17 out of 17 people found this review helpful.
Nice unit if you have near-mint CDs
Date of Review: Dec 23, 2002
The Bottom Line: Easy (but labor intensive) setup, nice feature set, good price make this a great unit with the caveat that it doesn't handle flawed CDs well.
This is a 300-disc CD changer that comes with a fairly nice set of features for storing your collection and creating your own playlists. The unit is perfect for folks like me that have large CD collections spanning various types of music and want to be able to listen to your entire collection or one type of music from your collection four hours on end with barely any effort after initial setup (unless you have disc readability problems, see comments at the end).
If you ve never had a mega CD changer before, you ll probably be a bit overwhelmed by the size of the unit. At 17"W x 7-7/16"H x 19"D, you ll definitely want to check your stereo cabinet to make sure this thing will fit. But, it is extremely lightweight (when empty) for the size, so anyone should be able to maneuver it around trying to squeeze it into a tight space.
Setup is extremely simple, but labor intensive. Simply load your CDs in one by one, and enter the disc information into the system:
- CD Title: If the CD has CD text encoded onto it, the Sony will automatically load all CD title, song title, and artist information for you. If not, you can use the dials on the machine to manually enter up to 13 characters to name the disc or (much better) plug in a standard computer keyboard (PS/2) and type in the disc label. Unfortunately, the system limits you to a 13 character input per disc including both artist and album name. You ll have to be pretty creative and use some personalized license plate-type abbreviations, but it s sufficient. You also cannot name songs through manual input. If you copy your original CDs onto CD-Rs (more on this later), take some extra time to add CD text info for the artist, title, and song names, and you can overcome all of these limitations.
- Group: The CDP-CX355 provides 8 Group Files. These allow you to categorize your CDs by genre (or however else you may prefer). These groups are the key to creating lists of CDs that you can select to play to fit your mood. Unfortunately, each CD can only be assigned to one group. So, if Group 1 is your Top 40 group, and Group 6 is your Christmas Music group, that MTV Christmas Album of yours can only be assigned to one group or the other.
- Delete Tracks: We all know that some of the greatest albums of all time can still have some mighty annoying songs you never want to listen to. During setup (or anytime later) you can tell the system which songs on a CD you don t want it to play ever again (you can reset these choices later). This has become one of my favorite features of all.
My experience was that it averaged about 1-2 minutes per disc to load it into the player, label it, and group it. So, expect to invest some significant time to get this thing rolling (filling it with 300 CDs could easily take 10 hours of work). But, once you re done you ll be well rewarded for your time.
Unlike the setup process, playback couldn t be easier. Generally, I use this on random play. At most this takes 3 clicks- click random, click the group you want to play (or all groups), and press play. The unit also remembers the playback option you last used and defaults to it when turned on (e.g., if you choose random play for all of your country music, then next time you turn the unit on it will be set to random play for all of your country music).
The big playback problem in terms of functionality is that you can only play one group or all groups at a time, nothing in between. That is, you can do a random play on all discs, just your jazz discs, or just your R&B discs, but not both jazz and R&B at the same time. To overcome this, you can create a program of up to 32 discs and individual tracks that can be played in random mode, but this takes a lot of button-pushing (and looking up where you stored each disc so you can program it in). You can create up to 3 different programs of 32-discs each if you have some common playlists you like that span across multiple groups.
Playback quality is quite good. The unit plays CD-Rs and CD-RWs well (which turns out to be a vital thing, see criticisms below). There is an optical digital audio output if you have an amplifier with optical inputs. Even if you don t, the sound is pure and clear using RCA cables.
If you are new to CD changers, you may be a little disappointed in the amount of time it takes to switch between CDs. The problem is common to all mega CD changers- the currently playing CD has to be stopped, ejected into the changer/holder mechanism, the holder has to rotate around (up to 150 slots for a 300-disc changer), and the next CD has to be moved into the playing mechanism. Expect about a 8-10 second delay between songs in random play.
If you want to avoid this delay, the CDP-CX355 allows you to chain 2 of these units (or another compatible model) together. The unit is intelligent enough to play one song off of one changer while getting the second changer positioned for the next song so there is no delay at all. Of course, being able to daisy chain CD changers is also useful if you have more than 300 CDs (and a lot of shelf space)!
The remote control is good. It handles pretty much everything you d want to do with the player once you get used to it. It s not entirely intuitive, but also not all that hard to learn.
OK, so now for the big drawback I ve found with this machine. The CD player is very unforgiving of defects on your CDs (scratches and smudges). Many CDs that play fine on every other CD player I own either skip badly or simply will not play on this changer. After some experimentation, I ve found that this is especially true of the first track on every CD, the player can t handle even the slightest defect on track 1. The same (or worse) defects later in the CD don t cause as many problems. On some discs, Track 1 will not play at all even though I cannot visually find anything whatsoever wrong with the disc.
Not only does the CD player have this playback problem, it actually compounds the problem. Anytime the changer comes across a track it cannot play, it essentially returns a no valid disc error within the system, so it won t even try to play other tracks on the disc. The only way to get the player to try playing the disc again is to open and close the front door. This seems to reset the system so that it will again at lest try to play tracks off the problem CD.
The only workaround I ve found is to copy problem discs to CD-Rs. This works about 95% of the time. The only 100% solution I ve found is to copy the problem disc to CD-R, and make an extra copy of Track 1 (Tracks 1 and 2 for discs with short first tracks) at the end of the CD, and then place Track 1 on the Delete File list for that disc so that the player never tries to play Track 1. So far, I ve never had any problems with discs I ve done this for. It s a very time-consuming and annoying workaround, but effective.
