Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony D-NE20 ATRAC/MP3 CD Walkman

I needed to replace a top of the range Sony Walkman CD player. My CD/CD-R/MP3 collection is huge - some 10,000 CD's and the iPod is useless with such a music library - you need to access multi-CD operatic or jazz sets and you might want the odd compilation CD. Yes, I'm over 40, ok! I like the entire album ,opera, jazz gig or whatever as originally put out by the artists. This piece of technology is nearly perfect. First, compared to the iPod, it's very inexpensive. The Atrac system is great and you can get between 10 and 30 CD's worth of music on a single Atrac CD: note the sound quality (and I'm fussy) various so little on the kbps that you can run it at the lowest Atrac setting giving you maximum capacity. Second, it's mega-light and has fine touch button access if required. The remote manager has been greatly improved since my last model but it does so much that you might need to keep the manual in your pocket for a while. Sound quality? Sony are using a light weight digital amp and as the battery life is for ever once charged, i can see the point but here's an interesting observation. The last model I had was not great sonically with the accompanying earphones. This new model is good but "initially" not great. The reason is that the new equalizer is set to a very "level" setting and that once you get the custom setting organised the sound is amazing and better than that which I was getting with state of the art Sennheiser earphones. Now that I have got it up and running it's the love of my life! The last gripe I have is that, just as the Atrac sound needs "setting up", the Sony Sonic Stage Software is not as user friendly, as say, that of iTunes. But............ upgrade to Sonic Stage 3.1 and once familiar it works just as well. In conclusion, if you are a music buff with a large CD collection (and by the way, I have never found a recorded CD that it could not play, of any format) and want to play mutli-format recordings, get the same benefits as iTunes MP3 with up to 30 CD's worth of music more easily accessed than via an iPod, and want the lightest, best looking piece of portable music hardware I've seen in ages. This is for you.

this replaced my 2 year old sony mp3/atrac cd player, and boy what a difference. The first thing you notice is the size. While not quite in the ipod league, it's as small as the size of a cd will let it be, and about as thick as a cd in its case. The supplied earbuds are surprisingly good, but are already in a drawer I'm afraid. The remote is superb, backlit and intuitive to use, comes with a little drawstring bag, emblazoned with Sony logo's, but it's all you need as once it's in your pocket the remote is all you need. Too many features to list, most pretty usefull too, all in all , excellent until I finally go for the hard drive option.

Just to pick up on the point about playing multi-track opera on an Atrac CD, all you have to do is to set the playback mode to "seamless

After hearing friends horror stories of ipod battery failure and hard drive failure just outside the warranty. And being mugged for there ipod (the advert is in the headphones). My wife bought me this cd player for my birthday back in april due to the fact i am officially a gadget freek, and Sony's best advert (most products in my home are Sony). I can honestly say with the level of sound quality on offer from both mp3 and ATRAC why would you want an ipod. Then more importantly factor in the CD playback which makes any compression software seem pointless, it all comes down to how much of a priority you put on sound quality. Do go to the Sony website to download Sonic stage 4.0 it is very useful as mentioned the Lossless encoding works extremly well and ATRAC sounds better than any other format at much much lower bit rates (66kbs), as for people saying itunes is easier to use, fine but ATRAC lossless sounds so much better than AAC files and to that matter Apple Lossless (and at lower bite rates) also Sonicstage 4.0 can now convert AAC files into ATRAC too. I use this cd player on the train every day to work the built in battery lasts for weeks on end (i travel for about an hour and a half each way). I have used this cd player through my separates Hi-Fi and it still sounds fantastic (use the charging stand to stop the click thud noise when turned on though). I will say though replace the supplied headphones with better quality ones i myself are using CX300's from Sennheiser and all i can say is wow, it's like going out with my home Hi-Fi with me. Just remember size isnt everything, although this thing is so small and light you will be amazed.

I was very interested to read an over 40 year old listening to opera on a Sony Atrac CD Walman. I tried and gave up. Alot of opera demands that the music is played seamlessly from one track to another. The Atrac system does not allow this as it loads each track separately - unless things have changed. I contacted Sony and they said there was nothing they could do. So it's a Creative MP3 for me. There is only a tiny hiccough between tracks.