I love listening to music and so does my toddler. Unfortunately, my husband doesn’t share the same passion and has yet to hook up my 60-CD-changing stereo from when we moved into our house three years ago! So when I hosted a play date in the summer, I ended up using my husband’s PlayStation 2 to play music for the kiddies in our living room. I really wanted to be able to let the kids play outside while the music blasted out the window, or bring the music outdoors with something portable, but I realized I didn’t have anything like that. I have most of my music stored on my PC through iTunes so I really wanted a stereo or boombox that would accommodate that. I looked at a few iPod-specific boomboxes before deciding to get this Sony ZSSN10 in silver. I still wanted to be able to play a CD and I wanted radio reception. I also wanted something compatible with an iPod or other MP3 player that would play burned MP3 CDs and I wanted it under $100. This seemed like a perfect fit.
The basics
I bought this boombox at Amazon.com for $79.99. I couldn’t find it in any retail stores I frequent, but I did also find it online at Target.com. Since Amazon offered free shipping, though, it was the better deal. The Sony ZSSN10 silver is a portable audio system that contains a single CD compartment that plays regular CDs, standard MP3 CDs, and highly compressed ATRAC CDs. It also has an AM/FM tuner, an audio input jack where an MP3 player can be connected, and a timer. There is no cassette player. SonicStage software is included that allows you to create special ATRAC CDs that can store about 30 regular audio CDs’ worth of music on one CD. A remote control is also included. The Sony ZSSN10 can either be connected to a wall outlet or can run on six D batteries. It comes with a 90-day limited warranty.
I always associated Sony with clarity…
…not anymore. Well, that’s a bit harsh, but there’s some truth to it. I’ve had great success with Sony audio products I’ve used in the past. The sound quality has always been great. This boombox is more on the mediocre side. Once you turn up the volume past the halfway mark, it starts to have some problems. It’s not terrible, but it’s no longer crisp and clear. It has more of a gravelly sound and isn’t very balanced, like, say, my husband’s Bose car system, which, even when it’s pumped up doesn’t hurt my ears. Since I’m mainly using this in my living room for my daughter and me, it doesn’t bother me that I can’t crank up the sound until the house shakes. I just leave the volume set a little lower (3 or 4 is loud enough for us and for my husband in the next room to hear) and then the quality is good. For house parties, though, this boombox has a little too much reverb. We used it at my daughter’s birthday party and, though the kids didn’t seem to notice the poorer quality at 6, the sound quality wasn’t as clear as I would’ve liked.
The radio reception is adequate. I have problems with reception in my house, so the minor static I sometimes get on this Sony is tolerable.
Where’s the cable?
One of my main reasons for getting this boombox was because I wanted to connect it directly to my
iPod Shuffle (yes, I’m still that behind in technology). I knew there wasn’t a USB port on this stereo but I assumed that they included the audio cable for connecting an outside source through the line-in jack. They don’t. I ravaged the box looking for it. I thought I had misplaced it until I read the manual. Apparently, you can hook a PC, TV, VCR, or a portable digital music player to this boombox and each requires its own special cable. Therefore, Sony must’ve felt it would be too much work/money to include any of the three types of cables. Other than a little disappointment at not being able to use that feature immediately, this wasn’t a big deal. Those types of cables are readily available and I’m pretty sure they’re fairly cheap. I ended up digging out the one that came with our
iH5 iHome clock radio.
One less iProduct in my house
I know it’s a brand recognition thing, but I’m getting sick of all the iSuchandSuch items for sale in stores. So I really wanted this Sony boombox to work. For some reason, I couldn’t get my Shuffle, which had been acting temperamental at the time anyway, to work with this boombox. As soon as my hubby brings the Shuffle home from work next week, I’m going to try again.
But my husband received an iPod Nano for Christmas (from his loving, though ulteriorly motived wife) and it works wonderfully with my Sony boombox. I just plug one male end of the cable into the audio out jack of the iPod and plug the other male end into the line-in jack on the front of my boombox. I push the line button on the front panel of the boombox and then use the iPod to control the music. There’s no slot for it to rest on and it doesn’t charge while plugged in, but I can live without those iPod-specific features. The music comes out crisp (as long as the volume is set below 5, which is pretty loud) and I can easily scroll through folders on my iPod and listen to an array of musical genres.
I said ATRAC, not 8-track
I was pretty psyched about the ATRAC feature on this model. It sounded too good to be true. I mean, saving 30 CDs’ worth of music on one CD? I could backup my whole collection on a handful of CDs. That sounded awesome.
Unfortunately, I got frustrated with the software. SonicStage and the Sony Connect online music store are
not newbie-friendly like iTunes. When I started to load it the software, I got excited by the promise of it searching my computer and loading itself with all of the MP3 music it found. Great, I thought. I won’t have to reload all of my CD collection into this new software. It’ll just read my iTunes stuff. Nope. It didn’t detect any of it. I managed to save about 3 CDs’ worth of music onto SonicStage before I got frustrated. It didn’t recognize the albums, which were all fairly popular older ones, so I had to type in all of the information. Then it wanted to calibrate it with some other online share site (I can’t remember the name) so others could download that info. The user interface of SonicStage was hard for me to navigate. Maybe I’m too used to iTunes, but SonicStage made no sense. It took me a while to figure out what I was looking at and all of the music is listed in an unattractive directory. It looked cluttered and confusing. So I gave up. For someone who is new to MP3s and hasn’t spent hours storing their collection on iTunes, maybe SonicStage makes sense. But it didn’t for me. It seems to me that ATRAC will go the way of 8-Tracks unless iPod has a version.
How’s it spinning?
I’ve had this boombox for a few months and have gotten a lot of use out of it already. My daughter loves listening to music so I often play CD compilations of MP3 songs I have stored on my PC. Other than my PCs (and my DVD player, which I don’t leave plugged in), it’s the only component I own that can handle that format so I’m happy I have it. We’ve had a few parties and this boombox has been a lifesaver. The remote was perfect for adjusting the music (not the iPod-connected music) from across the room and the panel controls are easy enough for my two-year-old to control. She was actually the one who discovered that you can turn this boombox on my pressing any button rather than by first depressing the on/off button on the top, which, of course, dear old mom kept doing.
I haven’t ventured out with this boombox yet, but I love that I have that option. It’s not as light as I thought it would be considering how much slimmer it is than the old double cassette deck boombox I had in the 90s, but it is fairly light (though I haven’t put 6 D batteries in it yet). I’ve seen a lot of recent boomboxes that look squooshed in size (like a cube), but this one has that distinctive long body (about 18 inches long and 6 inches high), though nowhere near the length of old-school boomboxes. I’m a little upset that I didn’t opt to buy a waterproof model since I know I’m going to want to bring this baby to the beach, but the one model I compared this Sony to was butt-ugly and $100 more expensive. My husband jostled this thing a bit and it did skip. It's definitely not anti-shock.
I’m my own best friend
This is one of the best gifts I’ve bought for myself. It combines the practical old-school sensibilities of a portable boombox with all that newfangled MP3 technology. I can listen to the radio, to my CD collection (or to any CDs I borrow from the library), to the MP3-containing CDs I burn from my iTunes software, and to my (OK, my husband’s) iPod Nano (with the help of an additionally purchased male-male audio cable). If only the sound was better balanced at high volumes and it was waterproof. Then it would be perfect. Oh, yeah, and if that ATRAC stuff actually made sense. THEN it would be perfect.
