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Back when I was designing multimedia bon mots, I came to an understanding: while eye candy gets your attention, it's sound that fills the room, that anchors the experience. I first learned this lesson on the road. Step 1) enter hotel room, step 2) set up CD player, step 3) relax. Music tames the foreign wilds, brings the living room to wherever I land.
Which brings me to my Sony D-1000 portable CD Player. It's the size of a paperback book covered in cool black velvety plastic. It sits upright, held by a brace that folds out. It's disarmingly light, still shockingly-so, even after years of picking it up. Let's see, so far we have: Easy to look at and lovely to hold. What else? Oh the SOUND! You wanna know about the sound! It produces surprisingly full sound, provided you place it in front of a solid wall.
 Remember those extremely cool gadgets that populated Wim Wender's film "Until the End of the World"? When I first saw the D-1000 in the window of a New York gizmo shop, I felt a little of that future bleeding back into the present. That was, what, maybe two years upstream? While I couldn't find any mention of the unit at Sony Online, I still saw the puppy peeking out of some New York shop windows when I blew through town in mid-June. Sad to say, my unit has developed a tendency to track badly. I've never tried to get it serviced--as only the first couple of tracks are affected and not on all CD's. I go with the minimalist tech approach: if there's a problem, I just skip the offending track. Even with this glitch, I've kept the D-1000 as my faithful travel companion. It has a clock and an alarm (buzzer or a wake-up CD). I never did figure out how to set the damn thing, and always promptly forgot after reading the instructions. You can buy an AC adapter for it, but I never bothered. This baby wants to be mobile. No attachments. It wants to sing you to sleep in strange rooms. For a look at Sony's current line of Discman CD players, check out the Discman page at the Sony Electronics Product Guide. - Peter Sugarman [7/17/97]
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