decent price at the time I bought it.

will work fine for a few months then it will turn itself off or start skipping even with a new CD and on a table.! Stay away from this product!

Man, sony has lost my business! I bought this CD player close to a year ago, it worked fine for 3 months then I started skipping like mad!. And the thing was it was on a flat surface with no virbration(table) and it would skip by itself. Turning ESP on helped for a while, then even using ESP will not stop the skipping. Luckily I bought the extended warrentee, so I got it exchanged after the 4th month. Thinking I'm alright, and i just got a lemmon the first time I was happy with this CD player for the time being until it started again with this new unit after 7 months or so! Unbelivable! I've always thought Sony products stood up to high standards, but 2 for 2! and from the sound of this forum I'm not the only person having problems with this piece of crap. I've had sony products before and they too broke(Sony cordless phone.. it just stopped working all of a sudden).

cheap & reliable

Well... it's plastic

I bought this unit at a 2nd hand store in London this summer after my beloved D-303 (incredible machine!) left me forever after 8 years. I needed some portable cd player since I am a music addict and I didn't want to spend much money so I trusted what appeared as a bargain to me as compared to some other brandless players in the store. What I want to say it that this machine has evidently been heavily used, it is heavily scratched everywhere, has been used apparently for some 3-4 years then sold away, yet it works perfectly! I could not believe these tiny and fragile pieces of equipment could have a second life. Sounds good enough, build is bulky and rugged enough to resist real portability. ESP works fine although you can't jog with it.Can support remote control and has manual resume control.

Similar Products Used:

Sony D-303

The Sony D-E301 CD player is a great buy.Its got ESP that works very good it doesn't skip at all if you have the ESP on and the Headphones have great sound to them.I highly reccomend this to anyone.

I have done a review some weals ago on how this broke on me for no purpose at all. I have now managed to fix this problem by simply snapping the moving laser piece back to the center. What luck I had! I didn't even think it would work, until I heard it snap and decided to give it a try. And what luck I had to just decide one day to take it out and take another look at it, thinking it could be fixed. One problem, however, is that the volume is a bit staticy. Other than that, it works like new.

durability, sound quality

the strip of electrical tape i used to stop the switch that stops the CD from playing when you open the lid. (it happens a lot when it's in the front pocket on my sweater)

Well... For the amount of money I paid, plus the $10 I paid for the NiMH batteries I bought for it, and the little mod I did so that it'd recharge the batteries when I plugged it in with the adapter... It's a slick little CD player, with 10 second anti-skip. I can't really complain. The last Sony Discman I owned before this one had no anti-skip, and by the end of my time with it, it wouldn't even track properly. I've had this discman for a year or so now, even though I bought it from a pawn shop for barely $40 CAD, I wouldn't part with it for the world. I've put this little cd player through absolute hell... dropped it numerous times, opened it up to "modify" some things... I'm very happy with it. It's a good piece of equipment for the money, and if you know how to properly set the tracking on a cd player, you won't ever have to worry about the non-tracking issue. ;)

Similar Products Used:

almost every Sony discman before this one...

Fairly resistant to skipping. Sounds good.

old

I've had this for a few years now (??) and it has never given me any troubles. Mine doesn't shut off at random times like other people have said theirs' do.

I bought this product about a year ago at my local Walmart. I am in high school and usually listen to music on the bus. About a week after I bought it, it broke on me. The CD wouldn't spin, and I thought that this SONY product would stand up for more than that. I went back to Walmart to get a new one for exchange. The new one held up for quite a while, but it had broken on me about 3 months ago, with the same problem the first one had! This is really strange because I had another Discman, before this one, from Sony that was about 3 years old until my friend accidentally dropped down a flight of stairs. It even worked after that for a few months!!! I don't thind that this discman is as high qsuality as the others and recommend teh newer models now. Avoid this one if you don't want to be jipped.

it works

battery life

Just a hint for the others in the forum experiencing sudden stops of the player:

In my case it helped to lock the little contact sensing if the lid is opened (I used some wax, although there might be more elegant methods...). This way, you might have to reset your player after changing a CD (in case, say, that you want to skip forward to track #11 of the new CD, while the previous one had only 10 tracks) by removing a battery (the player will then forget the TOC of the previous CD - if you enabled that option). If you just press play and listen to the end, you don't even have to reset it. And at least you can move it around and it keeps playing.

The overall sound quality is quite o.k. for a portable (but cannot compete with a decent "big" CD player. I am missing an optical output, but you can't expect too much for the price I paid for it...

P.S.: I am not sure about 1998, it might be 1997 even.

Similar Products Used:

no-name CD-portable (much worse/more noise)
MD-portable (Sony MZ-R 30) (sounds better)

Doesn't skip when it is in working condition

Intermittently shuts itself off for no apparent reason, mediocre battery life

This is the first ESP-equipped CD player that I kept (I returned a Panasonic portable CD player with 3-second ESP). But less than a year later the player would sometimes stop playing unexpectedly without ever touching any controls and in mid-disc), even though I had the Hold switch engaged. And the battery life is only 12 hours on a set of two AA alkalines, which is mediocre by current standards; my two newest CD players run for more than 12 hours on a fully-charged set of NiMH rechargeables!

Enough of the bad. The good: When this player is working right, it doesn't skip with the ESP switched on. Period.

Overall, I gave up the ghost on this piece-of-crap Sony; repairing it would have cost me as much as a new low-end CD player. But the price isn't bad for the basic features it had during its vintage (1997-1998). As of now I am giving this model mediocre (if not terrible) marks all around.

Similar Products Used:

Panasonic SL-S231C (gave that to my brother because he needed a car-compatible portable CD player), Panasonic SL-SW850 (overpriced and too basic but I still use it when the weather gets rough), Sony D-EJ815 (my newest CD player that I now use as a general-purpose unit)

Nice design

flaky behavior

For the most part this player has been great, and has held up well to a lot of use while hiking. Occasionally however, it has the annoying tendency to become hyper-sensitive to being jostled and simply shuts itself off. This is most troublesome because its unpredictable. For several months it will work great while I'm hiking and bouncing it allover the place in its case-logic bag, but then for no apparent reason, it will not play for more than a few seconds before shutting itself off. I hope the newer machines are more stable in their behavior.