Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony D-NE300 Silver ATRAC/MP3 CD Walkman

The Sony D-NE300 Silver ATRAC/MP3 CD Walkman is for want of a better word, sweet. The sound is top notch, and has many features such as programable playing. I bought it two weeks ago and (playing it for about 60 hours so far) I am still on my original set of batteries. It comes with Mp3/Atrac creation software and headphones. My only quibble would be that there is no belt clip or carry bag.

I recently bought this player after a recommendation by a friend, and ithink that it's excellent. Not just for the fact that its amazingly cheap,but the sound quality is perfect. Also, you can fit many cd's on to oneCD-r, which helps a lot as you needn't carry as many cd's around with you.Its light, aesthetic and easy to use, with great volume and super goodbass, which is good 'cause i like my music powerful. Buy this, you won'tregret it-it's the best value for money player out there.

I love this cd player, I got it for christmas and I think it may have been one of the best things I got! My old Personal CD Player was hardly used, as I found it to bulky but as this one is so small it fits perfectly into my handbag, so it is easy to carry around. The battery unit is stored inside the player, but that is not a problem as I use my cd player about an hour on average everyday and I have not had to change my batteries yet! Also there is a battery display on screen to tell you when your batteries are running low. As for the Atrac technology I love it, so far I have taken my faveourite songs of my albums and loaded them on to the cd, therefore I do not have to carry my cd collection everywhere with me. As for the software I thought it would be slow but I was surprised how quickly it transfered all the songs. I would say that if you were'nt bothered about getting a small MP3 player than this would be the product for you!

Good points:-
a) Great value - this plus 6 CD-Rs of mp3s gives you the equivalent of an iPod mini for less than a third of the price;
b) Seems sturdily built - I dropped it (on a carpetted floor) with no apparent damage;
c) Battery life seems fine. The power adapter that it comes with doesn't get warm even after ten hours continuous play;
d) Generally quiet operation - just a short whirring/'sucking' sound every few minutes as it hoovers up the next section of data.

Main gripe (and this may just be me):-
One reason for buying this (apart from the price) was that I read that it can play m3u playlists burnt onto MP3 CDs. Technically it can, but I can get it to read only two playlists (out of eight) that I burnt onto a CD. If anyone's got it to read more than two playlists I'd be glad to learn what I'm doing wrong. (The manual is no help on this point.)

Any other negatives are really nitpicking - I find the shape and surface quite slippery (hence me dropping it) and taking CD out is more fiddly than my previous Panasonic (and you have to take the CD out to replace the batteries).

Overall this is a bit of kit I've been dreaming about for the last two years and I can fully recommend it if you don't mind limited playlist control.

This cd player is generally very good. It plays normal CDs, plus Mp3 Cds and Sony's Atrac3. with the latter two the player displays the track information if saved with ID3 tags. sometimes it doesn't fully read the tags and leaves off half the track name. it has different sound options, its shockproof and the battery life is pretty long even with cheap, poor quality batteries.

There are a few things that annoy me about it. It takes ages to read CD-RWs before it plays them. i would reccomend only using CD-Rs. one good thing is it can read them without them needing to be finalised so you can add songs later.
Also, when playing an MP3 CD, if you press the stop button it does the same as the pause button, even if you turn the player off.

The worst thing about it is the Sonicstage software. It is terrible. I would just use MP3s, at least they can be played on other computers and can be made into a normal audio CD. in the Atrac3plus format files may be smaller but for all the hassle it is using SonicStage I would use MP3s