This is a wonderful CD player. It was shipped and handled very well. We would order again.

I've been going through a lot of CD players in the past few years. Either I don't like the way they sound or they have a problem with durability. I bought this Yamaha to solve those problems. In short it faithfully reproduces sound and I hope it lasts. I bought this at a brick and mortar store and although I didn't pay list you could probably do better on the internet than I did. Even at a discount you could still pay close to twice the price of other changers. But you get what you pay for.

EDIT: Did I mention this player has great SPECS. I guess I just did and the sound you would expect for those kind of specs.

I was surprised how little user information was available on the web about 5 disk carousel changers.

I tried several higher end players (including Rotel, Denon, Sony, Onkyo/Integra and Marantz*) but I couldn't get past the extremely long time it took to switch tracks between disks while in random/shuffle mode (15 to 20 seconds). The 17 year changer I was replacing could change tracks on different disks in 8 to 10 seconds (measured from the end of one song to the start of another on a different disk).

Yamaha got it right with the CDC-697. It matched the track change speed of my 17 year old changer. If you regularly listen to music in random/shuffle mode, this CD changer is the only one out there (in 2008) that can change tracks on different disks within a reasonable time (8-10 seconds vs 15-20 seconds). Nothing else I tried out there that could do that.

Yamaha also seems to have the best version of the disk exchange feature. All the players I tried allow you to change some of the disks while one disk is still playing but the Yamaha is the only one that lets you change 4 of the 5 disks (the fifth is still playing). The others only let you access 2 of the 5 disks to change.

I think Yamaha put more thought into the "changer" aspect of this model.

One other benefit is that the CDC-697 is one of the few CD changers that supports CD text.

I hope this helps others.

* I did not personally test the Marantz CC4001 but I was able to get someone on the DTVforum to check the timing for me.

This unit is really good. The digital characters are a little small to read for those with limited eyesight. Mechanicaly it works great. The best for the price out on the market.

Same dimension as most 5-CD players, with the usual advanced features.
It stands out from those I've had because of its smooth and quiet changing mechanism.
I especially enjoy the random cut player, not just random CD but random
cuts from among the 5 CD's loaded in the carousel.

The only thing I don't like is that I can't seem to find a way to make
the carousel rotate when it is open all the way for loading.
This requires you to load a CD into the rear-most slot while part of it
is still inside the body of the unit, making it easy to scratch or drop the CD.

Otherwise, I like it a real lot!