Price Paid:  $500.00 from Sevenoaks

Summary:
A competant player that out-performs some of it's more expensive rivals. This player has the build quality expected from a company such as Sony and looks good too. The player is very easy to use - the jog wheel is something I couldn't live without! The player has both optical and co-axial outputs which is great if you want to make recordings to MD or CDR and has many facilities such as track spacing and peak search if you are making analogue recordings. For the price you really can't go wrong!

Strengths:
Build, ease of use, sound

Weaknesses:
Too many gadgets, cd text, filters

Price Paid:  $300.00 from Sony Center Santiago

Summary:
I bought this player for the quality of its sound and the CD-TEXT feature, which is very useful for my own compilations, besides it can play CDRW.
But soon I realised that this player has many problems with some discs, mainly because some CDs have an internal radius which is a little bigger (fraction of millimeters), and because the way this player fixes the discs, the CD cannot spin allways at the speed needed. This causes glitches in the sound, even the stop of the playing with the message "NO DISK".
A pitty for such a promising player; may be a simple and traditional fixing mechanism (now I don't by this fixed optical blah ...) with a 10 seconds buffer would be better.

Strengths:
Sound, build quality, CD-TEXT.

Weaknesses:
Too sensitive to CDs physical imperfections.

Price Paid:  $300.00 from Sony dealer

Summary:
this is a great cd player. the price is very good. highly recommended.

Strengths:
Great sound, natural sound,Fixed optical mechanism, construction.

Weaknesses:
digital filters.

Similar Products Used:
SONY, HK

Summary:
After exhaustive auditioning of numerous machines over the last few weeks I bought the Sony CDP-XB920 today, and since getting it home it has not ceased to please and amaze me. My previous player was an aged Marantz CD-63 (good in its day) which is now retired to the second system in my study.

The Sony has been a great pleasure after only a few hours use, and is still burning in so it is getting better and better by the minute. I can hardly wait for each disk to finish before reaching for something else to rediscover.

Finely articulated sound across the entire frequency spectrum with no bad spots or overemphasised areas; good but not extreme soundstage; punchy but not agressive dynamics; clean and detailed but also revealing of faults in recordings (over compressed recordings are obvious).

The disk "stabiliser" or "puck" is a funky little thing - so much so that the novelty of using it (and the obvious good engineering of this and the fixed lens system) prevents the player being a chore to use. The only thing I don't like is the user adjustable digital filtering - it is a bit gimmicky - why not just get the standard setting right?

A very fine and musical CD player. The perfect middle-ground upgrade for when you (like me) are ready to graduate from inexpensive consumer products but are not yet in the Krell league. I wish I could award it 6 stars in both categories.

Components:

Sony CDP-XB920 CD player
Rotel RT-820 tuner
Golden Tube Audio SEP-1 valve preamp
Golden Tube Audio SE-40 valve poweramp
Alon Lotus SE speakers (tri-wired)
Tara Labs interconnects
Chord speaker cable

Strengths:
Clean, neutral, dynamic sound. Fixed laser design.

Weaknesses:
Adjustable digital filter.

Similar Products Used:
Sony, Marantz, Pioneer, NAD, Rotel, Musical Fidelity, Myriad (various models of each).

Summary:
This a must have cd player.
It has revealed al kinds of new details I had never even heard on my old cd's, and the price is very good.

Strengths:
Great sound, digital filters, it matches perfectly with my MD player (a sony MDS - JB920)

Weaknesses:
Not a lot of cd's have CD text nowadays