Sony CDP-CE500 5-Disc CD Changer (Black)

I purchased this about a month ago so I can't vouch for its longevity, and I have yet to copy a cd to a memory stick so I can't vouch for that feature either, but in every other way this cd changer has been a revelation. I bought this to replace a fairly high end Teac deck that was about 20 years old and had finally died. It took no more than 2 minutes from the time I took this out of the box before I was playing my first cd. There is practically no setup involved; just connect the RCA plugs and plug it into a wall outlet. To my amazement, this device was able to plumb sound details that my much more expensive Teac couldn't. This Sony player works quickly, efficiently, fairly quietly for a changer, and produces superb sound. At the price I paid at Amazon it seems like an incredible bargain. Some reviewers have stated that this machine did not hold up well over time. If that should prove to be the case, I'll update this review. But for now, I couldn't be more pleased.

Been looking for a good CD player since I have an older stereo that does not have one. Looked at many units on Amazon as well as other stores. Saw this unit and read the specs, and the price and decided this one should fill my needs. Price great, very quick delivery, good name unit. Hook up was fantasticaly easy, instructions on operation was easy to understand, and the sound is great, has worked flawlessly ever since installation. It's great not to have to keep changeing cds one at a time, can play a whole evening on one loading. If you are looking for a really great player at a great price, I don't think you can go wrong choosing this unit. Amazon is a super place to do business - not only do they have great selections on a variety of products but they have quick delivery along with prices lower than what is found locally - Satisfied 110% with the equipment, Amazon and all.

Overall, this seems to be a pretty good CD changer. I replaced several Onkyo and Denon units that sounded great (perhaps a bit better than the Sony) but had fairly poor reliability. So far, the Sony has been rock solid reliable. I would easily give it five stars if not for two or three drawbacks. pros: - continues on to disc 1 after disc 5 finishes, unlike some players - fast, quiet tray mechanism - clean sound (but maybe not as warm as other brands) - good button layout on player and remote; very easy to operate cons: - auto-standby (after 30 min) can't be defeated - have to power it on separate from amp (makes switched power supply pointless) - sometimes stops after various discs for no apparent reason The auto-standby is without a doubt the most annoying "feature" I've seen on any piece of home electronics. The whole point of a CD changer is to keep it playing throughout the day. Any time you leave the room for a few minutes and come back to press Play only to have it be powered down, it makes you question the sanity of the Sony engineers. At least it remembers the disc, unlike full power disconnect, and you can press Play instantly instead of waiting for it to be ready, plus it's a quick power-up, so it doesn't take long to get it back up and playing where it left off. As a result, I find myself turning it off regularly just to avoid the surprise of it not being ready to resume play when I return. The inability to run it in switched power supply mode is quite ironic. I always run the CD changer powered by the amp, so turning the amp on turns them both on. You can't do that with this player. Turning the amp on would just bring it into stand-by mode, so you still have to power both on separately. So, Sony clearly did not intend for it to be run in a system full of separates (how else would you use a CD changer??), in which case why have the auto-standby feature in the first place? Power saving only makes sense if you can power everything down. Maybe it was designed for a system full of Sony components that all behave similarly, but it's a terrible design idea for anything else. About 10% of the time, it stops playback after a disc is done. It doesn't matter which disc tray or what type of disc it is (original or recorded compilation). I don't know if this is a glitch or a feature to keep it from playing indefinitely if unattended. When it happens, it's always sitting on the next disc ready to resume play, so I'm guessing the latter. [UPDATE: After a few weeks, this problem went away altogether, completely on its own. I never changed discs or even opened the tray. Yes, I leave the same discs in the rotation for weeks, sometimes months, on end!] All in all, the drawbacks are annoyances more than quality issues, so I only deducted ones star. This changer has a lot of potential if a few little tweaks are made.

I received this CD Changer yesterday and have put it through enough tests to give a 100% recommendation for acquiring this particular model! I managed to get it working as soon as I had taken it out of the box and hooked it to my receiver. Normally I am a bit of a klutz when it comes to setting up hi-fi equipment, but in this case I have had experience with several previous generations of Sony CD changers and I had looked at the manual online before I even ordered the unit! So in no time at all I played a commercial CD on it, a CD-R and the flash drive as well! So far the player is producing beautiful sounds thru the optical digital connection to my receiver. I highly recommend using the optical digital connection and if your particular receiver does NOT have one, I would strongly recommend getting a new receiver with a digital optical input. I am NOT getting into the argument over digital vs. analog sound, but surely most of you would agree that a digital optical connection sounds better (sounds brighter to my ears!) than the standard patch cords(left and right audio cables) when playing CDS. Obviously the main attraction of this unit is the ability to play off of a computer flash drive. As I am typing this I am listening to a flash drive which I inserted into the front of the player and it contains over 1,000 tracks! That is easily 50 hours of pure musical pleasure and believe it or not I can set it to repeat indefintely! Obviously for a rainy or snowy afternoon, or maybe even a lazy morning I can just sit in my easy chair and listen to my favorite artists or bands! And yes the CD player does display the song title, artist and album title with a few exceptions. At the very least it seems to always produce the song title and sometimes the artist may not be identified. But all in all, the ability to play off of a flash drive seems to be a revolutionary step forward in enjoying a CD player! I also like the fact that I am NOT tethered to a computer in order to play my music. I love computers but there are times I just want to listen to music and read(newspaper, book, magazine,or even a Kindle!) or have a pleasant conversation with my wife. I like listening to music a great deal of the time and even if it is just background music it keeps me in a pleasant mood! One more thing I should add is that previous Sony CD Changers did NOT have the ability to play MP3 files thru the optical audio connection. This was a bit frustrating for me but now I can listen to CDs, CD-Rs & MP3s thru the optical digital connection! My cup runneth over! The changer also has the exchange function(unload and reload up to 4 CDs while still playing a CD) which is great and the remote seems to work very well indeed! About the only thing missing is a headphone jack, but one could always attach the headphone to the receiver of course. Honestly this is the very best CD player that I have ever owned, and for the ridiculous low retail price is a no-brainer as far as deciding to purchase one! And finally please note that you have the ability to delete tracks off of your flash drive while it is connected to the player and in my opinion that is wonderful! You can banish any and all offending tunes if you so desire! Sony used to have a similar function on their CD megachangers a few years ago and then did away with that particular function, but now in a sense it is back!! There are other functions obviously like programming tunes,shuffle play,etc. I would strongly recommend this unit to anyone. My only problem is what am I going to do with my old CD changers?!? P.S. I have only listened to my unit for a few hours but hopefully it will keep going strong and I will enjoy it for many years to come! Kudos to Sony for designing this model and at a reasonable price! Just wish that the Amazon deliveryman could find my doorbell. It would be most appreciated!!! Richard Pearson

I chose this carousel player to replace another Sony carousel CD player which I had owned for years, which performed very well, and which eventually suffered from a display malfunction. The competitive price of this Sony CDP-CE500 player, the player's ability to play MP3's from a flash drive, plus otherwise good experiences with Sony prompted my purchase of this item. Although others have reported occasional problems with playing CD's, my unit thus far has performed that task well, albeit regrettably noisily when it changes from one disk to another. One hopes this is not the forerunner of some mechanical problem for the future, but time will tell. As some others have reported, playing MP3s (the only type I have tried so far) from a USB flash drive sometimes seems to be a challenge for this player. It will occasionally stop playing a song midstream and exhibit the phrase "data error" on the display, catch its breath, and then move onto another song. In one instance it will play a given song throughout without error, but on another occasion, the same song gives the player this hiccup. The frequency of this "data error" problem seems unpredictable from one session to another of playing through tunes on the USB drive. I have tried the remedies Sony lists on p. 22 of the manual that comes with this player, including using MP3s (mostly purchased and downloaded from Amazon.com) increased to the highest bitrate my audio editing software will produce (294kbps). That doesn't seem to solve the problem, although raising the bitrate did seem to lessen the frequency of the data error problem, which still pops up at unexpected and frustrating times. So far, I have used two different flash drives from Kingston (DataTraveler) and one Viking. The Kingston drives seem to perform marginally better, but still there are hiccups. The same MP3's, on the same USB drives, play flawlessly on other USB MP3 players I have (on my computer, in a freestanding unit, and in my car).

What can I say. It's quiet, reliable and well built. It hasn't had a skipped track or a hiccup from a low grade disk yet. I like the USB port on the front. As it turns out, that's the only digital input to my new system. I thought the receiver I would eventually get would have all that. I ended up buying a Sherwood RD-7405HDR that doesn't have a USB input so this one will come in handy. One disappointment would be the slow way it processes .mp3 disks. With ordinary music CD's there's no wait but .mp3 data disks have a large directory that must be found and read into memory before the music is available to play. I'm so used to the 57X CD ROM drives that I use in desktop computer systems that going back to the 1X rate stereo components use is a real drag. They play fine, the sound is great, just expect to do a little waiting the first time the unit reads a disk before it starts to play. The file and folder navagation is very easy and straightforward... once it loads:-)

Our 20+ year old cd changer had started skipping a lot and we knew it was just a matter of time. I'd been looking for a couple of years for a new one and didn't need a lot of bells and whistles, but everything seemed overpriced, too large, or some way or another unsuitable. This year, I noticed most similar items had been put into circulation around 10 years ago. Therefore, I was very pleased to find this new player with flash drive capability, as well as optical capability, which was just released in early 2011. I was a little fearful, as a couple of people mentioned poor sound. However, I have found the sound to be excellent, and have even heard some deeper tones I've never heard from my Bose wave system before. I find the sound clear and full, and probably better than the quality changer it replaced. We've had this for two weeks and have really enjoyed using the flash drive as it was very simple to transfer songs to it from my iTunes folder on my computer. This keeps the song titles intact, even though it didn't transfer artist names. I was simply happy I could get the titles without messing around with separate software. I can keep adding to it at my leisure. When my CD's run out, I can easily switch to the flash drive for more hours of music. The manual makes it sound difficult to search for and play specific tracks on the flash drive, but it really isn't. You do, however, have to search through each track one by one with the flash player to find a particular track, but of course with the CD player you can go directly to a specific track on any CD at any time. I was really happy I could still use my old RCA connectors and not have to be a tech genius in order to install it. Just switch out the old RCA connectors, hook up the power and voila! It's also nice to know that if I upgrade my amplifier system to newer technology, this Sony has optical capabilities, so hopefully I wouldn't have to replace my entire system. I find programming tracks too time consuming to bother with, but it is nice to have this feature available. Of course, one can simply use the shuffle function to quickly rearrange playback, and that's something I probably will use. All in all, great player at any price, easy to use, and fills my home with beautiful music. Arrived in four business days, even with Super Saver shipping. Gotta love that Amazon!

My RCA 5 CD changer finally died last weekend after 10 great years and thousands of hours of play. The moment it quit I said a little prayer, sent it off to CD changer heaven, and jumped on Amazon to look for a replacement. I kept coming back to this model, but some of the negative reviews made me leery. I will say though, I've ordered a great deal from Amazon over the years and 98% of what I've received has been perfect despite other's negative reviews/experiences. I was hopeful that this purchase would be good as well, and it absolutely is... It arrived last Thursday (delayed one day due to the massive ice storm that swept the U.S.). I connected it to my receiver over the weekend, popped in 5 CDs from one of my playlists, and not a skip, jump, or quirk of any kind. The sound is amazing, and I'm already putting it through it's paces. The only reason I'm giving 4 stars instead of 5 (I would've given 4.5 if it were an option) is the shuffle feature. It shuffles very thoroughly and does not stay on one CD... However, it shuffles the CDs, and when it finds the CD it wants, it then shuffles the songs on that CD, which can cause a lengthy delay between songs. But even that isn't consistent; sometimes it's only a couple seconds between, other times it can be as long as 10 seconds which is a lengthy pause between songs. I am noticing however, that the more I've played CD's, the faster, more normal time is occurring between song changes, which is great. I am very pleased with this player and recommend it for the price. Hopefully I'll get the same longevity as I did from my beloved RCA player... Update February 22nd: FANTASTIC CD Player! I've upgraded to 5 stars. My initial complaint was due to the shuffle times until it dawned on me that each of my CD's had an average of 16 songs each as they were from my playlists; some of the CDs have even more songs, depending on their length. That's why there was a delay between songs; it had so many to choose from! I was panicked at one point when I heard several songs skipping, but luckily it was the CD itself, and when I cleaned it off, no more skips of any kind. This is an amazing CD player with a crisp, clear sound. I am extremely happy I made this purchase.

This player is the successor to the Sony CDP-CE375. I owned the 375 for seven years until the carousel started to slip. It probably just needed the belts replaced but I figured that it was about time to buy something new. The 500 operates in the same manner that the 375 did. The 375 had a turn dial that was very convenient when you wanted to switch to a different track. The 500 does not have a turn dial. However, the 500 has the extra feature of USB stick playability. In regards to sound comparison, the 500 is louder than the 375 when there is a disc change. The 500 controller is more user friendly. All in all a good player and definitely worth the price.

This is a great component for people like me who have a major collection of CD's, and want them to sound the best by hooking the player into a good sound system. This really does the job, it's very user-friendly, and all its features from easy loading, to random play, to being able to have 5 hours of continuous quality music, plus to be able to directly file the music onto your computer is all one can really ask for!

It was not suitable for what I wanted I wanted a complete unit by its self not needing to be connected to another one

All the right features and more, like MP3 compatibility and CD to USB key / Toutes les bonnes fonctionnalités et plus comme compatibilité MP3 et CD à Clé USB

I am satisfied by this product. This is exactly what I was expecting... simple and friendly to use, no bells and whistles.