Review: Sony CD burner for music lovers

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By Melissa J. Perenson

(IDG) -- Look out, Sony Walkman. There's a new kid on the block that promises to reduce the number of gadgets people travel with. An audio-CD player is de rigueur for passing the time during lengthy flight delays. But increasingly, I want the convenience offered by a portable CD-RW drive -- whether it's for emergency backups or for passing data on to a colleague.

Sony's latest device does both: It's a CD-RW drive that doubles as an audio-CD player. The $399 Digital Relay -- available from Sony later in March and in retail stores in April -- records to CD-Recordable and CD-Rewritable at 4X, and reads CDs at 24X. And if that's not enough to get your attention, the Digital Relay can also play CDs jammed with MP3 files. Though the Digital Relay is priced at about $100 more than most portable USB CD-RW drives, its cost is less than the combined prices of a CD-RW drive and an MP3-capable CD player.

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Housed in a sturdy, silver case, the Digital Relay is longer and slightly boxier than the typical stand-alone CD player--and yet, at just 5 by 1 by 7.5 inches, it's sleeker than most competing portable CD-RW drives (from companies like Iomega and MicroSolutions) that connect to a PC through a USB port.

The Digital Relay's added length is necessary to accommodate its supplied lithium ion battery; a spare battery costs about $50 (it's the same kind used by most Sony camcorders and Mavica cameras). Sony says the battery will last for two and a half hours of playing or recording CDs and for up to 2 hours of playing MP3 CDs; it can even burn 80-minute, 700MB discs. Cool feature: The battery's charging progress is displayed on the LCD.

Smooth Digital Goodness

Connecting the drive to my PC and installing the software went smoothly. The drivers come on a floppy disk, which is handy if your laptop doesn't have a CD-ROM drive. Included on a separate CD is the user-friendly Sony CD Extreme (for creating audio, data, and video CD-Rs) and Prassi's AbCD software (for packet-writing data to CD-RW). As an added bonus, the CD also has Macintosh CD-mastering software, as well as Mac and PC versions of Dantz's data-backup package, Retrospect Express.

While having CD-RW anywhere, anytime is undeniably handy, the Digital Relay's real appeal is the fact that you can use it untethered as an MP3 CD player. I used the drive to burn data discs as well as MP3 discs -- with great results. My only complaint: The bottom of the unit gets warm after extended periods of CD play.

The durable shock-proof mechanism did an admirable job of preventing the drive from missing a beat as I bounced around the gym listening to an MP3 CD, and the sound quality was nothing short of excellent when I used the supplied earphones equipped with an inline LCD remote control that sits between the unit and the headphones. You control most CD playback operations by using this narrow remote, which has buttons for play, stop, pause, mode, display, forward, and back. Displayed on the one-line LCD screen is the track title and the artist of the MP3 or CD you're listening to. While the remote is handy, there is a catch: Since there are no buttons on the unit itself, there's no way to operate Digital Relay's playback controls if something untoward happens to the remote.

If you're in the market for a USB CD-RW drive, the Digital Relay is a superb choice. While it's more expensive than other portable CD-RW drives, its versatility makes it worth the premium.

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Sony's Digital Relay

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