Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony D-NE306CK ATRAC Walkman Portable CD Player with Car Kit (Silver)

The Sony D-NE306CK works as advertised.
I bought mine to mainly use as a CD\MP3 player in the van.
The car-kit does an admirable job of transfering the music
from the Sony to the vans audio system. There is some noise
from the cassette adapter, but I found lowering the volume on
the van stereo in conjunction w/increasing the volume on the Sony
pretty much much eliminates the noise. The skip protection works
great. The city driving I do has plenty of rough roads, and so far there has been no skipping in G-Pro 1 mode.
The 2-line dot-matrix display shows all the ID3 tag info except
the Year. That is probably a minor loss. Mp3 songs recorded at 192kbps sound quite good. Can get around 90-100 songs at that rate on 1 cd-r. This unit does shuffle play for both single song
recorded cd-r's and cd-r's recorded with folders. The folder names are shown on the diplay. The parametric equalizer has some
default settings, and also one Custom setting for individually
adjusting low-mid-high with the menu button. If using the Sony
with headphones or portable speakers, this is a nice ability to have. But I found using the Sound settings to adversely affect
the van's sound output, so it's best to keep Sound adj. off in there. The battery life so far has been excellent. Not sure yet
what it will be, since I have had it only 1-1/2 weeks, but I have
over 20 hours on it using 2200 nimh batteries and the Batt indicator on the display is still at full.
I am also using the player at my job with the Panasonic RP-SPT70
portable speakers and the sound is 1st rate! The 306 get's as loud as you want, and the Pany speakers are impressive for their
size. All in all, the Sony is a good buy for just $69, maybe even a great buy! This player works as advertised, and has plenty of fine features. Recommended.

My old Sony Discman (car-ready) died some days ago, so I bought the newest Sony car-ready CD player (D-NE306CK). Playing mp3's in my car is great, but there is on thing that bugs the hell out of me. In the earlier model Sony car-ready player, there was a 'line-out' plug that the cassette adapter plugged into; this model does not have one. Now there is a small control knob (Rotary commander) in-between the player and cassette adapter, so that you may stop, skip forward/backward, or pause play. Anyway, with no actual 'line out', you have to adjust both the car stereo volume/bass/treble and the volume on the the Sony portable player. If not set right, there is too much rumble, noise, and whatnot. Anyway, the player is nice by itself, but when used together, you will need to tweak the sound on your car stereo and on the player. I think i'm getting used to the rumble now.

I purchased this player 4 days back and I played some MP3 songs in car. When the car is running on road and some noise is there outside, then you feel that that sound is a bit low and cannot hear properly. Also, some hissing is there if you increase the volume of the car casseet player. The headphones in the pack are not good. Only one earpiece sounds and another does not. Also , everytime you start the car, you find that the sound level of the player is muted and have to make it full each and every time.

The editor review nicely covers almost all the features of this player, with a few exceptions. This player supports VBR MP3s, and according to Sony, the battery life when playing MP3 CDs is 65 hours. One not so great feature is that the battery compartment is inside the player, so if you need to change the batteries, you have to open the player, remove any CD that might be in it, and then you have access to the battery compartment.
The various equalizer settings make very noticeable differences in how your music sounds, but all are nicely clear and crisp, and in my experience don't distort even low quality mp3 files. The included headphones produce decent sound.

STRENGTHS: great battery life; anti-skip; digital volume control; equalizer with 3 preset curves; 18 playback modes; digital Mega Bass; Auto Shut Off; car kit with remote control;
plays regular CDs, MP3, WMA, and Atrac3plus files recorded on CD-R, or CD-RW; uses 2 AA batteries. It supports ID3 tagging, info about song title and singer if you properly named music files during CD burning.

WEAKNESSES: Included headphones are OK, not great. I bought Sony MDR-E828LP Fontopia Earbuds with Winding Case. Free CD player case would be nice. SonicStage software consumes a lot of your time for CD burning.

CONCLUSION: With included Sonic Stage software you can copy music CDs to your computer and compress at 132, 105, 66, 64, or 48 kbps (kilobits per second) and burn to a CD. I chose 105 kbps ATRAC3plus compression and burned 18 music CDs onto 1 blank CD!

I've noticed this CD player has better battery life than my Panasonic CD player of the same price category. This CD player offers high quality performance and saves money on batteries. Claims to play 85 hours, which is about right. With included accessories it sales for a great price. Don't buy cheap, unknown brands get Sony! They make the best CD players.