Sony CDP-CX455 400-Disc CD Changer

I like many was attracted to this product for the main reason of managing my growing CD collection. My wife and I had about 500 CD's at the time, and I was sick of CD jewel cases all over our family room. When comparing the Sony 300 changer to the 400 changer, I decided to go with the CDP-CX455 mainly because of its ability to categorize up to 200 different artist's CD's - including the Top 8 Artist direct access buttons.

I've had my unit for about a year now, and I can honestly say I am still very happy I purchased this unit. It's done all it's advertised to do, and I've yet to have any issues with it's functionality. I only recently heard that the MP3's will not output through the digital output, but I'm not playing MP3's through my home stereo anyways, so although I'm surprised, I could care less about that.

The process of loading 400 CD's into the changer in one sitting was very time consuming. To my surprise/disappointment about 4 of 400 of the CD's I loaded into the machine had CD TEXT encoding!!! No fault of the Changer, but I meticulously entered all 396 of the other CD's album names and about 160 Artist Names using the PS2 Keyboard input on the front of the unit. One quirk to the entry as you'll see in other reviews is the CAP's default on, you need to [shift] to enter lower case, but again.... no big deal in my opinion.

I've never used the analog output on the unit, only the optical digital connection. I have a 7.1 Paradigm Active Reference system, a Servo 15 sub all running on an Anthem AVM20 and I still think the quality of audio is great.

I like some of the other reviewer's of this product am surprised how some users can be so disappointed in the unit when it's very affordable in comparison to many pieces of audio equipment. It's done everything I expected it to do. Some features other's have complained the unit did not have, would be great features to have, but for $500 Canadian I doubt it would happen.

**update July 05**
I bought a second unit. Although I don't have 800 CD's yet, I do have over 500 so an additional machine was on my wishlist for some time. I'd hoped that if I waited awhile the price would come down as electronics often do, however they didn't (at least not yet).

Contrary to the salesperson at Sony's store's belief the Canadian version of this machine comes with the 1/8" mono connector for controlling the machines together. In addition to the control cable, the audio output of the second machine patches into the input of the first machine. The machines are addressed in their set up menu as primary and secondary. When using two machines together the optical output is not functional, this is a disappointment in my opinion. The functionality of using two machines together works great, but skip using the mega control button, I'm not even sure why it's included it actually limits the inter-machine functionality, without it on, the two machines work together fine. When one machine is playing the other automatically pauses and vise-versa.

Another little tidbit I figured out when programming my universal Harmony 880 remote control. When one machine is set to machine two, it's remote frequency is different to the first machines. It took me a while to figure that out so I thought I'd mention it for the benefit of any other potential two machine owners!