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The sound is fine. This is the second minidisc player I've owned. I probably would not recommend this item unless you don't care about ease of use. My main complaint is the slow operating speed and clumsiness of opening it to insert the disc. My first one (Sony MZ-R30) was exceptional in quality so maybe it isn't fair to compare the two. but this newer one is slow to respond, awkward to open, and the control panel is slightly hard to see.
To me that eliminates at least half of the usefulness of such a device, but it's my fault for not finding that out before buying.So why the 4 stars. with. Well, shop twice buy once I reckon. I've read that some people get 34+ hours of battery usage & I wouldn't doubt it. I'd read a lot about the Hi-MD format so I wanted to check it out in person.
I got a refurbished model for I think around $90(). Now that my little experiment's over it's probably heading to Goodwill.Oh, and the folks I ordered it from (ship2you) did an absolutely superb job, thanks, it got to me in 2 days. And the Hi-MD format is just terrific.I'd love to have a more versatile machine using Hi-MD, that I could easily record things with, move files around under Linux, and use OGGs etc. With a mic jack, and some software tweaks, this would be a heck of a machine I could be happy with for years. Yah SonicStage is a pain (though better than I expected from reviews, I guess Sony did improve it) but the Japanese lessons & music I put on the disc sounded absolutely fantastic. Shame. The Hi-MD format is everything I'd read, I can't for the life of me fathom why Sony isn't doing more to spread the use of MiniDisc. It's just too limited, and only because of the iron paw of Sony.
I don't know how in the world I missed this when shopping, but this model DOES NOT HAVE A MICROPHONE, NOR ANY WAY TO USE ONE WITH IT. But this machine ain't it. and everything was great. Because, as a player it's awesome. The interface on the machine is kinda clunky but for stuff like Japanese lessons that won't really matter too much since you won't be fishing around too much.So as just a player, I really like this little booger.
If your hardrive player or flash player breaks and it will, or if the battery fails then you can't access any of the music on the player. I've had cds corrupt data in as few as 2 years.
Minidiscs are rewritable a million times according to Sony, and act as a hard disc drive meaning you can delete and rearrange the music or data on the disc. Minidiscs have a much longer life span.
The 1 gig capacity and atracplus codec are reason enough to use HiMD. Minidiscs last longer than cds.
Since the advent of HI MD minidiscs Sony has made this the only portable way to listen to music. The fact that the media is removable makes this device even more attractive.
In contrast, you always have your mini-discs.
It uses the obsolete USB 1.0 so it take 45 min to 1 hr to transfer 1gb music or data. Sound quality is excellent for compress music. The bad. The Pros: It's a thing of beauty. Sonicstage isn't music-sharing friendly. Well may be true priced at $100.00+, but that aside I would have to disagree. Some people say it's made of cheap plastic. Runs on a single AA battery for days.
THIS CABLE WILL FAIL in time. After loosing valuable data, I have put all 3 of my units and dozens of recorded and blank discs in a drawer. I have been a long time user of Sony's minidisc equipment. For about $3, I could copy a whole CD to one regular minidisc and keep it in my media library. I researched this on minidisc forums and found that It had happened to others.I used minidiscs for data backup because the $3, 300MB discs were perfect for my needs. There is one inherent design flaw with a media that has to spin. There is a tiny ribbon cable that attaches to the read/write head.
No great loss if you use the minidisc for music only, but a potential disaster if you use it for backing up data (which I used to do). This will destroy whatever data was on the disc.
The more recent units look to be cheaply made. When it does, you will get the famous "BLANKDISK" error whenever you insert your disc.
I mainly liked the removable media feature. It may be 6 months, it may be three years, but it will happen.
Probably never to be used again. The early units seem to be made better.
The read/write heads have to move back and forth across the media, and this is the weak point.
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