 May be unavailable now, but may be available again. Keep an eye out for it |
| Review Date: June 19, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Rykre, Carson City, Nevada |
This is just one of the few ATRAC CD players still available for purchase. Get it before it's gone forever.
ATRAC: A technology that has revolutionized the way we listen to music.
Just like the "electric car" was taken away because it was a threat to the oil industry, Sony's ATRAC CD burning program has been discontinued probably because the music industry doesn't want too see an artists entire music repertoire burned onto one CDR.
Are you aware of Sony's SonicStage and the ATRAC CD format available through this car stereo? If you're interested, I'm gonna tell you just how wonderful this CDR burning program really is. It has truly changed the way I listen to music, and the fact that I have put over a thousand of my CD's onto just a small box of CDR's to be played at work on my Sony ZS-XN30 boombox, my Sony D-NE10 Walkman, and my Sony CMT-HPR99XM home stereo in my bedroom, and my Sony MEX-1GP car stereo, similar to this unit here.
Today, we take for granted that we can carry a whole music library with us and listen to it wherever we like. It was Sony that first made this possible with its audio compression technology ATRAC (Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding), which was introduced with the MiniDisc in 1992.
ATRAC uses a variety of advanced technologies to analyze digital sound data, allowing it to reduce the size of that data while maintaining superb sound quality (ATRAC compresses music data to approximately 1/5 the data rate of a CD; ATRAC3 and ATRAC3plus are able to compress music data to approximately 1/10 and 1/20 the data rate of a CD, respectively). This ability to reduce the size of data has enabled recording media to be made smaller and more tracks to be recorded on them, changing the way we listen to music.
First of all, having an ATRAC CDR player for the car is the greatest thing because when you have ATRAC CDR's, you don't have to change CD's and endanger yourself while driving because it will seem like you won't have to change CD's for many weeks. One ATRAC CDR in the car will play practically forever. This one particular Sony car stereo, the MEX-1GP, has a removable faceplate that you can hook up to your computer and load up to one gig of your mp3's directly from the computer just in case you don't have a CD with you, at the time. So with this unit, you can play either, the radio, XM satellite (a program you pay for), the mp3's in the giga panel, or your CD's. What more do you want?
Sony's SonicStage and ATRAC CDR burning program has been discontinued. Like I said, probably for legal reasons because it was just too damn wonderful to allow the world to continue to embrace. The music industry must have felt a whole new threat in new CD burning technology.
All the boomboxes seem to have disappeared or they are selling at either a give-away cost, or at an extremely high price because some people out there know just how valuable they really are. A few years back, Sony created the program called SonicStage. You set this program up in your computer just like you would load Nero, or MusicMatch or any other way that you can burn CDR's on your computer. SonicStage is totally a Sony program where you can put all your CD's and your MP3's into a library and then burn CDR's that will hold up to nearly 33 hours of music on to one CDR, and with excellent sound quality. Actually, sounding far better than just transferring MP3's to a CDR as a data transfer.
Now, all of a sudden, these Sony ATRAC CDR playing stereos (which include boomboxes, walkman's, and car stereo's) are suddenly discontinued and I believe it's a conspiracy to stop a fabulous music sharing option, however, that's not why I love the invention of the ATRAC CD player. Back in 2004, I bought my first ATRAC CD playing boombox (Sony ZS-XN30), not yet knowing what ATRAC even means. But the booklet instructed me to set up SonicStage in my computer so that I can now put lots of music on one CDR. Their advertisement was "Atrac3plus: 490 songs on one CD. Burning software supplied". That caught my interest so I set it up right away into my computer. Now I'm ready to burn some CDR's to play at work. To set up my library in SonicStage, I just started caring over a few mp3's that I had, but then I started to load a bunch of CD's of music that represented a certain theme. I put all my "blues" collection CD's, plus some James Brown, Ray Charles, and other important blues singers into this SonicStage library. After I put all I had into the library, I ended up with about 27 hours of music. All "blues", and about 550 songs. I selected the burning option of 48 kps so that all my songs can be put on to one CDR. I carried all the songs over to the burning option and started the burn. This CDR took about 2 and a half hours to burn. Sure, that's a long time, but it was worth it. When the burn was complete, I put this Blues CDR into my Sony ZS-XN30, and pressed shuffle. After about 25 seconds of the unit needing to read the CD, song number 312 started to play. It even displayed the name of the song and the artist on the LCD screen. After that, it jumped to like song number 185, and that song played. It was suddenly so wonderful to hear songs shuffling without hearing CD changing noise and having a long delay like a multiple CD player (shuffling whole CD's). Instantly, this new CDR that I just made became the most valuable CD that I owned because it had so much on it. So, that Monday, I took my Sony boombox and my "blues" ATRAC CDR to work. Set it up, and hit shuffle. It played all day long. When I turned it off at my lunch hour, I came back, turned it back on, and it continued to play where it left off. That was great because this allows me to play the whole CD without hearing even one song repeated, all week long. By mid Thursday that week, the last song on the CDR finally played then the CD stopped. I've come to realize that Sony's SonicStage and the ATRAC CDR burning program is the greatest invention for storing music on a single hard copy unit. This is better than just floating all your mp3's in an inferior sound carrying unit like an ipod. How much music can your ipod hold? 60, 80, 100 hours? With Sony's ATRAC CD burning program, you can make 33 hour CDR's, and as many of them as you want. And all my ATRAC CDR's can be played on any Sony ATRAC CD player. I now have about 100 ATRAC CDR's and no reason to play any of my other CD's. I boxed them all up and put them away, never really needing them ever again. That is, not until the day I lose my last Sony ATRAC CDR player.
So this is why I'm buying up as many Sony ATRAC CD players that I can so I can be set for life to always be able to play my ATRAC CDR's. It seems now (as of June 2008), Sony's car stereos that play ATRAC CD's are still only available through independent sources. You can't get them directly from Sony anymore. These units are discontinued. I don't know if you can set up SonicStage in your computer anymore as a new user. Call or write to Sony and learn more about ATRAC and see if we can bring this back, because this truly is the greatest breakthrough in storing and preserving all our favorite music. I don't think it got promoted very well. I'm loving my Sony MEX-1GP, and I've got three more Sony CDX-GT710 (W) car stereos in my closet for my cars I'll have in the future. I can't let ATRAC go. This is just as wonderful as the "Electric Car" was before Bush and the ever-threatened oil industry took that technology away.
Here are other Sony ATRAC playing car stereos still available through independent sources selling though Amazon. In many cases, selling far cheaper than their original intended price because Sony has currently discontinued supporting and pushing its SonicStage (Atrac CD) technology. You'll have to type these in individually.
CDX-GT500, CDW-GT420U, CDX-GT510, CDX-GT81U, CDX-GT610UI, CDX-RA700, CDX-GT710, CDX-F605X, CDXF5510, CDX-GT620UESRP, R5515X, MEX-1GP, SNY-CDXR5715X.
These are the ones I've discovered through Amazon. If you have any questions, call Sony at:
1-800-222-7669 (Use 1-866-456-7669 for Digital Music Players)Hours: Mon-Fri 8:00AM-12:00AM (Midnight) / Sat-Sun 9:00AM-8:00PM EST
1-866-962-7669
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terrible shipping time
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| Review Date: May 29, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Peter Cron Jr., scr,pa |
| i orderd this sterio 1 dAY SHIPPING ,AND WAITED A 3 WEEKS WITHOUT RECEIVING THE PRODUCT THE SELLER DID NOT STICK BY HIS WORD THERFOR I HAD TO CANCEL THE RADIO ORDER I GIVE THIS SELLER A TERRIBLE REPORT. |
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