I wanted a basic but quality CD player for a small equipment rack in my home music studio. Integrating music stored on USB devices was essential. The Yamaha CD-S300 is well made and performs as expected with one exception: you cannot play WAV files stored on USB devices. The manual explains this, but who reads the manual before purchase? Some of us prefer the higher fidelity of WAV. So aside from having to convert my WAV files to MP3/320/VBR or AAC format, this is a good player for the price. The remote control enables extra features and is easy to use. Navigation of folders and files on USB is simple; you see the name of the folder/file on the digital display. I like everything about the CD-S300 except for the lack of WAV on USB. If that doesn't matter to you, the device gets five stars.
TyI applaud the excellent service from Pro Acoustics. Our Yamaha CD player arrived nicely packed, in perfect condition, and several days early to boot! We will certainly purchase products from this fine company again.
It has been a pleasure to write this glowing review. Thanks, Pro Acoustics! (P.S. The Yamaha CD player is even better than we had hoped for, and no pun intended, the acoustics provided by the player's DAC lend to a very life-like performance level throughout our entire house).Plays nicely and never fails, except at every power-on... Then, it totally ignores all the buttons until it loads a CD -orchecks to see if a CD is loaded. This takes the unit considerable time (as it does with most brands). If you push the button to open the drawer when (or before or at the same time as) you power it on, it ignores the button, and goes through it's thing trying to load the CD. So if you turn it on intending to insert a CD, it won't let you do that until it fusses and figures out that there is already one loaded or actually loads any CD you left inside. The microcode should first interrogate the "Open Drawer" button at power-on and perform that function if the button is pressed. It's quite annoying.
WORK AROUND: Before turning it off, open the drawer and then power it down with the drawer open. The problem with this solution is that it allows dirt to enter into the unit. A partial solution to this problem is to (after it is powered down with the drawer open) gently *Almost* close the drawer -until it's about 1/4" or a little less "open". Just leave it open enough so that you can grab it with your fingers BEFORE you power it on again and insert any New CD you want to play. That way when the unit powers up it will have a CD inside that you intend to play -which is what you want the thing to do anyway. It's just a real bother to have to do this every time you power it off, and I worry that it's still not completely sealed, but that's the only fix I've been able to find. [Unless Yamaha wants to send me a microcode upgrade... ]
MY CONCERN: The engineer(s) who did this design were obviously not the swiftest guys on the block. I worry what else they did wrong. Under this heading I have found that if you load any music that isn't a standard CD -i.e. a flash drive or MP3 player or a CD with MP3 [or WAV] files -the microcode only knows how to read a "flat" directory structure. In other words, if you have something with multiple directory levels -with folders and subfolders, if you will -this CD player will not handle 'em. It's not a huge limitation -you can still play a lot of stuff -but if you tried to organize your music with multiple levels of directories/folders (as is frequently the case on an MP3 player) you are out of luck. The thing will only recognize the first directory level it encounters. One would expect more from something that costs a few hundred dollars.
BTW, my old unit did the power-on function quite nicely, thank you.
MISSING FEATURE: This is not a bug, but it IS another function that got left out of the microcode load: How about the capability to display "Remaining Time" on a CD? I can understand why this might be difficult for non-CD (non-.WAV file) media, but why not include this at Least for the Standard CD case (if it's too difficult to make work for all cases). This used to work just dandy on my old Yamaha CD player. Unfortunately that unit finally ceased to be able to synch to and read CDs, so it had to be replaced (after a number of years). I paid good money for a replacement, which sadly was shipped without a design check or review by the team that was supposed to do this. Sigh.
Yes, I'm an engineer... did super computers... and they worked.Great CD player. USB+iPod is plus plus. It plays whatever iPod can play and bypass iPod's DAC. That means it can play all the Apple lossless format includes ALAC and AIFF. I compared the integrated DAC with Arcam rDAC. The integrated DAC does a very close job to rDAC.
It's also one of the best responsible retailer I have encountered. They called me when they received my order from Amazon and told me I might need to wait few days. And they called me again on the date I received this item to make sure everything is OK. Seems I am not only one who cared and who's tracking my order.
I was considering to order an AMP from this retailer again. Unfortunate they do not carry the AMP I was looking for.
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