Keyboard input, best track memory, sound quality

Small buttons on the remote

AWESOME! This cd changer is very well designed and includes many clever and unique features. The sound quality is superb.

Convenience, text readout, keyboard input, sound quality, daisy chaining for up to 600 CDs online!

remote is weak, no coaxial digital output, cannot daisy chain to digital outputs.

I got tired of fishing through shelves of CDs everytime I wanted to listen to something. Having 300 of them stored in one place with searching capability is great! It took hours to set everything up - mostly to type in all of the album names - but it was well worth it.

The operation of this unit is pretty straight forward. It works quite reliably and quietly. The sound quality is surprisingly good. I have some pretty high-end stuff, Bryston, Mageneplanars, McIntosh, Forte, and Paradigm. Typically, you don't see CD changers in these setups. I hooked up the 1039 using the optical digital output into my MSB Link DAC. The sound is excellent and much better than I had expected.

Now that I've run out of space in the 1039, I'm going to take advantage of the daisy chaining feature and order another or a PD-F27.

Similar Products Used:

Sony CD changer

Capacity, search by artist or album, keyboard interface, playback

Remote, but I use receiver remote anyway.

Nice unit. Thought the 301 capacity might be overkill, but it's great to put CDs in and be able to access them whenever you want. Flawlessly plays back CDs my old changer had trouble playing. Picked it up on eBay for a great price and would not hesitate to recommend the CD player to anyone interested in a giga-changer.

You can search CDs by artist or album name and create a "best" list you like to listen to. The random play feature is great and the time between songs is not overly long.

Similar Products Used:

RCA 5 disc

Capacity, Groups of music, Keyboard input, the plus one slot, sound

Remote, size (to be expected in giga changer)

I ordered this thru JANDR.com, No problems at all. Was comparing this to the Sony changer but decided for the Pioneer due to the extra slot to play discs that are not in the changer (I have more than 300 discs). It is daisy chainable and I plan to get another one when I have made a
new cabinet and can afford it. I have had no problems with
the memory even when power has been totally cut off for couple of days. The sound is good and it has digital out also. The only problem is the remote due to its tiny button size (I am glad for the keyboard input to put in titles, using the remote would have been frustrating). Four stars
due to the remote.

Capacity, Keyboard Hook-Up, Retrieval Speed, Able to set up groups of music, Price, Ease of use, quiet.

Size

I've only had the unit over a month but so far its working great. It's nice to have all of your disks ready to play. You find yourself listening to more music then you ever did before. You can "Daisy-chain" these units together to explode your capacity. You can hook up to the unit with a standard computer keyboard to enter the titles which lets enter all of them in no time at all. Another awesome feature is that you can set up groups of music, then play just a particular group - play all, random, etc.

The sound quality is great. It changes disks quickly and quietly. The unit is easy to setup and use. The remote is small if you had to enter all of the titles with it but if you don't, it's a good size. The unit is rather large, I had to modify my cabinet slightly in the back to get it to fit, so take this into consideration before you buy.

I found this unit on the net for $239. For all that you get with this unit, that price is outstanding.

I haven't experienced any problems with the unit losing memory. I always use the remote to turn the unit on/off.
So far so good.
Enjoy

Random mode will only work on one changer at a time when daisy chained.

The capacity and price of this player is the strong point, but Pioneer kind of misleads the consumer as far as daisy chaining the units is concerned. You can't program between two daisy chained units and the random feature will only randomly play tracks from one player(meaning random will only randomly play tracks from disks 1-300 or 301-600 not from 1-600). The random button on the remote will cause the master unit to randomly play tracks. To use random on the slave unit you have to get up and push the random button on the slave unit itself. You would think hitting random on the remote or the master unit would mean that the random mode would work on all 600 discs. Not so!!! Also you cannot use the optical hookup when daisy chaining. The owners guide kinda sucks too. It is too vague in stating what the player will or won't do when daisy chained to another. Pioneer likes to call two of these together a 600 disc changer, but you loose the capability to use most of the features of the player when using more than one player. These units perform fine and I haven't had any trouble with them, but I feel Pioneer is really misleading the consumer with the capabilities of these units. The thing is, I doubt any retailer would've known about this unless they actually had two of these things hooked up at home or on the showroom floor and actually experimented with them for a while.

quick disc-changes, quiet operation, CD-TEXT, keyboard input, CDR(W) playback

daisy-chained slave runs analog-only output.
no SPDIF Coax digital output

Well, I love this product for the simple fact that I'm upgrading from dual single-players to this 301 changer.

I'm in the process of backing up all of my audio cds, and while doing so I'm putting CD-TEXT info on them. The 301 changer displays the artist/title/tracks on the screen (scrolls the titles at first then a static readout for the remainder of the song, then scrolls the next song title, etc...) I haven't used the keyboard yet to enter titles, and I won't need to either.

I am running this 301 changer via an optical cable to my Yamaha RX-V995 receiver, and it of course sounds great. I haven't yet tested the DAC in the PD-F1039, but I'm sure it's not as good as the Yamaha.

This brings me to my next point: When daisy-chaining two of these changers, you have to pass the analog audio out of the slaved changer into the master changer, and from there it runs digital out of the optical cable. However, this is unacceptable to me because I want BOTH players to run digital, not one digital and one analog. (This is assuming I understand how these work since I only have the one player now). The only way I can get both to run digital is if I plug one optical cable into my CD input of the receiver from the master CD, and the 2nd optical cable (from the slaved changer) into another optical input of my receiver (i.e. Tape/MD). This wouldn't be so bad, if I could still use the one remote to control both changers - but I don't know if this works like this.

The remote is small, but I don't care all that much about the remote. I programmed the basic functions into my receiver remote such as play/stop/pause/disc+/disc-

The readout is easy to read from a distance of 20' from where I sit; no problems there.

My only other gripe is with the random modes. I haven't really played with it much, but I don't think there's a 'random disc' mode. In other words, I want to hit "random" and have it randomly select a CD and play it all the way thru, then go to the next random CD. But when I hit "random" it either randomly plays the songs on the current CD or it randomly plays songs on random CDs. (i.e. in the latter case, it will randomly pick CD 124 and play track 6, then when track 6 is over it will put CD 124 away and pick CD 212 and play track 3, etc... This is rather annoying since there is a 10 second gap between songs, plus it's extra wear-and-tear on the mechanics). Is there something I'm missing that I don't know yet?

However, for the value and price, it's a very nice CD player. I got it from 800.com for $285 shipped 2nd day air. I purposely wanted air shipping because I didn't want a monkey driving a truck from California to Massachusetts screwing up my player. It was worth the extra $$$.

A great way to store and listen to your CDs at a very affordable price. Features are easy to use.
Sound is excellent.

Lettering on remote hard to see in low light.

Since I'm a fan of old time jukeboxes (the ones that play vinyl records) CD mega-changers immediately caught my eye when they were introduced. Then, when my trusty 12 year old Technics single CD player finally quit, I saw this as an opportunity to move up to this modern day jukebox.

After using the Pioneer 1039 for about 18 months I can easily summarize my opinion in one word -- FANTASTIC.

I listen to music daily; so I have given the 1039 a pretty good workout and its operation has been flawless.
In fact, I've been listening to CDs more than ever before because I often operate the mega-changer in the "random selection mode" instead of listening to the radio. It's like having a radio station that plays all your favorites with no commercials.

Although the remote is a bit small, I quickly became used to it and I don't consider its size a problem. Lighter colored letters on the remote would have been easier to see in low light.

Pioneer's mega-changers are smaller than some other brands I looked at. However I still had to cut out the back of my audio cabinet to accommodate it; so measure first. (The 1039 measures
16 9/16 wide x 17 1/16 deep x 7 5/8 inches high.)

The Pioneer 1039 is an amazing piece of technology, with many useful features, at a very affordable price. My old
Rock-Ola jukebox was never as good as this.

Large capacity. Digital output. CD title display. Keyboard input. Remote not a problem if you have a pc keyboard

Can't seem to perform random access on CD-R/RW recorded by Pioneer CD Recorder.

Since it's replacing a six disc changer, I'm really enjoying having all of my music at instand access. I've been listening to music I havn't in a long time, finally able to fully take advantage of music collection. Display and text editing is terrific with use of Keyboard. I hightly recommend using the external keyboard since the inputs on both the remote and the unit it's self can take much longer and a lot more effort. Random play I've enjoyed immensley. Which brings me to my one complaint. A handful of my discs are recorded on a Pioneer CDRW 739 recorder. These discs cancell the random play function on the player. I haven't had this problem with my car CD player also made by Pioneer. It is possible to connect two of these units to a reciever both with a digital optical. However, what is required is a reciever with multiple digital (optical) inputs that you can assign the location to. i.e. Input 1 for CD and input 2 for CD. My Pioneer elite reciever has this capability, but that would also take up two of four digital inputs, somethinkg I'm not willing to do. Fortunately I only have one CD Changer. Otherwise, this has been a great player, and I highly recommend it if these issues aren't a problem for you.

Similar Products Used:

Pioneer PD-M430 Six disc magazine style changer

Keyboard, CD-R/CD-RW compatible, CD-Text compatible, 301 Disc capacity, Optical output

Bad DAC, Disc memory is for the slot not the actual disc

I had been looking at multi-disc changers for a while as I have a rather large CD collection. I had been eyeing the Sony CX-350 and was close to buying it. However, when shopping for a TV I noticed that London Drugs had a sale on the PD-F1039. I paid $250 CDN which I found out was essentially the list price.

When I initially got it I tested it out a bit. I compared the internal DAc to that of my reciever. Despite not having a high end reciever or extremely fine ears I could definately tell the players DAC was vastly inferior to my reciever. I thus would not recommend this to people who are not planning on using the optical output. This is not such a large problem anymore as most recievers and mid to high end mini-systems have optical inputs now. I have a high end component mini-system which came with a single disc CD player connected to the reciever through an optical cable so I didn't have to buy one. I also tested the memory backup of the unit writing a couple names of titles and then unplugging the unit for a while which didn't seem to phase it. I've also tested CR-R's in the unit and they work. Even unfinalized discs will play although for some reason the CD-Text will not work without being finalized. I believe this is a quirk of the player and not the technical specification as my computer was able to read the Cd-Text information. As for changine times it's not instant but it's not unbearable either. Changing a playing disc from one side of the player to one on the entirely opposite side took 20 seconds from the play button on my remote to the first track on the new disc. I'm a little concerned about people complaining of mechanical problems with the changer mechanism but no problems so far. My advice for people with problems is to make sure you don't move, bump or jostle the changer at all and make sure it's not being subjected to any vibration. Some people have complained about taking the discs out but I have thin fingers so it's not a problem for me. The remote isn't amazing but it does the job. I don't have big meaty fingers again so for some people it may be a bit small. Overall I've very happy although I will need more space eventually and I don't like the fact that you can't daisy chain them and use both optically.