The overall sound quality is good in all modes tested by me (audio-CD, MP3-CD, FM-radio).There are some problems, however:
1. The ESP (electronic skip protection) system is bad. The player buffers up to 40 seconds of audio CD data and up to 120 seconds of MP3 (at 128kbps). However, it behaves very badly. While walking (just normal fast walk) with an audio-CD (the ESP is ON) I sometimes (too often :-) get sound "breaks" (this has never happened to me with my old philips player which also has about 40 seconds buffer). The situation gets even worse when using a MP3-CD. The following happens (almost always !) - in the beginning it reads the MP3 data until the buffer is full. Then it switches the cd-spin-engine off and plays the music purely from the buffer. About 10 seconds before the end of the buffer, it switches the cd-spin-engine on and tries to read consecutive MP3 data. If you are walking, it usually happens that it fails at this moment, and the sound "breaks" for many, many seconds (so, let's say ... every 100 seconds of "music" you get 20 seconds of "break" ... is this what you expect from a player ?).
2. In FM-radio mode it is not possible to use EQ function at all (in CD-related-modes there are 6 different settings available: Flat, Rock, Jazz, Super.Bass, Classic, Power.Sound).
3. In FM-radio mode one can preset up to 15 stations (I would need at least 20 in my area :-)
4. The remote control does not have a LCD display (the main unit has one, but not illuminated).
Note that there is no firmware upgrade possible for this model, so all these problems will not go ...
It's up to you ... if you can live with them ...
