Portable CD players in their time were a huge leap forward from the tape cassette players that people used to use if they wanted to listen to music whilst on the go. Ironically, they always seemed to me to be less durable and more prone to going wrong than old fashioned cassettes, so I'm glad the MP3 player was invented!

Still, in the back of one of my drawers recently, I found a working Sony Walkman D-EJ751 portable CD player so thought it needed a shot at a review too...

I bought this for around £25 years ago, and found it to be very easy to use. The controls on the lid of the CD player are easy to figure out and I never had any problems with getting it to work. However, as a concept on the whole, portable CD players are not good. I found that if I moved around too much whilst using this, or didn't use it in a flat position, eventually, the CD would skip or worse become scratched inside the CD player. One bump and the song would skip to the next track, or start at the beginning, which I found to be very annoying.

Sound quality is also not great when compared to good quality digital tracks, so there's nothing to rave about there either.

It came with an adaptor to plug into the mains, and this is a good idea to use as it eats batteries from what I've found though it claims it gives 40 hours of play time for a set of 2 AA batteries.

You load the CDs into the player through popping up the lid on top, and they are easy to put in and get out. I have a red version of this player, but they are also available in silver, blue and yellow (yuck).

Overall, for a machine that's pretty much going to be surpassed by even the cheapest MP3 player in terms of it's ability to keep up with the times, it's hard to recommend it. Saying that though, if you haven't got a CD player (I don't know anyone who hasn't) and really need one, then this hooked up to speakers would be simple enough to use and do the job. Still, I'd just buy an MP3 player if I were you.