Re: Sony CDP-CX450 & CDP-CX57

Nirvis is a small but fabulous company, and you will definitely feel the $200 investment was worth it when you're done. Initial set up can take some doing but, as you can see from this board, lots of people are willing to help. On your specific issues:

No. 1 is totally bogus. Maybe Sony is talking about trying to wire digital outputs *together* or something. You can have several CD players together on the same Slink-e bus as long as they are set to different IDs via the switch on the back, and you can put them on separate buses if you need to (Slink-e provides four buses). You can't players together by the standard Sony technique and have one control the other, since that intereferes with what CDJ does, but this is not a problem since CDJ provides all the control you need. There is one issue re digital outputs: You have to have enough inputs on your amplifier or outboard decoder, and you have to configure CDJ to switch to the right input for each player. Or, alternatively, you have to pump analog outputs from the CD players into a mixer and then into your amp. The deluxe solution is to buy the DXS switch promoted on the Nirvis board.

No. 2. I think Colby is still beefing up support for the 450 and it may not be totally there yet, but should be soon. However, what do you mean by "support" for these particular features? CDJ builds a database of every CD you own that includes title, artist, song titles and, if you want, lyrics and album covers. It's so powerful that most people make it their only interface and wind up ignoring the clunky group file features and so on that Sony includes with the players. However, CDJ will *upload* its data to your player, so that you'd get a display of group and album title when a particular CD is playing.

No. 3. You need a physical connection from the Slink-e to the PC. The IR port is to allow CDJ to control non-Sony equipment, and it does not alleviate the need for a physical connection. It's possible to buy 50-foot serial cables and some people do that, but the more common route is to run a CAT5 cable--I believe people have tested this up to 200 feet and it works. Mine goes from the computer in my home office up through a closet into the attic, then drops down into the closet where the stereo stuff lives. At each end of the CAT5 cable, you need an adapter that converts CAT5 to the DB9 serial interface. These are cheap and can be bought at places like Fry's Electronics or Micro Center, or they can be ordered. There's a description somewhere on the Nirvis site of how to do this. The critical point, under-emphasized in the Nirvis documentation, is to pay attention to the pin numbers as you're wiring the adapter (you open it up with a screwdriver and wire it the way you want it). If you wire pin 1 on the first adapter to the red wire, for instance, you need to be sure red goes to pin 1 on the second adapter--which will be (this is the essential point) in a different location than it was on the first adapter. Just get a magnifying glass and look closely at the numbers.

Hope this helps. I am no technical genius and I was able to get it all set up after some trial and error.