Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony D-NE326CK MP3/ATRAC CD Walkman Car Kit

This is brilliant. When CDs were a pretty new thing twenty years ago I remember buying a Sony Walkman that cost me well over $200 and played two CDs on 4 AA batteries. Now look what you are getting--a machine that costs a fraction of the price, plays for something like 40 hours on one battery (and rechargeables are now cheap too) and, here is the killer, using the software that comes with this kit, you can save as much as thirty hours of sound on a single CD with Sony's proprietary ATRAC3 Plus compression technology. Alternatively you can convert sound files to MP3, which this player will also play and get about 12 hours of reasonably quality sound.

If this sound useful to you, then I don't think you can go wrong with this kit at this price.

What I have been using it for is recording talking books and 10-part dramatizations of lengthy novels from BBC webcasts using a software recording program.

So I now have the whole of Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and Agatha Christie's Nemesis all on one CD which I listen to on long journeys in my car. This saves messing around with several CDs sliding all over the care and falling behind the seats.

Seems to me that there is loads of potential for all kinds of other things. For example you could save 100 music CDs to 4 CDs to use in your car. Very neat and convenient.

Of course the question will arise as to whether the quality of the sound is good enough in this compressed format. For me it is, and the jazz tracks I have also recorded sound fine for use in the car. Obviously if you are a professional sound engineer, or perhaps a professional musician, you may have gripes about it, but for the rest of us, it is probably fine.

The remote control is not much good and the control buttons are a bit small for full size fingers, but you can get used to it. Getting the battery out to replace and/or recharge it is a bit fiddly, especially if you have big fingers.

With the connection to the car's tape player, the corded remote, and the corded power supply, you will have a bit of a tangle of wires in the car, but with this kind of battery life, you can dispense with the power supply easily enough, and the remote too, so then you only have one cable and the player can sit on the passenger seat. With a bit of practice you can turn it on and off and skip tracks without looking.

So if you have an older car with a CD player that doesn't play MP3 CDs, and you want to get rid of a clutter of CDs in your car, or if you want to put a bunch of audio books, or maybe a language learning course, on a single CD, this could be an excellent purchase. I don't regret it.

The question will obviously arise: Why not use an iPod type device instead? You can certainly do that, but not for anything like the same price. And for me, loading up a CD and then setting it aside when I have finished using it, is very simple and requires little time or effort.

I have several issues with this player:

1) The case-open slider is along the side of the player is situated where the cords come out and it is difficult to open the player as a result.

2) The buttons are too small. They seem designed for infants or people with abnormally small fingers.

3) It will sometimes shut itself off for no apparent reason. I will turn it on, then wait for the first track, and instead of playing it, it will sometimes shut down.

4) If I hit PLAY twice in a row it makes a continuous high-pitched beeping sound that is at the actual volume level. It is unnecessarily loud and obnoxious.

5) The velcro is not very sticky and so far has failed to adhere to the dash. I plan on using 30-minute epoxy to affix the velcro patches.

6) The fast forward will only go at what seems like 2x meaning it takes longer than necessary to speed through a track.

Overall, this design gets an F. Its quality is well below what I would expect from Sony. It actually plays the discs fine, but it usability is severely limited by poor design choices.

Addendum: Now it won't play at all. The tape adapter apparently is broken, although I cannot see where. My car tape player now rejects it. At least I can still listen to regular tapes.

I purchased this player recently from amazon.com.
This is working good until now no probs.Wish sony had made
a cordless remote instead of corded one...which makes u feel
too many wires!!
The velcro that is given to stick the unit is not great..
The cd player keeps falling!! This is a minor issue about the
the product, we can use another thing to stick it..
On the whole good one!!!

This player remembers exactly where it was when turned off, making it an excellent choice for books on CD. Interestingly, this works perfectly when the car power adapter is plugged into a switched accessory (cigarette) outlet; even though the player has a battery, the loss of power on the adapter makes it shut off anyway. This eliminates fiddling at your destination - just switch off the ignition. It starts where you left off when you turn it back on.

I generally burn books as MP3 tracks of 3 min each with about 10 tracks per directory. Using the 'prev/next track' control allows you to skip by 3 min while 'prev/next group' skips by 30 min. This is a simple one-hand-no-visuals-required operation, completely different than an iPod that requires eyeballing the little screen. The control is very simple, rugged, and intuitive - it has little beep cues through the audio to tell you what's up when you diddle it. This is identical in start/stop capability and control to most of Sony's MP3/ATRAC CD and flash players. Even large books over 25 hours will easily fit on a single CD when encoded as MP3.

Sound quality is quite good for music and handles books on CD with ease.

The most annoying thing about this CD player is that it only has one battery which means it doesn't last long.