Customer Reviews

Sony D-NF610 ATRAC3/MP3 CD Walkman with Digital Tuner

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

After using this device for one month+, this is a small list I gathered here for good/bad things about this little mp3 player.

Pros:
- You set your favorite radio stations, and it is still there after you change the battery.
- Good sound output quality and can deliver high sound levels
- Two level dynamic bass (although, i dont like to use)
- Your old MP3 CD's will suddenly make sense.
- Long battery life. I bet if they put some kind of solar cell on this devices, it would run with them perfectly without battery nor main power.
- some of other sony cd mp3 players has much successful (harder to break) control buttons. But D-NF610 looks smooth and beautiful with its radio.

Cons:
- My reason to give it 4 star (canceling 1 star) is its poor quality buttons. Especially the CD OPEN button is a stiff plastic, when you bend it by pressing, CD door is open. Someday either it will loose its speciality of keeping the cd door close, or it will be broken.
- Sometimes when I try to change radio channels, CD starts playing. Because of tooo compact and joint button desings. I have small fingers.

- Poor quality radio, especially when I compare to my old sony walkman radio. Too much noise and no MONO/STEREO switch.
- There is a USA/Europe shortwave radio BW (9KHz or 10KHz) switch to make you choose. But No switch for NTSC/PAL/SECAM systems. So TV Tuner does not work in Europe. I guess, you will need to buy D-NF611 for Europe.
- You will need a cd player bag.

- Japans and I have opposite intuitive direction feeling. When I use Jog Dial button, it does the opposive of what I thought. (That had happened to me with my Sony CMD Z5, I guess this is something to do with japaness culture)

- You cannot register this item, if you are not living in USA/Canada.

- No built in battery charger. This seems a logical decision to remove such a charger, because it is a very simple and cheap circuitry to do that. Would only increase its cost of production say 1 cent for sony, but would made our life easier.

I've been through numerous CD/MP3/Radio players including by Panasonic & Classic. Sony finally got it right. It's realitvely slim, got G-shock skip protection, great batttery life, MP3 tags, really fast searches, and a decent radio (AM & FM, not that common). It even has NOAA weather which I've never seen on any other player. Sound quality is excellent (the Panasonic had low headphone levels and the Classic had chronic hiss), and you don't even need the included software to burn a MP3 with Mac computers (take that, Bill Gates!). The only drawback I could find was that if you wanted to use the jog shuttle, it always starts at the top of the disc, not from where you are at the moment. It's a minor drag. But for the money, it's the best player I've seen, PERIOD.

Sony's D-NF610 slim CD "walkman" is an excellent personal audio companion. It's similar to its sibling D-NF510, except the NF610 has a digital tuner that pulls in AM/FM/TV and special weather channels, all in a compact, stylish form factor. Assembled in Malaysia (a country known for its anti-American politics -- hence one star deducted from my rating), the player seems pretty reliable. The weird shape is not as cool as Sony's perfectly round models, but it does allow for a larger, 2-line LCD display which, yeah!, can show MP3 tags. Another impressive feature is the 75-hour playback on two regular AA batteries.

Sound quality is good if nothing to get overly excited about. As always, you may want to replace the included headphones with your own favorite. On a good pair of earphones, the "digital mega bass" boost adds a pleasant and clear boom to the music, so you know this is not a phony, irritating bass system typically found on the Coby's and Samsung's.

The player also plays CD-R/RW discs burned with MP3 files or Sony's proprietary ATRAC3 files. Sony makes all kinds of claims regarding ATRAC3, but since 95% of the world uses MP3 and another 3% uses WMA and the rest probably AAC, I see little reason to burn ATRAC3 discs.

Finally, the price is right for a high-quality portable CD player.

When I first starting looking at MP3 players, I was always very disappointed at how much money it was to expland your MP3 players memory. I was looking at around 80 bucks just to get about 490 music into one cd. I recently brought this wonderful player at Circuit City and I was quite surprise it was one of the first ATRAC3 MP3 cd player. What a great idea for Sony. You get over 490 music on one cd and the cds only cost about 6 cents a piece. I've been a strong believer in sony discmans ever since the Sony D-CJ01 came out. I replace my d-cj01 to this ATRAC3/MP3, which deliever far better sound and style. Sony put their D-NF610 ATRAC3 MP3 cd player on the market and this discman really lives up to sony quality. Now you get Sony's long lasting battery life, 2 different levels or ATRAC3 and MP3 play back. The two different ATRAC3 settings give you these two choices: 1 small buffer and higher quality of music, and 2 large buffer and lower quality music. I have yet to hear the difference in the two qualities. While running the ATRAC3 proved to be better than my previous sony discmans the D-CJ01 and the DEJ62. I have yet to hear this ATRAC3 skip while playing MP3 cds. It's been dropped, dragged, smashed but the player keeps on going. One of the coolest features of the ATRAC3 cd is that the cd itself stops after about 10 seconds of spinning and doesn't start up again for another minute and a half. Making it impossible to skip during that time and also impresses your friends. Sony's ATRAC3 lets you listen to about 50 hours of normal music and about 40 hours of MP3 format music give or take depending on the batteries you are using. Rechargable batteries have significantly lower battery times. This CD player shows next generation Sony quality. I'm glad I waited for sony to come out with a ATRAC3 cd player. A must BUY!

Here is a short list.

1. There is a noticeable lag switching between mp3 files on this unit. This makes listening to things such as live performances and conceptual albums less than fully pleasureable. SOLUTION: Encode the entire cd/album as a single file.

2. The sound quality from this unit is superb...making it quite easy to distinguish between MP3s encoded at a lower bitrate (128) from that of a higher one (320). SOLUTION: The encoding must be at a higher bitrate... subsequently your CDRs will hold about 7 albums at most. (I have read elsewhere that this walkman will not play VBR encodings... I haven't tried VBR as of yet).

3. The bass-boost hardware functionality is not very consistent to be enjoyable. SOLUTION: Wavelab or similiar software to modify the bass-punch of the MP3 encoding (if you are into that sort of thing).

4. If you leave your MP3s all on the root-level (or in the same folder) the plus or minus buttons on the left-hand side of the LCD will not advance between the tracks... only to adjacent folders. SOLUTION: Put each of your single MP3 albums in it's own separate folder on the root level. I leave albums by the same artist in their own folder and then use the shuttle function to get to it instead of the plus button.

I hope this will be of some help, I enjoy using this player everyday! Good luck and take care.

ps. make sure to own the albums you encode :p

This is one of the best cd player for the price. One bad thing is the headphones that come with it, get another pair but if ou are looking for a mp3/cd player with tuner get this!!!!

Undoubtedly, this player has the best feature set on the market. It can play my long self-help mp3s with ability to scan FF and REW within an MP3, a feature which earlier players sadly lacked.

It's versatile, playing CDRs and CDRWs burned either as a normal Audio CD or DATA formats with MP3s and Sony's new format ATRAC3. I like the ability to change my compilations on the reusable CDRW discs.

The multi-band tuner is also a great feature. Heck, the only thing this thing lacks is a TV screen !

I use this player everyday, commuting to and from work, and at night. It works flawlessly. G-Protection is excellent. The unit has not skipped once since I have had it. Battery life is also excellent. Using MP3 data CDs the player reads information into its memory and stops the drive motor thereby conserving energy. I estimate that one pair of AA Alkaline Batteries can give between 50-60 hrs of usage. Life would be less for regular audio CDs though.

But....

The Bass Boost function is poorly implemented. It tends to exaggerate the mid-bass range which is 200-400Hz rather than 80-100Hz. Even at low volumes there is a slight distortion when the bass thumps. Somehow it lacks that warmth and depth that you have come to expect from Sony's D-Bass system.

Also the main function pad, used for playing, pausing, and scanning preset stations/tracks, is too small. One can end up pausing or switching the unit off if you do not look and carefully align your finger on the pad.

Small annoyances though. The unit does everything and has everything that I consider important. They should correct these oversights next time around.

I bought this cd player not knowing that it played the ATRAC format. I am able to fit 27 cd's worth of music on one ATRAC cd. So, when I travel to camps and such I never change the CD. The only down side to the ATRAC CD's is how long they take to burn. It takes my DELL several hours to process the information. But, I don't have to burn very many of them. The FM and AM tuners work very well, even in a building.

The CD walkman sounds like dream finally comes true, not really, actuall far from. I listed some shortcomings:
1. After spending 4.5 hrs on burning my first AtracPlus CD from 15hr mono 96-bit mp3, this CD player just doesn't recognized the CD I just burned. Again, this CD player also doesn't recognise mp3 CD. I used three different brand CD-R. It just displayed "Sessopn 002", then stopped. Press play, it displayed "No File". So far no luck to play any MP3 or Atrac songs on CD-R.
2. SonicStage simple burner software has a slow performance, almost 1 min/per song on a P3 machine
3. CD-sound quality, I rated it 2 out of 5. The two-step base sound distorts music.
4. FM radio reception only can receive strong signals.
5. The way to manually set radio presets is bizarre.
6. jog dial always starts from the first track, not from the track in play. To cancel jog dial, you have to scroll back to first track. Why not have a cancel button?
7. play/stop/forward/back button is hard to use, unless you have a slender finger.
8. no optical output.
9. All plastic body, the good thing is it is light.
I owned at least 10 different sony products, this CD-player is going to be the first Sony product I will return because of poor quality. Very disappointed.

i got this player 2 years back from singapore where its sold as DNE-611 and i have no regrets at all,this player simply rocks.i have used the player extesively for jogging and have not had any problems with song skipping and not to mention the radio reception which is pretty good.This player is top notch as far as build Quality goes and would recommend this player.I dont use the atrac format although its a superior format and saves space,I'd rather burm my mp3 cds than convert them to atrac and use them...I saw a reviewer saying that he is reducing the rating by one star as its made in malaysia,this is stupid coz sony manufactures in malaysia and so does AMD,Intel and the most electronics manufacturers...