As much as I loved my old Discman D-1000, the poor dear was getting a bit long in the tooth. It had an annoying intermittent behavior: it tended to skip a lot in the first few cuts of the CD. When intermittent turned into constant, it was time to move up to the current version.

While I went looking for a slim traveling music companion, what I came home with was the ICF-CD1000. I had some initial concerns about the extra weight and the thicker form factor, but I've come to appreciate the protective clamshell design. When the unit is closed up, ready to travel, all of the fragile controls and display are safely inside. Them clams is smart, dude! Also, while the unit has bulked up some, a lot more features are packed into this pound and a half audio mollusk.

You've got your AM and FM radio, along with five buttons to preset favorite stations. Setting the presets is drool-proof: dial up the station and hold down the "Enter" button while you hit the desired preset button. A basic telescoping FM antenna deploys out of on the back. As I'm writing this, I discovered an unexpected bug/feature. You can use the radio to check the FCC compliance on your laptop! My faithful AlphaSmart Pro is causing some static interference with the FM radio reception every time I navigate around the screen.

The clock functions are robust and there's a nice bold LCD readout, easy to read from a groggy hotel bed. If you've got the AC power adapter plugged in, the readout's backlit. Running off batteries, you've got to activate the back-light to use it, and it cuts off after a few seconds.

The clock runs on military time, so you better understand that 21:58 means it's time to turn on the tube for ER. You can keep track of what time it is in another part of the world, too. With the help of a teeny world time zone map on the lid, I can always tell you what time it is in Osaka, just in case you need to know. Finally, there's a button that handles the one hour time shift of Daylight Savings Time. I thought this was overkill 'til I realized that this appliance wouldn't need to join my list of gear that needs DST adjustment two times a year.

You can choose between the buzzer, radio or any track off of the CD for your wake-up call in the morning. And yes, for you slacker doodles, there *is* a snooze button.

It's New Year's Day and I'm trying to be honest as long as possible into the new year, so I have to confess, I don't listen to the radio. You just never know when some clown's gonna sidle up and try to sell you something. My alarm clock lives on my wrist, and if I need back up, there's my trusty PalmPilot. So why'd I pony up close to US$200 for this puppy? I *need* to travel with CD music. That's how I can cope with the rudeness of hotel life.

As a CD player, the unit does a fine job. It's got 2 tiny speakers behind that pretty screen. Like any portable, you want to park it in front of a nice reflective wall. The reflected waves, in addition to the waves that are hitting you directly, combine nicely, psycho-acoustically speaking, into an enhanced sound presence. Frequency response is 20-20,000 Hz, and there's a "Mega Bass" feature to help augment the necessarily small system. The long and short of it is that the system sounds real good; CD or radio. Most of the time I've been writing this, I've been listening to some real old choral music coming in over the radio (damn, another resolution bites the dust...)