I was in the market for a portable MP3 player recently. The cheapest iPod or Rio Karma I could find was hundreds more than I wanted to spend, even refurbished. Fortunately, someone suggested I look at CD based portable players. It had not occurred to me, as I own no CDs of my own, but it turned out to be an excellent suggestion.
I shopped around a lot, and there are dozens of different models to choose from with prices ranging from $40 to over $150 for a CD player with MP3 playing capabilities. Obviously, for $150 you might as well beef up another $100 and purchase an iPod or similar, so I searched for a quality product in the lower price ranges. I scoured Amazon for product reviews, but found little of interest. A search for CD based MP3 players brought up a huge list of several hundred players, including dozens that were discounted and unavailable, yet still came up in the search results. Why I would care about products I cannot purchase is beyond me, but there they were, wasting screen realestate.
Disappointed with Amazon, I looked to Dealnews on a whim. Fortunately, on that day someone tipped off Dealnews that Best Buy was offering the Sony DNS505 CD based player with MP3 playback capabilities for $20 off, at a sweet $60. I checked the reviews and the player is actually quite new. I bought one for in store pickup immediately, dispite my distaste for Best Buy in general, and ended up waiting in line for twenty minutes in the online store pickup line. Finally, after presenting a valid photo I.D. and credit card of purchase, I left my local Best Buy with my new CD based MP3 player from Sony.
The package, as usual, was sealed plastic. After much fighting, the packaging lost, and I retrieved the Sony S2 from its prison. At first glance, it did not appear all that impressive. It features a rather silly carrying handle, which at first I thought would be an annoyance. Later, it proved to be valuable and effective for carrying the CD player around with me and it boasts the text dot matrix display. The device takes two double A batteries, which I purchased separately.
The S2 appears to be built from solid plastic, although I dare not drop it to see how well it fares. Aluminum might’ve been better, but would have dented and bent easily. The device can be opened by twisting it clockwise, and then gently opening the lid with the handle towards you. Inside is your standard CD player, complete with a laser you’re advised never to touch or disturb. You must install the two double A batteries from inside the player, as they reset under where the CD itself will reset.
To test the S2, I burned a 700MB CD-R on some extremely cheap, year old media with a poor quality rating at 32X. I burned two dozen top level directories, each with various MP3 files inside encoded at a variety of bitrates from 128Kbps to 320Kbps. Somewhere in there I might have a variable bitrate file, but I did not test variable bitrate support explicitly. The manual indicates the player fully supports MP3s between the aforementioned bitrates and variable bitrate MP3s and directory nesting up to eight levels deep. Once burned, I carefully inserted the CD-R into the player and turned the lid counter clockwise, locking it into place.
Once fully locked, the player springs into life. (I still haven’t figured out how to explicitly turn it off, so I just half unlock it right now; After much usage it turns out you just hit the ’stop’ button twice or it powers down after idle inactivity.) It reads the inserted CD, in this case a CD-R with a bunch of MP3s on it. The small text dot matrix display will inform you the CD is being read and then display how many MP3s it has located on the CD. At that point, it idly awaits your next command. The button layout is straight forward, and you can start playing files simply by hitting the play button. You can also stop, pause, skip tracks, or enable the special hold switch which prevents accidental fiddling if you’re jogging or moving around.
If you navigate the basic menu, you can change some of the devices default options, which are clearly marked in the manual that ships with the S2. The player supports a variety of play modes, including using an M3U playlist file and simpy playing songs randomly. I enabled the random mode for my drive down to Orlando, and it worked quite surpurbly. I haven’t figured out how to make my shuffle mode selection stick between powering the device off and on again, however.
The dot matrix display is kind of neat, and it seems to happily display valid ID3 tags, if you are lucky enough to have them from ripping your own music CDs.
The S2 has a formitable output jack, and it is capable of playing music extremely loudly. By default, Sony’s Automatic Volume Limiter System (AVLS) is disabled. You will want to review the information available at the American Tinnitus Association’s Web site and, once you’ve done that, enable AVLS so you don’t damage your hearing. Seriously. It’s especially a concern with the default wrap around headphones the S2 ships with, which do a very poor job at filtering out external noises, making it necessary to crank up the volume in moderately noisy environments.
The S2 does support two modes of skip protection. Dubbed Skip-Free G-Protection(tm), Sony’s shock protection technology seems to take into account the actual physics behind a CD skipping. From what I have read so far, it is quite difficult to intentionally cause the S2 to actually experience a skip. I have taken the S2 out with me jogging a couple times and I wasn’t able to get it to skip. It bounced along happily with me. In fact, in over a year of ownership I’ve only had it skip twice that I can recall, because the device was so confused it actually turned itself off.
If you want to hook up the S2 to utility power, it supports an optional 4.5V adapter which is not included.
All in all, I am quite pleased with Sony’s S2 D-NS505 portable CD player offering with MP3 support. For $60, the price was definitely right. However, the suggested retail pricing from Sony as of this writing is $80, which is what most vendors are offering it at. I didn’t evaluate any of the other $80 offerings from other vendors, so whether it’s a good deal at the suggested retail price is unknown to me.