excellent sound
I have owned many of the high end tape and cd players sony has offered
including the most recent ultrathin DNE20 cd player a mini-disk player
and the original silver-blue metal walkman.
The sound quality on the E series player is exceptional qualitatively
exceeding all previous offerings. Listening to a good recording of
say classical piano music you may get the impression that the piano
is in the room and even be able to make out some level of structure
( for instance how far away the piano was during recording ).
The user interface is self explanatory and very adequate for listening
to cd's. If you have a pc with the right windows operating system
and media player it is easy to transfer disks to the player using the
few printed instructions that come in the box.
The actual execution of transfer still has some problems : If your disk
was sold by a distributor not linked to microsoft's ( proprietary? )
database you may find that the cover photo and track titles have been
replaced by the closest thing microsoft can find in its online database.
Although I could type in the right titles myself I couldn't find a
simple way to insert the right cover photo and occasionally ( once or
twice ) cover photos did not get transferred into the player.
On the other hand windows media player is supposed to 'rip' the whole
content of the cd which does appear to get transferred into the player.
This along with the onboard 5-channel equalizer may account for the
difference in sound quality compared with the ipod.
If your main interest is listening to music and have regular access to
a windows pc the E-344 is very well worth the ~$75. Sony also offers to
replace the player after 2 or 3 years for an up-front payment of ~$11
( 2 years ).
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