Customer Reviews

Sony D-NF400 ATRAC Walkman Portable CD Player with Digital AM / FM / TV / Weather Tuner

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Strengths:
Feature-rich, Sony quality, surprisingly decent headphones, excellent skip-free technology, long battery life

Weaknesses:
Slightly awkward button placement, sluggish (at best) SonicStage software

Summary:
I spent quite a bit of time in the week or so before I bought this product researching the main players in the MP3-CD field. While my favorite based on everything I'd read was the iRiver iMP-550, I decided that I could get everything I wanted out of a player for less than $100. The features that I sought the most were:

1) an AM/FM tuner

2) the ability to fast-forward within an MP3 song, which I found many of the lower-end players could not do; and,

3) a jog dial or other implement that made navigating through songs and folders fairly simple.

I ended up narrowing my search to Sony and Panasonic products, and eventually went with Sony because I was curious about their ATRAC technology, which I'll get into in a bit.

STRENGTHS:
For the most part, Sony is going to put out decent products, and this player seems to be no exception in terms of quality and workmanship. I don't have any complaints yet, having owned it for about four months. The D-NF400 has every feature I had looked for in my initial research, and then some. The TV and weather bands have turned out to be more entertaining than I would have guessed.

I didn't spend any time actually listening to other MP3-CD players, so I don't have a basis for comparison when it comes to volume output. I can say, however, that with all of my 192kb songs and most of my 128kb music, I can get plenty of sound at about 3/4 volume capacity even while commuting by train. At home or in my quiet office, I'm often only at about 1/2 the volume capacity. Although I've replaced the stock headphones with a set of Sony MDR-V150s (ear-muff style), the stock headphones are nearly as loud and reasonably clear except at very high volumes. They also let in a lot more outside noise, however, so if you really love your music, you're better off replacing them.

So far, I've not heard a skip from this player. As I said, my most frequent usage in on the train, which isn't the smoothest ride in the world. I've also hooked it up to my car stereo via a cassette tape adapter and driven all over the mean streets and freeways of LA without a hiccup. And, of course, since I commute, I do a fair amount of walking with it between the train and subway. So I'm impressed that I haven't had any issues at all here.

I haven't had the player long enough to truly comment on battery life except to say that I've put in approximately 20-25 hours of active play time, and the battery indicator still looks full. Certainly nothing for me to complain about. (Update: the first set of batteries lasted approximately 85 hours split between listening to ATRAC CDs and the FM radio -- I'd say it exceeds expectations.)

WEAKNESSES:
I'll start with the biggest weakness, which is the SonicStage software. I've read reviews from several other people who have used it who have called it completely useless, and I can understand why. This software is designed to allow you to compress your music even beyond MP3 compression while still maintaining high-quality sound. Sony claims that at 48kbps, you can have up to 490 songs on one CD.

Now, let me start by saying that when the software does work, it does an excellent job. Using the default setting of 64kbps, I've recorded several CDs with over 300 songs on them. There is something very pleasing about being able to store your entire library of certain genres of music on a single CD. And although I'm no audiophile, I haven't noticed an appreciable difference in quality in my music, most of which was ripped at 192kbps.

The software operation itself leaves a lot to be desired, though. My main complaint is that it is e x t r e m e l y s l o w . The conversion from MP3 to Sony's ATRAC format is painful. The first CD I burned, which had 283 songs on it, took over 5 hours just for the conversion process. Thankfully, in this day of 100GB+ hard drives, SonicStage will keep the converted files on your hard drive so that if, for some odd reason, you ever needed to burn the same songs on to another CD, you would not have to repeat this tedious process.

SonicStage is also buggy (it crashed on me after almost four hours of a conversion job because I had managed to exceed the space limit for the CD I was trying to burn -- something it would have been handy to know *beforehand*). Also, I wish that Sony had allowed you to convert your proprietary SonicStage files to MP3s. Be warned that if you use SonicStage to rip your CDs, you're stuck with the music in that format. If you use MP3s for anything else (such as on your computer at work or perhaps an MP3 CD player in your car), you're better off ripping to MP3s first and then letting SonicStage convert them for you. All in all, though, when the software works, it does a decent job.

The only other issue I've had with the D-NF400 is with the design of two of the buttons. The jog dial for navigation consists of the left, right, up and down directions, with a play/pause button right in the center. Because the buttons are so small, I've often found myself trying to skip to the next song and instead pausing the current song inadvertently. The other odd button is the one used for switching between FM/AM/TV/Weather Band. It's a flimsly-feeling thin rubber bar, and it just adds a cheap feeling to the player when everything else is so solid.

SUMMARY:
Overall, I have had a great experience with the player, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone who prefers this format to the stored memory MP3 players. Good job, Sony!

I recently bought this CD-Walkman. Sony has again maintained its standards. The player runs for few seconds and loads the song into its memory and then plays from it for 3 mins, the motor stops for this time, this helps the CD player to be skipfree and conserves the Battery. This is a excellent idea implemented by Sony. Several reviews remarked about its usability, playing-software etc., but being a software professional I find this software excellent. The buttons are bit tricky to use mainly the radio button. Believe me I was initially searching them badly but when I found it I couldn't control laughing myself. And once you are used to it you will realize why they have designed this way. Its really skip free I even wagged it and the song was playing uninterrupted. Regarding MP3 it even goes into folders inside a CD. I'm giving 4 stars, as non-technical user will find the usability bit hard.

The Ugly:
The SonicStage software is garbage. I popped a CD in. It was able to go to some web site to retrieve artist/track info for my CD. But every time I hit the ATRAC convert button it crashes on me. This stupid thing actually made me waste time reading the manual.
The good:
For the MP3 playback it works pretty well. You can organize files in folders (8-levels max) and the display of the playing track is changeable. It allows full track names to scroll horizontally. Under [Menu] there's a "sound" option that allows you to change the LOW/MID/HIGH frequency wave pattern for sound quality customization. Aside from SOFT/ACTIVE/HEAVY and default NONE. I really like this feature. The radio/TV/Weather feature works pretty well. And there's a auto-shutoff timer you can set for the use of the player in 10, 20, ... minutes interval.
The bad:
Notice that there's a "loading time" for even regular CD's. takes around 10 seconds from the time you pop the disc in, hit play, to it actually playing a regular CD. For MP3 it's reasonable consider the amount of stuff it needs to load for initialization. AC/DC 4.5-volt power adapter not included in the US/Canada version.

I won't bother describing the various functions, as others have covered same very well. Suffice it to say that the player works very well indeed. Skip protection is very good, but not perfect though since any really bad shocks can cause skipping. When I go hiking up mountains, the walking pace doesn't cause skipping at all, for instance. But if I am running, then skipping can occur. The screen display isn't as good as it could be, since it is small and therefore it scrolls disc info and you have to press buttons to get the next piece of info. Hence, I did deduct one star here. The battery life is superb, up to 50 hours on CD and 80 hours on ATRAC, the instructions say and I can't say for sure that it performs as advertised but it sure seems like it. The software is excellent. It does not take five hours to burn an ATRAC CD. After ripping your CD's to the ATRAC3PLUS format (I use 64 kbits per sec since Sony's listening tests said that it sounds as good as or slightly better than MP3 at 128 kbits/sec and I can only say that it sounds every bit as good as MP3 indeed, and can fit 20 CD's into one), it takes maybe only 1/2 hour to burn the compilation ATRAC3PLUS CD. You can't play the ATRAC3PLUS CD on your computer but slide it into the DNF400 and it works perfectly.

In summary, compared with an iPOD, the DNF400 is bigger, with a longer battery life, 20 CD capacity, and a cheaper price. I'm happy, and so will you.

I purchased this CD player in lieu of an MP3 (hard disk) player. Reasons? The CD player is far less expensive, has almost 7x the battery life of an MP3 hd player, and more robust.

I am very happy with the quality of the player and the sound I get from it. Battery life is top-notch as well. The CD player is small and very portable.

I have burned most of my songs to Sony's ATRAC3 Plus format. This has enabled me to fit over 300 songs on to one CD. I cannot discern any loss of quality, though it is to be admitted that I am not a music expert.

There are some flip sides, which would prevent you from making ATRAC3 your only music format:

* Proprietary to Sony and not used by anyone else (contrast that to WMA, which though proprietary, has found wide acceptance as a codec).

* Sony's Connect music store may or may not allow you to burn your purchases to an ATRAC3 CD (varies by album). (Strange but true, they sometimes don't support their own format). As a workaround, you have to purchase the music, burn to Audio CD, then rip it back to ATRAC3. If you have to do that, you might as well buy from the cheapest online music store, and not exclusively from Sony's Connect store.

* The player is not flash upgradable to newer codecs. Also hell will freeze over before Sony supports WMA.

* The PC software will rip and create ATRAC3 CD's but amazingly, will not allow you to play the CD you just created back on your own computer. The only thing that can play ATRAC3 CD's is your CD player.

* Not all Sony products are compatible with ATRAC3 CD's. There is only one boombox in their product line that will play them.

Recommendations
Always burn your music purchases to Audio CD. Then rip to ATRAC3 for the purposes of using on your walkman. You can always use MP3, but I have never done so. I burn to Audio CD as backup, then use ATRAC3 format for everyday listening.

I purchased this product as a replacement to my previous-generation entry-level Sony CD Walkman, the D-E350. I was not interested in purchasing an MP3 player, though Creative Lab's Zen Micro has me drooling, so I decided to purchase a MP3 CD player.

Upon using it, I was in awe of the amount of songs I can play on it. I can fit over 120 MP3 songs, most of them encoded at 192 kbps. Mind you, this is without using Sonic Stage, just burning MP3s from my My Music folder to a blank CD-RW. 650-700 MB for music is a lot more space than other flash memory MP3 players offer, and I can put with the added space of a portable CD player; haven't we all been carrying them for 15+ years?

As for the controls, they are good, but take some getting used to coming from an older-generation Sony CD player. My only gripes are the flimsy construction of the center "jog-dial" style button, as if feels as if it'll fall off with an inconvenient bump.

The radio is only acceptable, and my cell phone, a Nokia 6800 with FM radio built-in, offers much better reception. The sound is almost always fuzzy, with static abound, which is exascerbated when you move about. I honestly bought the CD player with radio just to listen to NPR news programs in the mornings and afternoons, and the reception makes me just shut it off and reach for my cell phone.

The sonic stage software is absolutely atrocious, it is not user-friendly and extremely slow. It's easier to bite the bullet on not getting the much-vaunted 490 songs and use Windows to burn your MP3 collection to a CD-R.

This is a good CD MP3 Player, just ignore the ATRAC3plus moniker emblazoned on the top and you'll be fine. Where I am, they discontinued this model, so I'm curious to see what improvements Sony is cooking up.

I love this CD player with radio etc.! I gave it four stars because I thought the instructions for programming the presets were a little confusing.

After returning the Sony D-FJ200 (because it doesn't play MP3s) I went out and got this CD player. I decided to stick with Sony - the other main alternative was a Panasonic model that seemed to have some issues with durability.

So far this unit has performed reasonably well. I have not bothered with the ATRAC format - I mean, give me a break! Why fool around with yet another proprietary format that can't be played by any other electronic device?

If you really want to put that many songs on one CD, it is also possible to rip songs into MP3s with lower bit rates than the standard 128kbps (64kbps is equivalent to FM radio quality). So there really isn't any need to use proprietary formats like ATRAC and WMA formats - they can't get any better fidelity at the lower bit rates than MP3.

I got this model originally because I thought that I would use the AM/FM radio - this hasn't turned out to be the case. Reception at my house, which is surounded by hills and large stucco houses, is pretty bad.

The main plus for this unit is its incredible stinginess with battery power - I'm using rechargeable AA batteries, and they just seem to last forever. Another plus is the ability to fast forward through the MP3s, which many units can't do. However, fast forward of the MP3 format is much slower than for the CDA/WAV format - only about 2-3 times faster than regular speed, so its not a huge advantage. Song quality is decent - the unit never skips from motion. When playing at very loud volumes, there does seem to be a little bit of a saturation effect, but this is not severe.

One problem with ripping songs to MP3s is that some soundtracks blend one track right into the other. When played in the original CDA or WAV format, this CD player, like most players, will play from one track to the next seamlessly, but when the individual tracks are ripped into the MP3 format, there will be a noticeable pause between the end of one track and the beginning of the next. Examples of soundtracks that have this problem would be "Gladiator" and "Phantom of the Opera".

To solve this problem, I ended up downloading a trial version of the Sony Sound Forge 7.0b software to stitch these connecting WAV files together before ripping the combined tracks into one MP3 file - this does eliminate the gaps. Sound Forge can also convert any audio file to 64-320 kbps MP3 among other amazing feats of audio editing, but there is a 20 MP3 limit to the trial version and it is quite expensive unless you can find it on eBay at a discount.

The biggest minus to this CD player are the awful standard Sony control buttons. The radio control bar can only be worked with your fingernails and even then it is still imprecise. The main control button is remarkably imprecise - it has the ability to be pushed any one of five different ways, but frequently only the central control (which pauses the CD) gets activated by accident. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to advance to the next song and instead paused the CD. The volume control buttons are also hard to locate by feel only. And my fingers are not that beefy - I rarely have problems with tiny cell phone buttons or similar devices. It's the imprecision of these unique-to-Sony buttons that gets me frustrated.

All in all, a good quality CD player, but could be much better. Message to Sony - put in better control buttons, and throw in a free copy of Sound Forge instead of the ATRAC software.

I got this player because of its great reviews. Blows away any mp3 hard drive player. one person said that. yeah, right. I got mine 7 months ago. now when you start it up it makes wierd scratchy and popping sounds. Other people have had this problem too. I'm goin out to get a Creative Labs Zen Micro 5 gb.

've used the played for abt a mnth.. very good battery life
good sound quality.. and quite loud too.
while playing mp3 files it remembers where
you stopped so the next you play the cd you needn't scroll thro'
all the files i love this feature.
There a lot more features but i dont bother to explore its got all i need.