Portable CD Player Review

Evaluating reviews of portable CD players

The portable CD player field is dominated by Sony, audiophiles at CNet and Dimension Music say, mostly due to its outstanding "G-Protection," which virtually eliminates skips. Since experts spend the majority of their time reviewing MP3 players and iPods these days, we found no current coverage in professional magazines and websites. Consumer Reports' last comprehensive review of portable CD players dates from 2002, and all the tested models have been discontinued. We found the most reliable reviews to be those posted by owners at Amazon.com and BestBuy.com.

Portable CD players have almost completely lost market share to MP3 players. However, for those who have a collection of CDs and no desire to spend hours converting them to digital format on a computer, portable CD players are still available. The majority of devices today are hybrid players -- that is, models that play both standard CDs and CD-R/CD-RW discs encoded with MP3 files. While many portable CD players do well in reviews, the very basic Coby CX-CD329 (*Est. $15) gets low ratings from consumers. At Amazon, owners write that it's flimsy, feels cheap and is poorly constructed. Other common complaints are that the batteries don't last very long and the anti-skip protection doesn't work.

We also found a few mixed to poor reviews for the Phillips AX2411 (*Est. $30). Some owners report that CDs skipped or the remote didn't work, while others say the volume reset feature is annoying. While many Philips CD players are still available, Philips is no longer manufacturing them. Panasonic is another electronics manufacturer that's chosen to discontinue its lineup of portable CD players.