Review on 🎧 Sony D-NE710 ATRAC3/MP3 Portable Disc Player CD Walkman by Darin Brooks

For a while I've wanted to buy an MP3 CD player. I've compared this option to others like Nomads and iPods with hard drives, as well as devices with memory cards. I felt a CD of burned MP3s would be the best option. At first I was concerned that hard drives are more likely to fail and tend to drain batteries like daemons, not to mention that they are quite expensive. While the concept of a memory card was good because it had no moving parts, the standard 128 megabyte option was little better than a regular CD. So I chose the MP3 CD because it was the best option in terms of cost and capacity. I chose the Sony D-NE710 player. There are no regrets here; it is definitely the one. Let me tell you what's great about this player: High Capacity With standard 128kbps MP3 files, you can easily fit 150 or more files onto a single CD, as you're only limited by the 700 megabyte capacity of a CD are. To put this in perspective, a CD I recorded with 175 songs totaled over 12 hours of music! And mind you, only with MP3s. Sony's proprietary ATRAC/ATRAC3 format is another option you can use (standard ATRAC is comparable to MP3, while ATRAC3 is designed for super-compressed storage). Although the sound quality is lower than MP3, twice as much music fits on a CD. Needless to say, you get about 12 albums on one disc. The only real downside is that with all methods, when you insert a disc into the player, it has to wait a few seconds to read and parse it - but that makes it much easier to navigate the disc later. Audiophiles will also whine and complain that the tracks are worse than the original recordings, but when not? If your ears can tell the difference between a CD and a 128kbps MP3 file and it's driving you crazy, then this player isn't for you. Needless to say, this is not a problem for the vast majority. Extremely long battery life The Sony D-NE710 offers over 40 hours of battery life, putting it ahead of many standard CD players! The secret is that the player only spins the CD when it needs to read parts of the song into memory. Then he turns off the turning mechanism. On average, he does this at the beginning of each song and then at intervals of about 2 minutes throughout it. During the six-hour drive, the battery life indicator didn't lose a single bar. For this reason I also assume that the motor mechanism in this turntable will last a long time. The only consequence is that there is a 1-2 second pause between songs while the next track is loaded into memory. - Good controls The player also makes it fairly easy to navigate through the huge number of songs you can burn onto a CD. Tracks can be sorted into folders. You can use the + and - buttons to switch between folders, and use the rotary dial to quickly switch to the track you want. Press Enter to listen. Everything is easy. I mentioned the disadvantages above, but there are others. First, the included headphones aren't worth the cost of the player. Sony should have delivered a higher quality model with this player. Second, the rotary switch feels fairly loose and not as solid or well-built as the rest of the player. Thirdly, people are worried that converting MP3 to ATRAC format will take a long time, but that applies to all such conversions. What you're really doing is taking compressed MP3 files, decompressing them into WAV files, and then compressing them back into ATRAC files. After all, I don't see this as a flaw, but as a necessary evil. And since the player supports MP3s (bitrates like 128/192/256kbps etc., but not variable bitrates), that's not a problem either. In the end, the Sony D-NE710 is a great player for the money. Highly recommended.