Skip-Free G-Protection technology boosts the laser pickup's shock protection to minimize read errors that would otherwise interrupt your music, providing quick recovery from both horizontal and vertical shocks. The D-NS505's water-resistant body and heat-resistant lid helps protect it against the elements, with rubber gaskets, bushings, and splash-resistant seals that help keep out water, moisture, and dirt.

Playback options include 32-track programming, repeat (track, disc, or program), random play, and--thanks to Sony's great work in DSP efficiency--more than 75 hours of ATRAC3plus CD or more than 50 hours of audio CD playback from 2 AA batteries (not included).

The D-NS505's 2-line dot-matrix display is built right into its handstrap, offering full ID3 tag recognition, and bookmark playback (which lets you program your favorite songs from multiple CDs and play them back at the touch of a button). CD Text support displays artist and title information with compatible commercial audio CDs.

The player comes bundled with Sony's SonicStage CD Simple Burner software. Compatible with ID3 tagging and most CD burners, this application transfers songs from CDs or MP3 music files from your PC's hard drive and burns them to recordable CDs using ATRAC3plus compression.

ATRAC3plus is a high-quality audio-compression technology that reduces the size of digital audio files while preserving much of a track's original sound quality (similar in concept to MP3 or Dolby Digital sound formats). With ATRAC3plus, music can be burned and compressed at 132, 105, 66, 64, or even 48 kbps (ki