Sony CD MegaStorage 400 Disc Changer

De-Evolution Dooms the Sony CX455

Strengths: Holds 400 discs. Good playback quality. Displays embedded CD Text info.

Weaknesses: Scrambles title, artist name and CD slot links with the result being a totally worthless and error-prone display of these values. Slow to power-up. Slow to read table of contents for each disc.

Summary: Sony had a good thing going with their CX400 MegaChanger. Unfortunately they tinkered with it and the end result is a nightmare. Gone are the eight music category buttons you could use to quickly categorize each music CD. Gone is the speed of the earlier units: this unit takes almost 30 seconds to change from one CD to another and about that long to initialize after it is powered-up. Gone is the ability to change from continuous to shuffle or one disc play to all disc play modes while the CD unit is playing; you must now first stop the unit before changing modes. Worst of all, this unit scrambles the link between artist names and their associated CD's. Sony is aware of this problem but cannot fix it and "officially" denies it exists. We should know: we've been thru four of these units trying to find one that works as advertised. None of them do.

Yes, this unit will play MP3 encoded CD's. Big deal. MP3's on a CD player are pretty-much worthless since you've no way to control the music selection within a given disc (no artist or album select options within the disc). Also, you cannot view the track title for the disc on this CD player until the track cues-up.

Save your money. Reject the Sony CX455. Better still, buy the Sony CX335, a 300 disc capacity unit of similar design but without MP3 capability and without all of the software bugs present in the CX455 units. I should know, I own a total of six of these devices from the 200 disc unit (my first purchase) up to the 400 disc unit (2 of those). The three 300 disc units work much better than the 400 disc CX455.

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The software that controls the changer mechanism i ...

Strengths: One place to store ALL of my music. It's a Sony...?

Weaknesses: Very poor software in the control system. Not nearly enough memory for holding text info. Relatively slow disc access. Small text display.

Summary: The software that controls the changer mechanism is not very bright, so the control system really gets a work out searching, loading, unloading, etc. - probably shortening its expected lifetime.

Also the software, and trivial amount of memory for text information means the user spends an inordinate (insane) amount of time maintaining and updating info that any decent indexing system should handle. Also the display is inexcusably short - chops off artists names, forget about album or song titles.

Excuse my sarcasm above, but I'm not a big Sony advocate. I think they charge too much for too little, simply based on their alleged "reputation" for quality. In this particular case, however, they had the most storage for the least money. But additional features are even more limited here than on most Sony equipment. Get what you pay for I guess...

It boils down to two issues: Mass Storage, and Library Management.

With the ability to pack MP3s in, as a single storage facility to hold all your music and give you easy access, it's great. I have recently listened to albums that I had almost forgotten about, and that is wonderful.

But as a music library management system, this thing is pathetic.

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Even though this changer does play MP3's, CDR's an ...

Strengths: plays MP3's and CDR's

Weaknesses: many

Summary: Even though this changer does play MP3's, CDR's and reads CD text - it has many faults;

First of all you can only input CD text titles to the changer using a keyboard or jog dial - you cannot input individual song titles - so I burned all my CD's using CD text so I could see all the song titles to the songs while they were playing - if you do this then the Changer will not retain 100% of your CD text “TITLES” in memory as the manual says it will (it’s more like 75%) - so if your scrolling thru your CD's trying to find a particular CD title, you will come across many that will just say "disc #43" or whatever disc it is that you are on. The Changer will then do a “TOC (table of contents) reading” and read the CD text from the disc and input the info back into memory - but at the same time it will also “kick” another disc text info out of memory - VERY FRUSTRATING!

The Manual says it will read “artist” text off a text CD - which it does to a certain extent as it will show it on the text display, but you still have to input this info manually for each disc if you want to compose a “top artists list” for playback.

Also the Random Mode is not so random. There are many times it will repeat the same song or many off the same CD and never play other CD's. I have even had the Changer just plain "stop" after awhile of random mode play.

The display that shows the title/song text needs to be larger as well.

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Overall I like my changer, once it is setup I will ...

Strengths: Lots of storage, good sound quality

Weaknesses: software is clumsy, ditto what other reviewers stated.

Summary: Overall I like my changer, once it is setup I will be satisfied. Looking now for a burning software that will create and burn CD text. If that is not available expectations should be to enter only artist info as the only practical use for the catalog

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