Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Sony Mega Changer Review

I just brought home a sony cpd-cx455. (The 400 disk mega changer.) And while I haven't had much time with it, I am fairly impressed so far. I think this was discussed at some point in the past on these forums but I'm not quite sure. First, I have it set up using the digital optical output, and I think it sounds as good as any other cd player I have used. Second, to anyone who might own one of these and be interested, I don't intend to ever add a cd title. No, I'm not crazy, and no all my cds don't have cd text. But I do have a cd burner with cd text writing ability. So all I need to do is make a copy of my cd (downloading the title and track info from CDDB automatically) and the resulting copy has the cd text. If people are interested I will update this in a few days when I've had more time to play around with it.

Please do! I've been thinking about a mega-changer for a long time. It seems some people love them, and some hate them with a vengeance. Have you had a megachanger before?

I haven't. I basically had a slew of cds in books and I found that I only listened to them in my car. When I got the axioms, that had to change. But I was playing cds through my (relatively ancient) DVD player. Half of my cds it didn't like for some reason or another and thus wouldn't play. Needless to say that's not really acceptable. So I looked into mega changers, mostly because I like the idea of having all my cds one click away and never having to deal with finding jewel cases and such. There's tons of good reviews of them, which made me optimistic, and I have a friend with one of the old 300 disk sony's that he's had for over 4 years with no problems. From the bad reviews it looked like the thing everyone hates about a mega changer is that sometimes it forgets all your information. But using my method of putting cd text on every cd in the changer (while forcing me to make backups of all my disks so I can still have them in my car) I should never encounter that problem. Worst case I have to play each cd in the changer for about 5 seconds so it reloads the TOC.

Sounds good to me. Let us know how it works out!

I thought about that same changer for a long time, but I ultimately went with one of the these:
http://www.linksys.com/products/product.asp?grid=33&scid=38&prid=554

Works great, and everything is displayed on the TV screen, but my guess is the sound quality, although very good, is not as good as the MegaChanger. On the other hand, song and disc changes have no lag time.

I looked into those sort of things actually, but didn't want to compromise the quality by storing in mp3. They are very cool, especially is you've got a lot of mp3s. The sony should play mp3 encoded cds as well, although I haven't tested that feature out yet.

Very good, Andrew. I and several other board members use megachangers. I'd never again give up the convenience for a single-disc player.

Hi ringmir,

I love my CX-355, the 300-disc changer, so much that I may get a second one to hold the remainder of my CD collection. Indeed, it does sound as good as a far more expensive single-disc Marantz I've had for some years.

For me, the "surprise" element of the mega-changer is the source of its appeal. I have very eclectic musical tastes, so I enjoy having an English choral work followed by Bessie Smith or Ricky Skaggs and the Country Gentlemen. I chose the 355 over the 455 because the display was a bit easier to read from across the room.

I forced myself to sit down one weekend with the keyboard and key in the names of all the discs, except for the few that had CD text. Occasionally, I'll push "Memo Scan" and the titles of everything scroll by. It's nice to scan them and hit the title you are in the mood for. . .

Apparently, with a second mega-changer, you can cross-link them so they will do cross-fades from one to the other. I'm not sure a cross-fade from Bach to Ricky Skaggs and bluegrass would work, but who knows...?

Regards,

So far I am very happy with it. It does cost me ~30 cents to backup each of my cds, and it takes a bit of time. But I think the fact that all my cds then have the cd text info on them will more than make up for it. This way I get all the track names too. Apparently you can't play mp3s through the optical output, which is a bit annoying but I don't think I'm going to be using it for mp3s much anyway. (When I do it's not all that hard to switch the thing over to the analog out.) I have read about hooking up two of them so that there's no delay in playback, but I don't have 400 cds yet, let alone more I hope to have some time this evening to play around with its various functions. So far though, I would definately recommend it.

Much like Alan, I've got some pretty varied tastes and I too enjoy hearing a weird mix of tracks. I don't have a mega-changer, but I have about 1,000+ mp3's at work. I'll just open up winamp and have it play from that 1,000 song pool at random. It's great.