Recommend Me a Portable CD Player

In My Humble Opinion
1

After many fine years of service my Sony Discman finally passed away this week after refusing to read my CDs. It was fairly old and served me well, but now I am in the market for another portable CD player.

I’m guessing they’re much cheaper than when I bought my old one due to the increased popularity of MP3 players. Has anyone recently bought one that they’ve been happy with? I’d rather buy a CD player than an MP3 player since it would be too much of a hastle for me to rip all my CDs on to my computer.

Thanks.

2

You can get a used Rio Volt for about $40 now. I’ve had mine for a few years now and still love it. It has great sound and volume quality. That way, if you do decide to upgrade to using MP3s at some point, you can play your MP3 discs in this player.

PS: I never use earbuds, I use my big ol honkin’ hifi headphones.

3

I bought a Sony Discman with MP3/ATRAC playback last year for about $80. It came with headphones, a car kit and a wired remote control. Overall, I’m satisfied with the performance of the player - battery life is good, sound quality is pretty good, skip-resistance is very good…

Look up a few online stores to get an idea of prices… I’m partial to bestbuy.com

4

gouda, that is actually one of the models I had been looking at. It seems like a pretty decent deal. What is ATRAC/MP3 playback?

I see this one doesn’t have it and is $40 CDN cheaper than this one.

Is it worth the extra money?

5

Well, having mp3 support means that you can dump compressed mp3 tracks on the cd using your pc (if you have one). This dramatically improves the amount of music you can stuff into a cd. Think anywhere from 6 to 18 hours worth of music (or more, depending on bit rate) on 1 cd.

6

ATRAC is a Sony-only format for storing music on cds. They claim that you can fit upto 480 songs (of quality equal to 96kbps MP3) in this format onto a standard cd. 128 kbps MP3 quality gets you about 300 ATRAC songs on a cd.

The downside to this format is that you can only use it on a Sony ATRAC-enabled player… useless if you often transfer cds to your car stereo/home stereo/friends…

IIRC, you can only convert to ATRAC from MP3. I haven’t tried out this format as yet, mostly because I’m too lazy. I’ve yet to convert most of my audio cds into MP3, so I don’t really see myself converting my MP3s into ATRAC anytime soon :slight_smile:

7

ATRAC playability is your call, but definitely buy an MP3 capable player.