Good SONY product let down by one thing.
Right, this little player is great for a bedroom, but i have modified mine and ill tell you why in a minute...
The sound quality for its size is decent enough, the cd player is crisp and quiet in running operation an the tape plays crisp and clear, HOWEVER, do not attempt to make any decent recordings with this unit, the tape transport uses a cheap permanent magnet as an erase head, therefore recordings will have a lot of noise, here is the reason why i did my first modification.
I have taken out the black erase head completely, now recordings are pretty good with minimal background noise and much higher music levels, even with chrome tapes which are not designed to be recorded on with boom boxes like this. If you do this mod you will need to buy a tape wiper/degauser, they can be found pretty cheap here on ebay, these simply wipe the tape pure clean better than even any AC bias erase head, ensuring you have a clean slate.
The tape deck has a built in ALC (auto level circuit) which ensures the recordings made never go in to clipping or distort at all, as i say the playback is very good for a player this cheap and doing the mod i mentioned above it will make great recordings too.
The second mod i did was change its speakers, while they do the job i found them a little lacking in bass, so i replaced them with the drivers out of my old logitech speakers which are 3" and full range and rated at 5w each not 2w each like what was in the sony, now it doesnt distort at all even at full volume as it now has a couple of watts headroom, must say it sounds great now.
Obviously i don't expect everyone to do these mods, but if you do you will have a great little machine.
I gave it 4 out of 5 stars simply because of the recording issues, but as i say that can easily be fixed with a pair of long nosed pliers just by opening the tape door,just pull that erase magnet out.
It plays mp3 too which is a bonus, you can shuffle,repeat 1/all,folder and even program, which is something you can only normally do ith audio cds, so its all good, then theres a very handy line in socket, basically you could use this as pc speakers if you wanted, again a welcome addition to a boombox.
There is a very neat sleep timer as well, this can be used with the tape, radio or cd so thats great, the radio i will say is pristine and very clear indeed, also very sensitive, mines picking up station very clear from 50 miles away so it must be a pretty good tuner.
Now the mega bass button, while it is true it boosts bass, it also boosts mids and highs aswell, so it should really be called a "loudness" button.
Im a bit disappointed the lcd screen isnt backlit but still, its clear enough to read, just not in the dark, in fact there are no leds anywhere on the machine, which is very unusual in todays led crazed world. Maybe this is another mod i will do in the future.
Hope you found this review useful, so in a nutshell yes its a good player.Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
