jumpfroggy's Full Review: Sony Walkman MZ-R500 PC Personal MiniDisc Player
I bought this a few years ago (maybe 2000 or so) on a whim. It was an open box discount, and I planned on trying it out and possibly returning it. I never did though.
First, the best things about it. It uses MD's, which are cheap (get for $1 each or less) which can hold 2.5 hours each (see below), sound decent (not great at that level), and NEVER skips. You can bang it against your palm continually and I still was not able to ever get it to skip. So the perfect jogging music player.
Using MD's has advantages over flash memory: it's cheaper, and you can afford to have a few. If you have a 256mb flash player, you have X amount of music. If you have some MD's with you (4 or 5 could fit in the space of a small wallet) the you have that much more music. I don't like to listen to the same 256mb worth all the time. If your flash player is bigger, doesn't matter as much.
This player uses MDLP, which means you can fit the normal 80 minutes, or 160 (LP2), or 320 (LP4) (all on 80 minute minidiscs). I always used LP2 to record mp3's from my computer, using the included PCLink. PC link is simply a usb audio card (is currently being sold at circuit city by another company as a hi-fidelity audio out). LP2 sounds alright, but has noticeable artifacts especially from mp3's (CD->mp3->ATRAC3... not good). Strangely enough, these were noticeable in my car, but not as much on my headphones. Funny.
But the player is absolutely horrible for getting music onto the disc. It's all recorded in real time, so if you want LP2 with 2.5 hours of music, you hook it up and record for 2.5 hours. That's annoying, but you can just let it start and go to bed, like I did.
The more annoying part was that it auto-separates the tracks on the silent passages, so if you have a brief pause it will put a track marker in the middle of a song. If the pauses in between are too short (and often they are), then you have 1 really big long track. Not fun. (BTW, to get around this you use winamp with an auto-pause plugin set to 2 seconds between songs, and in winamp goto preferences->output-> directsound->other->remove silence from beginning/end of track, makes sure you always get a track marker at the beginning of each track).
Last, since it's an analog recording process, it can suffer from lower quality (but with a decent soundcard, you will not notice... with a bad one, you will) and more importantly it takes a lot of experimentation to get the recording levels right. Too high, and it distorts (like headphones turned up way too loud, except you can't fix it by turning the volume down). Too low, and the bass is weak and you miss a lot of the song.
Bottom line: do not buy this, or any old MD player. Only get ones with USB connection (PCLink doesn't count), called NetMD's (or whatever sony wants now). That means you hook it up, and transfer files over the USB cable digitally, no loss of quality, no fiddling with settings. Warning; you'll still have to re-encode files (mp3->atrac3), but at least it'll be easier. Use RealOne audio player for this, not the bundled software.
Portable mini-disc player with recording capability Digital gain control ensures quality recording Automatic Volume Limiter System for even, consisten...More at Amazon Marketplace
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