Sony CD Megachangers

Does anyone have any experience with these? There's a CDX-455 or something along those lines that holds 400 discs. They can be had for a couple hundred bucks and seem to have a lot of cool features like the ability to hook up a keyboard and name every disk and track for the display to show. There is an ES model that sells for about 3 times this much, but since I would be using it as a transport with digital out, I can't see paying this much just for the upgraded DAC's of the ES model. The only downside is that I would have my Zenith DVB-318 for movies, my Pio DV-578A for SACD and DVD-A, and this for all my CD's. That's starting to look like serious overkill in the ol' equipment rack. I blame David F. and Ascend for making me love music at home again. So, what do ya'll think.......worth it or not?

Well, scratch that. The thing is almost 22" deep!! My receiver is under 17", and it's pretty big. This is bigger than the shelves on my rack by about 3".

Hey Eddie,

I thought a long time about getting megachanger, but I am trying to equipment down to a minimum while enhancing functionality.

What I advocate to folks, especially those that use their PC's a lot and have a home network(wireless), is converting their CD's to MP3 or some other compressible format using a good "ripper". Then play those files through some kind of media device hooked up digitally to your audio system.

I currently have close to 200 CD's worth of music stored on my home PC. I used CDex to convert those CDs to high quality MP3 files. Connected to my audio system I have an Apple Airport Express connected via optical digital to my pre/pro. I use Apple iTunes to play and manage the MP3 files, and iTunes connects to the Airport Express via my home wireless network.

The end result is I have an almost endless amount of music at my fingertips and I can create playlists on the fly. The nice things about the better encoders like CDex, when you rip a CD, it finds that CD in a public database on the internet, and then "tags" the songs will all the relevent information such as artist, album, genre, etc, which is then all useable in iTunes for sorting and playback.

Does it sound as good as playing the original disc on my Denon 2900?.....No....but it is still excellent and it does give me endless background music when I want it. Most people can not tell the difference.

The Airport Express is smaller than a pack of cigarettes. It is that small white box at the edge of the TV stand/rack to the right:
http://changpics.smugmug.com/photos/16287108-S.jpg