Sony D-NF611

I had this unit for a few weeks now. The unit is excellent and I would recommend it for anybody who wants excellent battery life of over 50 hours and skip protection. Plus the quality that Sony is known for. If you simply play Music CD's or MP3's this is a great piece of equipment especially for long journeys.

Another feature I liked is the ability to remember favorites of up to 10 disks. 5 for ATRAC format. You can actually program it to play only certain music on your CD and it remembers.

I also loved the sound level limiter which protects your ears from damage due to playing loud music for extended periods. This button limits the sound that is sent to your earphones.

The sound is excellent especially with the double bass boost, although I would love to have some more control over the sound like a built in equalizer.

The unit does not seem to recharge my NIMH batteries when plugged into the AC outlet.

Contrary to what the manual says, it does not lose my settings when I remove batteries for a few seconds to replace with newly charged ones.

The included burner software needs a lot of improvement. It will put all the mp3 files you choose to burn and do a playback but after you burn, it says not all the songs you selected were successfully burned. It's supposed to be if you can play them you should be able to convert and burn them, well, that's not what it does and it a big turnoff.

A 650mb CD also takes a long time to convert using the supplied software. Like 4 hours to convert and burn. The biggest problem is this software lacks intelligence. It does not remember what you picked so if you put in a bad disk, not enough space, defective, unerased or for any reason it had to abort, you have to start over from scratch. I tried 4x and was successful 1 time.

The software also does not want to be disturbed for any reason while it's converting, so no surfing, screen savers, anti-viruses or any background tasks.

If you are successful, you have over 20 hours playing time on a 650MB disk. A 700mb disk will give you a little over 24 hours of continuous music. Now that's a lot of music if I can get the software to cooperate all the time.

I now use it to play plain MP3 which gives me a bit over 12 hours playing on a 700mb disc. The other advantage is I can play MP3 on virtually any PC.

The ATRAC 3+ would have been better with over 24 hours of music if not for the bugs. It also cannot be played on your PC. That's another thing to consider.

Another thing I don't know is if there is a limit to the number of times you can copy a certain MP3 file into ATRAC3+ Format.