Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony CFD-S350 CD/Cassette Portable Boombox (Silver)

I had my old Sony Boombox for 11 years & it finally gave out. I saw this one; it looked nice and had all the same basics as my old one. I needed a simple player & this one fit the bill. Many others look too "space age" to me.

When I got it, I put in a CD and it didn't sound like it had much bass. I turned on the Mega Bass & it didn't sound any different. At least with my old Sony you could tell when the Mega Bass was on. Because of the lack of bass I think it's an OK player.

I took my children to a local play gym/arcade, and they had the Sony CFD-F10 there. It sounded great! Sad to say, it makes me wish I did a little more comparing, the extra $10-$15 dollars seems worth it.

Well, up until recently I was really pretty high on Sony products. But no longer. We bought this unit just under a year ago and the "PLAY" button broke with moderate use. After disassembling the unit, I found that the buttons (especially PLAY, FF, and REW) are all cantilevered away from the cassette handling mechanism. When you combine that with the very thin piece of plastic connecting the button to the mechanism, you have something that's designed to fail. Very poor design, and Sony could easily have done a better job by simply using more plastic in that area. So, since the unit was still under warranty for parts, I called and asked for a new button. No deal! They said that they could only sell me an entire unit, refurbished, or I would have to pay them to put in a new button "for safety reasons". Oh, maybe I could PURCHASE a new button, but they weren't sure.

Let me see the warranty says: "... Sony will supply, at no charge, new or rebuilt replacements in exchange for defective parts for a period of one (1) year. After 90 days from the date of purchase, labor for removal and installation is available from Sony authorized service facilities or a Sony Service Center at your expense." Available? More like "mandatory". They simply would NOT send me a new button, under the terms of their warranty. All they could do was refer me to the "Executive Resolution Committee" - c'mon - for a button???

What is Sony thinking? We are talking about a little plastic button here! Well, the story is not yet over. I FedEx'd the Committee a copy of my purchase reciept, Sony's warranty, and the details of the problem.

We'll see if Sony stands behind their warranty promises - or not. Stay tuned ...

1/7/07 - update - Sony phoned me directly after receiving the FedEx documentation and offered to replace the box if I paid to ship the old one to them. So at least I wouldn't have to pay about $30 for the refurbished unit (although the FedEx to the Executive Committee cost me about $12). Cost another $12 via FedEx ground to ship back the broken unit (repair facility is about 100 miles from here). Got a refurbished unit back in about a week - total cost of about $25. Pretty good service - but still disappointing to learn that their own service representative agreed with my assessment of the situation. Too bad their warranty statements aren't representative of the actual warranty policy - you can either pay them to fix it, or you can pay for a whole new (refurbished) unit. But to actually get a replacement part that fails under warranty replaced? Forget it!

My oldest son is autistic and insists on listening to the same CD on repeat-mode every night as he drifts off to sleep. He has one of these players in his room. Usually we turn it off after he goes to sleep but sometimes it playes all night.

We are well into our second year of this routine and this CD player has performed flawlessly. We don't let him have original CDs but rather burn the two tracks he listens to over and over to a special CD and let him have it. He has worn out several CDs through scratching and smudging but this CD player keeps going and going.

And, that's another plus, this player will play a CD that is very smudged and scratched.

We were so impressed with this unit that we bought a second one. It has been used extensively and still works like new.

I've occasionally used the radio function and have found that it pulls in stations very well.

My only complaint is that I found the controls confusing. I wish the symbols on the buttons were actually a contrasting color, not just impressions molded into plastic which are very difficult if not impossible to see in low light. Of course, if you use yours every day you'll probably get all your favorite functions down my memory before long.

It only has two speakers that are about 4 inches, so don't expect rumbling bass. In fact, you could probably easily find a CD boombox that sounds better, but probably not at this price point, and when it comes to sheer durability I don't know how this unit can be beat.

I had the previous model and like this one better. It works very well sounds great and has a very easy to use remote. I am not familiar with all the different bells and whistles higher models have. But can tell you this one works well and I am very satisfied with it more so than the previous model.

I was looking for a small, no-frills radio/CD player and settled on the Sony CFD-S350 for its size, cost, and my opinion that it was one of the least ugly players at the stores I shopped. I've had it for six months and have been quite disappointed. The first thing I noticed was that the FM sensitivity was poor. My 21 year old Sanyo dual cassette player has a much better radio. Programming the presets was easy.

Unfortunately if you unplug the radio for any period of time, say to move it to another room (or in my case, I have it plugged into a power strip that I switch off with some other devices), and plug it back in the radio defaults to 87.5 FM instead of the last used setting. Sometimes after being unplugged it will default to CD mode instead of the radio. I tried to get around this by installing batteries thinking that it would at least have the power to keep its memory, but that didn't work. In fact, it won't even use the batteries unless you remove the AC cord from the radio -- just unplugging it from the wall isn't enough! This is due to a switch in the power jack on the radio. Oh, another thing that it forgets when this happens is the volume setting so it defaults to a certain level. It's quite annoying to turn the radio on and have it default to loud static on 87.5 FM.

The "megabass" feature makes very little difference in how this system sounds.

The remote is nice and it lets you select a track to play from the CD as opposed to the unit itself which only lets you go forward or backward through the track list, but even when using the keypad on the remote expect a significant delay before the track begins to play as it seems to take a while to find the right track -- much longer than other CD players I've seen.

The sleep mode is nice since I occasionally like to listen to some programs late at night. No more waking up in the middle of the night to find the radio still on!

Overall I have found it to be very poorly designed, both from a human factors and electronic standpoint. I'm currently looking at moving it to a room where it would be permanently plugged in to resolve the power-on issues, and then buying something more robust for my regular use.