Good sound, cheap parts, overpriced!

I recently auditioned this shelf system at a local electronics store. Of all the systems they had that would playback MP3 discs, this had by far the best sound quality, and also was the least goofy looking. The others were made up of large, curved pieces of plastic that looked really cheesy, especially combined with the flashy lights and redundant silkscreened text ("AM/FM 5-disc super stereo system blah blah") on the front panel. Perhaps the marketing whizbangs at the large electronics corporations fell their target market likes this sort of crap but for people like me who value substance and quality over "style", this really limits my choices to usually one or 2 aesthetically pleasing systems in any store i go to.

Now on to the unit itself. In this price range i was dissapointed to see a crappy multi-disc transport mechanism and lack of proper speaker jacks. At $299 street price, I'd rather have a one-disc player with a quality transport. This thing should come with standard jacks so users can use better speaker cable. Instead they use the crap spaghetti wire and proprietary speaker connections on the back of the amp. The wire connector on the speakers is a standard spring clip style. The speakers sound ok with this system, but are nothing special. They have a really cheap feel to them, and employ a particularly thin lamininate to give them a high quality finish look when examining from a few feet away. The cabinet joints don't line up properly and after minor use expect the finish to scratch and mar revealing the MDF underneath. nothing against MDF - its an acoustically dead material great for hi-fi speaker cabinets where you don't want the speaker cabinet to color the sound.

My Mp3 disc that i inserted to test played well. It takes longer than expected for the system to read the disc and generate what i assume was a table of contents. Playback however is pretty fast, usually less than 5 seconds from when you press play. Even so, this thing pales in comparison to my truck MP3 player (alpine) which is amazingly fast when playing tracks. Remote control is better than average, and controls almost every function. Why do they even make shelf stereos that play tapes? jeepers, this system would be so much nicer if they offered a version without a tape deck. One nice 'feature' was the tone controls. I was amazed by how many shelf systems no longer have these. They offer variable eq modes (jazz, rock, pop, country, vocal, etc) but dont have a way to tweak it to personal taste. They tend to all sound too 'boomy' to over-emphasis the amount of bass the speakers put out. without a way of adjusting the tone, its hard to get a pleasing sound that doesnt cause listening fatigue after a few minutes of use. Fortunately, this unit has a bass and a treble control but they don't have a large enough sweep and the incremental adjustments from -8 to +8 on each do not offer fine enough resolution for people looking to dial in a perfect sound.

Another thing - the salesperson didn't want to haggle at all on this price. He said "its brand new, just came out" as if thats justification to ream customers wanting a decent system without paying full MSRP. WTF? What a turd. I would have purchased this on the spot had he given me a fair price around $200-240. This system would be a value if it were priced more reasonable around $160-$180. At $299 it is a flat-out ripoff unless you're one of those type of people that have no clue about the true costs of electronics. For $300 i could build a small shuttle PC and at least play solitaire or minesweeper, surf the internet while simultaneously playing mp3s.

bottom line - this is a good system for non-audiophiles who have no firm understanding of the quality / price ratio. If this was priced $100 lower (remove the tape player!) SONY would have a real winner on their hands. 3 out of 5 stars given because at this price point you should expect higher quality connections and construction. The user interface is not bad and the system has a decent amount of power output without typical distortion present at higher volumes in crappier systems. Speakers are more tonally balanced, tighter bass response, and don't sound overly boomy; more suitable for use as a balanced stereo system as opposed to a bowel-quaking, ghetto-blasting noise box.