I recently purchased the Sony CDP-CE525 for about $179, and I am extremely happy with it. It has the digital out, which is perfect with my Sony MDS-JE510 MiniDisc recorder (got in a bundle for about $250 and it came with a portable player MZ-E40 as well) and the sound quality is extra ordinary, even on my fairly old speakers, and fairly weak reciever (an old '84 Pioneer with 150 total watts... it used to be my parents for their record player). Even still, the sound is great, and the only complaint I have is the slow disc reading mechanism, but it is easy to get past that, especially when considering the relatively low cost. And plus, if I want to connect it to another CD player, or whathaveyou, it has that ability too. I am very happy. This machine was built for me to record with it. Any comments or questions, just email me.Peace out all.

verbil@p3.net

Lots of features, Great price, and I have had no problems with it. Very good buy.

Got this player for $149. For this price, you can't beat the sound quality and the features.

I was very pleasantly surprised by this CD player. Although it is not particularly solid, it is thoughtfully ergonomically easy to use. Sony has really improved the features of its CD players, and one can see why they are considered at the forefront of the digital revolution.
This is not an expensive unit. It looks good, however, and operation is smooth and silent. Sonically, it is good, and it can track scratched CDs that my inexpensive 60+1 Fisher changer cannot.

I originally bought it for its toslink optical digital output for direct digital dubbing to MDs without digital-analog-digital signal degradation. Now if this unit only had a coax optical output (which I have heard is sonically superior to the toslink), then it would be a phenomenal value at around $200.00.

Five Stars for a highly refined yet reasonably priced product.

I picked this up for $168. I'm entirely happy. The rotary dial to locate individual tracks is great, and overall the design and layout is A+. The tray slides in and out very smoothly and quietly. Especially with improved digital formats on the near horizon, I think it's sensible to spend a small amount for something that works and sounds great. I could have spent $360 on a demo Parasound that is way over-built and top quality, but would have ended up with something much uglier and also would have sacrificed a lot of the fun features on the CE525. Four stars, five for value. Oh yeah--when this changer is on shuffle play and searching for the next track, you can leave the room, eat a sandwich, come back, and maybe you'll be hearing some tunes.

I bought this for $159 at price costco, after a long wait and have been using it from the last 15 days. I see this priced at $199, or $189 if they have a sale. I mainly bought this player for it's optical digital out and also the good reviews posted here and elsewhere. IMHO, for this price you just cant beat the 525. The audio is very good, controls are egronomically designed, a very good remote etc etc. But I am surprised to see no "power on/off" button on the remote, forcing me to learn the 525 on. I see this as a minor inconvienience, but not a problem once you get used.

I bought this cd player for $160 at costco and am very pleased with it. I has good sound quality and has a cool feature of reading certain cd's text. You can also label cd's. It has an optical out so that is a big plus. It seems to take a while to load discs and read them but you get used to it so it isnt a big deal. Definately a good player for the money.

I've owned the CDP-CE525 for about a year now, and have been very happy with it. I picked it up at Best Buy for a little under $200. I can't compare the sound quality to that of other players, but I've listened to it extensively, and never been disappointed.
I purchased the unit mainly for the optical digital output, but it has a plethora of other good features. The dot matrix display is far superior to the standard displays found on Sony's lower models. It also supports CD-Text, which is a really cool feature if you have any CD-Text CDs. You can also enter custom titles for non-CD-text CDs, but you're limited to only 12-13 characters. Perhaps the second most useful feature (for me, at least) is that you can exchange 4 of the discs while one is playing. Also, the buttons and jog dial are smartly placed so they are both convenient and give the unit a sharp-looking front panel.

On the negative side, it takes about 15 seconds or so to locate the next track when playing in random mode across all five discs. Random play in 1-disc mode is fine, though.

Overall, I highly recommend this player to anyone who's in the $150-$200 price range and is looking for a solid unit with plenty of useful features.

This player is overall pretty good, but I agree with the other posters about the seek problems between tracks and especially during random searches. Unless you need the S-Link and MegaStorage features of this player tou should go for the CDP-CE535.
One neat thing on this player are the little LEDs on the Play and Pause buttons. I think this is more effective than the Display icons on the 535.

Good price, CD-Text, deletion of songs from CD for playback, plays CD-RWs.

Don't need or use the mega connection stuff.

I like this product especially since it plays CD-RWs made from a Phillips CDR765 CD recorder. I can delete songs that I don't like from a CD for playback of just the good stuff. The time it takes to change songs in "random" mode does not bother me. True, its not capable of doing DJ type stuff by itself.