Portable CD players were about as portable as house bricks in the early days of their release. Sony's D-NE10 shows that electronics manufacturers have come along way since those bulky 'non-portable' portable CD players. At first glance of the said model you might think you have been transported to the far off Walkmania galaxy and the D-NE10 is the enemy star ship that is going to take you down with its Atrac3plus laser beams. Take it out of that context and back to reality and we found the D-NE10 to be a robust, exceedingly slender CD player with many interesting attributes.
Design
Weighing in at 168g sans accessories and measuring 127mm by 21.8mm by 139.4 mm depth the D-NE10 is quite simply as compact as a CD player can be without having the CD protrude outside of the machine. Built with a matte silver texture (Gold and Black will eventually be available) made from magnesium and aluminium and styled with a level top surface and sunken plateau on the underside the D-NE10 is an extremely attractive player.
Features
The D-NE10 can be easily held in the palm of a medium sized hand but due to its slimness the only place Sony could neatly slot the buttons is on the underside of the player. These buttons are extremely small and are very difficult to make out in low light. By setting the player up like this Sony is encouraging users to use the backlit LCD remote control, which is placed half way up the headphone cable. The remote in question is superb, controlling all available functions of the player and including a sound mode key for parametric equalisation which allows you to adapt the player to soft, active, heavy and custom sound requirements.
Sound quality from the in-ear headphones supplied is fantastically lucid and the D-NE10 is the perfect portable machine due to the highly intolerant G-protection shock resistant system. We gave it some significant shakes and knocks while listening to Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells and the player skipped once after a fair number of knocks (in time with the chimes of course).
The D-NE10 comes with a rechargeable battery that takes 5 hours to restore and the alternate option of an AA battery adaptor. The AA battery adaptor is an external plastic contraption that slots into the recharging sockets. Sony has done a great job in keeping the adaptor limited in size to cohere with the overall lean design of the D-NE10. Using both of these battery options you are ensured greater than 83 hours of playback time.
With so many different personal audio options on the market these days you might need some justification that the D-NE10 portable CD player from Sony is a good option. Features of this player include traditional CD audio playback, Atrac3plus playback, Atrac3 playback and MP3 playback.
The main benefits of all these playback options are storage and sound quality. However, you forgo the option of using your Atrac3plus/Atrac3 formatted audio CD's in most other players.With the supplied Software, Sony SonicStage, you are able to transfer at different rates allowing a maximum of up to 490 MP3 songs at 48kbps to one CD-R/CD-RW and up to 90 songs in the Atrac3plus format at 256kbps, which are compressed files playing at a significantly higher quality than MP3 or MD's Codec. Compare this with traditional CD audio, which holds around 15-17 songs at most and you have a very powerful storage option in the D-NE10.
Performance
We found the Sony SonicStage software painless to navigate with straight forward prompts allowing you to record a CD from your collection into the software and vice versa, record/burn from the files that you have imported into the software to a CD-R/CD-RW. An additional bonus of the SonicStage software is simply that it is a fantastic music cataloguing tool to have on your PC. The 'My Library' storage space has powerful sorting options allowing you to categorise by artist, genre, album and date recorded specifics.
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