Product Description

New compact and colourful design (silver & metalli

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1641 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Sony
• Model: CFDE100LS.CEK
• Released on: 2005-05-04
• Dimensions: 10.36 pounds

Features

• Remote Control
• FM / MW / LW Tuner
• Mega Bass
• Vertical Loading CD Tray
• Single Cassette Deck

Manufacturer's Description
Sleek portable CD player with a bass reflex speaker system.

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

For Small But Not Narrow Spaces
This player was bought for the kitchen, so sound quality - within reason - was not a priority. It is sold as a compact model, so as compactness was an issue it was chosen.

The build quality is perfectly good for the money and the range of features fit for purpose. The sound quality is reasonable, if a bit top-heavy and lacking in subtlety. Both CD and cassette playback are OK. The FM tuner is OK, but locally Radio Three is a little weak and it can't receive in stereo without high levels of background noise. It is nice to note that it retains Long Wave, something vanishing from cheaper models of this type.

So why only three stars? It does everything well enough except the one thing it is sold on - space. The player is certainly smaller than many other similar players. But the AC/Mains lead supplied sticks out of the back and is so large it needs an extra 8-10 cm of space on a shelf, thus ruining the units compactness. If the lead had come out of one end it would have been capable of going into narrower spaces.

So overall, for the money it is reasonable value and providing you don't listen too closely, it makes a happy sound. But allow some space wherever you put it.

A pleasant surprise
The quality of this beast was a pleasant surprise. It is, of course, well made, as was every Sony item I've owned. The surprise is the sound quality.

It was a late birthday present for my wife, who likes classical music in her room on a mixture of FM radio, tape and CD's. It plays all perfectly (once she found the cassette slot ;-) ) and the sound quality is excellent. I believe it's all do with computers but, to one of my generation, it sounds like magic.

Highly recommended.

Rather bright for my taste but my 10 year old son loves it
My son wanted a portable boom box for his 10th birthday. He has a CD collection, of things like School Disco and Rock Legends compilations, rather than cassettes. I was attracted to this player as the Amazon listing said it played MP3's - burned onto CD's I assumed - but actually it doesn't play MP3s at all - it's commercial CDs or CDR and CDRW audio recordings only. There is a tape player that can record from the CD or analogue radio but sadly there's no inbuilt microphone for fun voice recordings. Sound from the tape player is fine on tapes recorded from my HIFI system (naturally there's no Dolby B/C decoder and its Type I normal tapes only). The radio works fairly well and is LW, MW and FM.

My son really likes this good looking player, particularly the natty simple but effective remote control [not the same as the larger remote now shown by Amazon in their stock photo] - although very meanly, Sony didn't provide the 2 AAA batteries we needed to use it. The player itself can be run on six R14 (size C) batteries, which would further increase it's very weighty feel to a wapping 3.1 kg. These batteries aren't supplied either, but in this case you have the mains lead. On alkaline batteries Sony say the unit will playback CD's for 7 hours and tapes for 15 hours (probably optimistic). The main units battery cover is easy to remove as well, so rechargeable batteries wouldn't be a problem, other than most chargers only hold four batteries per go. There's no lines in for recording or replay either - so you can't use the system as active speakers for your MP3 player, another missed opportunity. You almost certainly can't use a Sony CP-A9 car adapter kit either as the cassette door is very tight fitting. The unit is also quite large really for a system touted as 'super compact', having a footprint of 400 cm x 250 cm deep (with the mains lead inserted).

Controls for the CD and radio are 'electronic' and have a positive if slightly tacky feel. The cassette tape controls are the very old fashioned heavy clunky push mechanical type, but they feel fine in use. Solenoid ones would have been much nicer though, and would have allowed the remote control to control the tape functions - it can't, other than switch to CD or radio with the tape still playing. The tape has auto-stop on play/fastwind plus CD record synch, but no auto-reverse. The remote works fully only with the radio, CD and volume. CD and tape eject is a slick damped affair, although the CD load mechanism is rather over complicated.

Sound wise the player is a disappointment to me as it is very bright sounding, even through my old ears. Also annoyingly there is no equalisation at all - a series of preset ones like on MP3 players really should have been provided, as there is a reasonable, but annoyingly not backlit, LCD display suitable for a menu system. You do have the 'Mega Bass' button which does add a more pleasant weight to the sound, although I would have still liked to have been able to reduce the treble. The unit goes very loud, although this exaggerates the treble as well as the base. Being bright, the sound is also quite detailed though. The headphone socket works well and probably suites cheaper MP3 type player headphones around £30 that have good midrange but a more limited treble. The otherwise awful Sony MDR-V300 headphones that are all bass and no treble don't sound that bad with the unit. However my son (who can no doubt hear far further up the treble region than me) thinks the sound via speakers and headphones is great and he is very happy with the system. I told him he could send it back - but no, he is delighted with it. So although I don't really feel I could fully recommend the unit (largely due to the lack of any equalisation control outside the Mega Bass and it's rather Spartan features), it obviously suites some tastes, and I have to admit it looks good. We paid £79 from Amazon, although if the price has dropped it makes it better value.