I just bought my third one of these today. This one skips to start with. The others lasted years before they started skipping. Love these units when they work, but they all seem to fail.

Life of CD's is expanded tremendously!
Very easy to use.
Space and time saver.
Super easy installation.
It's made by Sony!

NONE. Well, except for the fact that I wish it could've been a DVD player as well.

I don't understand all the negative reviews on this product. Everything I've read so far seems like people should've recognized that they got a damaged product and should've taken them back instead of trying to make them work. It happens. I've had my player for over 5 years now, and it works flawlessly. I purchased an entire Sony Home Theater set up to go with this, and it's been heaven. I worship my Sony entertainment system. This CD Changer is also awesome! It's absolutely not too big. It's a large piece, but it's a small as you could possibly make one and hold 300 CD's. It's a very lightweight product for it's size. I had a nice size CD collection and got tired of seeing scratches pop up on my discs when I played them, no matter how much I babied them, but this allows to keep them enclosed from dust & scratches and plays easily. The wait between discs is not that bad. You have to consider that this thing is delicately putting your discs away and rotating to the next. It takes a little while to spin to the next disc. I've never had one ounce of trouble with my player at all. I'll be depressed the day I need to get a new changer, but I'm pretty sure it'll be a while. Buy one and enoy!

This machine does a lot of things well, but it also has a few really bad habits. My unit, at least two or three times a month, refuses to load the selected disk. It will do so only after I unplug the unit and then plug it back in again. (I suspect this is a static electricity problem.) Worse, my unit has fumbled the disks inside the unit, resulting in terrible grinding noises, damage to disks, and the need to disassemble the unit to put things back in order. This has happened twice now. I am thinking of going back to a single CD player.

Capacity Ease of use Ability to use computer keyboard for entering cd names.

Only 13 character cd naming ability. Length of time from cd selection to start of play.

My cd collection has close to 500 cd's. I hardly ever listened to them because I had to place my cd racks away from my stereo, this made it a PIA to play a cd. Buying 2 of these changers allowed me to keep my cd's conveniently located thereby increasing their usage.

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1991 Sony 5-disc changer (still works like new)

Excellent sound, flawless performance. Great price. Easy to use. Keyboard text input.

- Very BIG! - Long time between disks - No countdown timer - Remote required for some features ê

I enjoyed the many features of my Technics mega-changer except that it would sometimes mis-track and skip on playback. This was real PIA when recording from it. I read many reviews on the Sony CX335 and have been overall very pleased with it. It has not skipped or misread any of my CD''s, including those that I have made. I like the ease of inputting text via the PS-2 keyboard and the memo-search feature. I was surprised to find that there is no way to access the reamining time per track or disk - a feature available on even the cheapest players these days! Also, you can''t Fast search Forward or Reverse, or Skip tracks from the deck, only by the remote (hope it never breaks)!`

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Technics Mega-Changer?

300 CD''s

Very poor (none actually) customer service Slow and noisy CD change ( especialy ennoying in random play )

I bought my player april 2001. I installed the thing and started loading my CD''s. After a little with I noticed that sometimes when I turned on the player it didn''t recognize any CD anymore. If it did recognize the first CD everything worked fine furtheron but the next time it could go wrong again and not recognize any CD. So I returned the CD to the service center and got it back after 4 weeks ( 2 weeks repair time were promissed, but OK ... ). I got back home and immediately had the same problem. I returned to the service center and 4 weeks later I tested my CD at the service center and had still the same problem. CD returned back to Sony 4 weeks later ... ( you can guess ) no change. After all this boring hussel I finaly got a new machine and now it seems to work fine ( although I sometime suspect ... ) This is a long story to tell that the product can be OK but the service of Sony sucks like hell !!!

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Nice in design. Good sound. Ease of opperation

After 1 month a terrible noise in right channel. First repair attempt was unsuccessful. The second one discovered that main board was deffective. Looking for replacement of the board

Sony has to be more careful with quality of their products

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pioneer

Sound. Number of CD's. Ease of use. Remote control.

No track titles (but there are album titles).

This would be the perfect machine if you could see what track is playing. The only machine that displays track information is the Kenwood CD-425m, but that's holds 100 less cd's and Kenwoods break all the time. Plus it costs 20% more than the Sony 333.

The sound is very good. I don't have a digital receiver, but I'm very happy with the analog outputs. I know Sony takes some gab from audiophiles, but they invented the CD - I'm sure they know what how to make it sound good. Plus, sound is so subjective.

I'd like to get a digital receiver and hook up the optical output. But even if I never do, I'm very happy. I just wish I could see the titles of the songs.

Quality front controls, smooth mechanical operation, disc labels, keyboard input for labelling, 8 disc groups, TOSLINK optical out & analog out, S-Link A1(II) stacking capability, analog in (for stacked cd player)

Complex UI, Short disk labels, no exchange while playing feature, "single play" slot not isolated, large footprint.

This product is an excellent value for the money, and is feature-rich compared to it's cousins in the same price range. When trying out the front controls for several brands of 100, 200, and 300 CD changers in a superstore, I found that the Sony had the smoothest, cleanest control over it's carousel and the best response to the use of it's controls. The controls on some of the other changers felt flimsy or wobbled while used. Two brands that come to mind as having problems with their controls were the Kenwood and Technics players. I was also quite unimpressed with the JVC's carousel control -- it was jerky and tended to overshoot.

The remote and UI are complicated and pretty much require you read the manual. Also, not all features are available on the remote, such as group labelling and group assignment. Once I'd read the manual, however, operation of the player became quite easy. After programming all the labels and group assignments, the power of the unit's features became apparent. Once my music was labelled and grouped, I had instant access to 8 mini radio stations, by selecting one of 8 genres of music I have setup. Click a genre button, hit Shuffle-All, and hit Play. Voila, an instant home radio station.

The PS/2 Keyboard port on the front is extremely useful, but I quickly found myself having to make up cryptic short forms for Artists and CD Titles, as the space you're given for labels is very short, at 14 characters. Nevertheless, visual cues are wonderfully useful.

My biggest complaint is this unit's lack of a decent sized single-play slot. The single-play slot is the 1st slot, and is only indicated with a reversed number 1 (black text on white background). A slight saving grace is that hitting the stop button when loading/unloading CDs will "kick" the selected CD up out of the slot slightly, for easy insertion/removal.

The lack of any way of being able to play one disc and load/unload other discs is vaguely annoying, but is understandeable. Afterall, there are 300 slots for your CDs, and builtin stacking abilities. They even thought ahead so much as to add a 1/2/3 selector switch both on the remote and on the back of the player, so you can easily command up to 3 CD changers with one remote. The documentation is unclear as to whether you can operate more than two changers from one "head" unit using the S-Link interface. If you do happen to use the S-Link interface and another CD changer, you can take advantage of Cross-fading and play and exchange abilities offered when operating in this mode.

On the down side, my current unit (haven't exchanged it yet - stores are closed) has a loose connection somewhere inside on the analog outputs, and is outputting static to the left channel when warm. Fortunately, the TOSLINK optical output saved the day, and I can listen to music without static until the store I bought it from gets in a replacement for me.

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Pioneer PD-F908 100+1 changer, older Sony 5 CD changer

Holds 300 CD's, more than most people own. SPDIF out (digital optical)

Huge, limited character input (13 characters max)

Wow, At this price why would anybody want anything else. Got it connected via the generic RCA cables right now and it sounds better than my Yamaha DVD player that is connected using Digital Coax. Takes its time changing to the next disk, but based on what I have heard from folks with other changers, this seems to be the norm. I found myself wondering the first night I got if I had made the right choice. A few days later I'm redesigning the Home Theatre Cabinet around it. If you are in the market for a 200 plus changer. This is the one.

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