or lightweight and I think it would feel flimsy.

Cons.
-I had been looking at the cheaper model and was excited to see it had a built in radio. Then decided to go with this model for its boosted battery life and was shocked that it didn't have one built in. Not a huge deal.
-Also, the open button can easily (unexpectedly) slide open in a coat pocket etc. Just have to be careful.
-There is a pretty big volume/bass trade-off if you have it cranked all the way up.
-Definitely buy new headphones, the ones included are garbage. Even a cheap pair of the Sony in-ear ones with their own volume switch work great. Helps with the bass issue too.
-Lastly, the track name can be useless in the LCD screen since it will usually only show the band name when using the jog dial.

Aside from the few small irritations, I'm happy with the player and would recommend it.

Contrary to what one reviewer said, it works perfectly with Mp3's. You do not need to convert them to their ATRAC format. In fact, I tried it with a packet written cdrw and it works, although sometimes not perfectly. Some songs won't play and fast forward and rewind does not work.

I tried their ATRAC software. It is very tedious to use and 64kbps recordings certainly do not equal the quality of 128kbps mp3's. It's just not worth the effort to create propietary disks which cannot be played on anything else.

I used mine for over a month and never heard it skip with mp3's. Sony say it will run for 85 hours on a pair of alkalines with mp3's. I don't know if it's true, but its definitely MUCH better than my other player. This is the main reason I picked it over the Iriver slimX models. It's also not as thin, but I think the difference is minor.

It takes 20-30 second to read a CD the first time it is inserted, but it memorized everthing even when it is turned off. After that it starts up in about 10 second and continues where you left off last time.

The jog dial works like the scroll wheel on a mouse and works really fast when searching through the file list. It lets you search for a song while another is being played.

I do have a couple of complaints. The display will only show the first 7 letters in the title during a song search. You will have to rename all your mp3's so that you can recogize it.

In the US, it does not come with a remote control even though it has a connector for one.

Final Recommendations:
This player is highly recommended if battery life is high on your wish list and perfect packet writing support, remote control and radio are not. Otherwise, take a look at the Iriver's.

I tried the player out in the store and bought it because of the long play time and good UI for traversing the folder tree on the disk. Other players make it difficult to find a specific song. I really liked the idea of the ATRAC3 format enabling me to fit my music on a lower number of disks.

The UI is good and sound from the smaller ATRAC3 format is good, when I was able to get a disk to burn which was difficult. The software is extremely limited. It can't work with folder trees (300+ songs and they think one level of folders is sufficient?) it can't convert VBR or WMA files, takes an extremely long time to burn, and converting/burning can ONLY be done with the included software. Forget about using your favorite burning software. So unless you're willing to deal with the large hassles, don't buy this player because of the ATRAC3 feature. It just isn't ready for prime time.

The headphones are basically useless, but I'm sure they figure most people will already have ones they like. No adapter to plug into the wall, so either buy that at radio shack or use rechargable batteries if you want to use it at home or work.

It IS a decent MP3 player, but a tad overpriced considering the promised software and optimized format are not quite there. If Sony will ever update the software, my rating will go up.

When I bought this CD player I didn't know much about it, but it was on sale, so I decided to buy it. The sound quality is SUBERB, and it is very strong and durable. I really enjoy the screen feature that says the album name, the song you are listening to, and other things like that. The G-Protection is amazing, with two levels of strength to choose from. Also, all SONY products are AMAZING!!!!!!

So, why 4 stars? Well, really, it should get a rating of 4 1/2 stars. Why? Well, when I used the software for the MP3, my computer messed up and I had to start my list of songs ALL OVER AGAIN. It takes a long time to make these, and losing it is very dissapointing (FYI: I have a Dell XP). But, my computer is working better with this program, and now it works fine. It is usefull, though. You can fit hundreds of songs on a blank CD-R or CD-RW. But there are 2 other things that get on my nerves.
ONE-You can't save a project on the Atrac software. This makes you have to do it all at once, which can take hours out of your day.
TWO-If you are NOT a system administrator, you can not use this software. It wont let you. Adults won't have this problem, because they probably are already system administrators, but the teens and kids probably are'nt, so they will have to have their parents around in order to burn. This makes sense, so that teens aren't burning nonstop, but it really can make me angry.

BUY THIS IF:You do not plan to use the Atrac feature, but still want the very best CD player that has many great features.

DO NOT BUY THIS IF: You are depending on the Atrac feature for many uses, and will use the feature a lot.