Rating: 
Summary: great and cheap mp3 player
Review: The reason I bought this was for the ability to play my mp3s while driving my car and didnt want to spend money on a new stereo for the car. Being a sound buff that I am, I was quite pleased with the quality of my mp3s (usually min bitrate of 160). It connects within a minute via the car kit. I havent used the ATRAC mp3 software that came with the product because I dont want any funky junk software on my computer when I already have Nero and Roxio to do all my burning. So I burned all my mp3s to CD-R's and the CD player read them all without a problem. The only complaints I have were the play and forward button. All the major CD controls are on one button so you have to hit it just right to play or fast forward and it can be disconcerting when it doesnt do what you want while your trying to drive. But it also came with a rotary commander which I didnt use cause its just more wires laying out there by my shifter. Overall for the price of $79.99 and the sound quality and the ability to finally play all my mp3s on CD, you can't beat it; plus its quite thin and has a black face so its hard to spot if you wanna tuck it somewhere while your cruising
Rating:
Summary: Minor niggles aside, this is a very decent product
Review: This MP3/ATRAC/CD player with car kit was what I needed to play MP3's in my car. I keep the player in the glove box and leave the "remote" outside to swap songs. It's cheaper than buying a MP3 head unit for the car. The first (and so far, only) MP3 CD burned with Musicmatch Jukebox worked great. I have the stock stereo in my car so sound quality is "fine", as I'm not an audiophile. I usually listen to news radio any way. :-D With a bit of volume adjustment on the CD player and the stereo, the optimum volume was achieved. And with a set of batteries in the player, the settings are saved (and even the last song played) to be easily resumed next time. People who complain about the player losing settings should just keep a set of batteries in the player itself. One pair lasted a very long time, esp. when most of the juice is delivered by the car adaptor when it's being used. Sony COULD have made it better though... Just a few nits to pick... 1) the "switch song" beep was way too loud, and it's either all on or all off. I wish they had a way to choose 3-4 different volumes. 2) The power adaptor should include a pass-thru so I can still plug in my cellphone adaptor or something. It's not as if this little CD player would draw that much power, right? 3) The cassette adaptor should also tell the CD player to "stop" when the adaptor is no longer being played (like when the stereo was turned off or adaptor ejected) instead of having to use the remote to stop the player. 4) the cassette adaptor could have been quieter, as it does make a bit of creaking sound while in use. However, these are minor nags when the core functionality is fine, and cheaper than buying a real MP3 head unit for your car, while maintain portability. If you need to play MP3's in your car, consider this MP3/CD player which delivers on all its promises, and comes with features such as bass boost, remote commander, and more.
Rating:
Summary: A great CD player for MP3 files
Review: This player does what is advertised. I do not enjoy playback of MP3s at 48kbps, but I am satisfied with getting 170 songs at 132kbps at 4 min. avg. song and 700MB CD (their claim) rather than the unbelievable number of 490 per CD. The small print on the back of the package was in blue and very hard to read. Thus, beware a 300 MHz Pentium II is a minimum requirement for the Atrac3Plus compression software. I am not going to list all the other computer requirements, but would encourage you to find those out before buying, if the Atrac3Plus feature is important to you. By the way, that format will only play on the CD players that can read that format, obviously or not so obviously. You are likely going to love this player, if you need one for your car and/or home. It finds mp3 songs fairly fast (faster than my old Rio player) and continues play where you left off unless you hold down the play button. One problem I am having with my model is that the forwarding and rewinding through a track does not work as said in the manual with the mp3s on my CD-RWs, but works fine with my CDs, hmm. One other feature I would love to see to make this player even better is a carrying pouch with beltclip. While it does come with velcro adhesive for play in the car, eventually I usually manage to have the player knocked about accidentally. A carrying case would provide additional protection against damage. Hope this helps.
Rating:
Summary: Very nice, but 400 MP3 file limit
Review: This player has many nice features and I highly recommend it as long as you don't need to be able to play CDs with more than 400 MP3 files. There are other MP3 players that support much larger numbers of files such as the Panasonic SL-MP80 which supports 999 files. If you use SONY's proprietary ATRAC3 format for the files the limit magically increases from 400 to 999. I'm not sure whether there is a technical reason, or it is intended as an 'incentive' to use their proprietary format, or an arbitrary decision based on what they thought was a reasonable limit given the differences in compression rates of MP3 vs. ATRAC3. I expect that the 400 file limit isn't a problem in most cases, but it is for at least one set of MP3 recordings I have. The player comes with auto adapters include what the call the rotary commander which allows you to control the CD player without needing to touch the player itself. Mounting the rotary commander where the driver can easily access reduces the distraction factor when wanting to pause or switch between files or folders.
Rating: 
Summary: Sony D-NE18CK Atrac3/MP3 CD walkman
Review: This unit was an utter disappointment. I purchased it under the guise the a Sony would be reliable and of high functionality. Neither was true. The MP3 acronym only means that you can convert MP3's to their proprietary ATRAC format. While their format has merit in it's own right, their advertising and packaging is deceptive at best, if not an outright lie. So, I went ahead and converted several things to their format (which you cannot play on anything other sony ATRAC stuff) only to find out the unit would randomly emit a loud POP and completely reset itself. At first, I thought that this was the power supply (car power)but the same thing occurred when I used batteries. I lived with it for a while until finally, it became so prevalent (translate, frequent) that I gave up. In short, a piece of garbage.
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