cd players

I bought this unit to replace 2 Sony 200 cd only disc players. This model was only $125 more than the 400 cd player, so i went with it. The menu funtions are terrible!!!! They are way over complicated and irritating. And if you just wanna play cd's you have to enter th cd# and then wait for the player to recognize the cd before you can select a track. It is a time consuming annoyance. If you want to use the shuffle or program features you have to use the menu on you TV. You can't just push a button and go. This player is a huge disapointment, but i'm too lazy to remove all my cd's and take it back.

Expectations are everything. My experience with the incompetence of the consumer A/V industry must lower mine. I've heard the complaints about the speed and clumsiness of this unit but I have no major complaints about it. I must admit that I place a higher priority on picture and audio quality, and this unit is awesome on both counts. In addition, the transport is well designed, quiet and well balanced.

For those of you shopping for one of these, make sure you read the dimensions. This sucker is HUGE. It's much deeper than any of my other equipment, including my Sony ES receiver. I had to cut the back out of my A/V cabinet in order for it to fit. Again, no biggie. I'd have bought a new piece of furniture for it.

The time required to set up this unit is nothing when compared with the nightmare of displaying, storing, and handling 350 DVDs. My wife and I spent about three hours inserting the discs and entering the titles, using a keyboard and a spreadsheet of our movies. It took me another hour to divide the DVDs into the four included groups in the Disc Explorer. I divided them into Family, Action, CDM (Comedy Drama Musical) and Other (special features, yoga, documentaries). Seems to work so far for me.

Is the Disc Explorer the greatest thing in the world? Nope, but it works fine if you are too lazy to have a printout of your movies nearby. The best part is that it's not required in order to use the unit, which gives you lots of flexibility. If you are serious about your video system, use DVDlobby and you'll never use Disk Explorer again.

I've heard complaints about the speed of the transport on this unit. Again, expectations are everything. How long does it take to look through the movies in your media cabinet, decide which one you want, open the sometimes bizzarre packaging, load the disc into your player, take the old one out, and put it away?

With this unit, it takes 18 seconds to load and play a disk on the opposite side of the platter. It takes 9 seconds to go from viewing a movie to viewing the Disk Explorer. It takes about 4 minutes to navigate through all 400 disks with the Disk Explorer. It's faster if you don't add pictures to the disc names, and some of the names from the disk manufacturers are just wrong, so you might be better off not letting the unit detect your disks.

The only movie I had a real problem creating a title for was Confessions of a Dangerous Mind since there was only room for "Conf/Dangerous M". I settled for "Dangerous Mind". I know my movies well enough that I don't require an entire paragraph to remind me.

If you are interested in using this unit for SACD, remember that you must have a 5.1 channel input on your receiver. If you have more CDs than DVDs, don't expect this thing to be a good CD player. It isn't, but I've never seen a DVD player that was. Buy a megaCD changer and save yourself the trouble.

I liked this player so much I bought another one. This player plays DVDs that were unplayable on my other players (Panasonic, Sony, RCA). I have never tried the disc explorer because other reviewers complain about it and I lose power occasionally. I use a spreadsheet as my DVD guide so I can sort by Title and have a great custom "TV Guide" including episode names on the TV show DVDs. I bought my first CX985V 6 months ago and I have had no problems so far.