bergzy's Full Review: Sony Net MD Walkman MZ-S1 Personal MiniDisc Player
Sony MZS1 is Music to Your Ears!
I have always enjoyed portable music for things like working out, washing the car, having lunch at a fast food place, well, the list goes on and on! I have always liked nice small portable units. The ideal portable would have crisp clean sound that would have the option of playing at louder volumes, basic features like shuffle, repeat etc and large capacity of songs. I was one of the first to have a tape cassette Walkman. The thing weighed about two pounds and took 4 AA batteries. Then came along my portable Toshiba CD player. This thing weighed about 1 ½ pounds and skipped if you breathed on it. I used this thing for about 10 years. The next purchase was a Sony CD player with 10 seconds of anti-skip technology. High tech or what? The latest before the MD MP3 is a 6 month old Panasonic CD MP3 player.
What I left out before the Panasonic is that I am not a newbie to MD. I already own a Sony recordable one that played music like a CD player. This was just when Rio MP3 players were coming onto the scene with a whopping 16 meg internal memory. Obviously, the MD was the natural choice.
This mini-disc player used a proprietary lithium ion battery which was smaller than a stick of gum. This allowed the MD player to be really small and I mean small. It was slightly larger than the MD media and only a few times thicker. This sounded ideal to me at the time. In fact, my model was special ordered from Japan because it wasn’t released in the US yet.
The problem encountered was that the battery life became shorter and shorter with the recharging. What started with a few hours, went to a couple then down to 30 minutes and so on. I had to use the AA battery pack with it to get decent listening time. This feature increased the size and weight of the player. I thought about getting a new battery but they are a rip off for what you get. I found that nothing beats generic cheapo AA batteries. They are inexpensive and can be found anywhere.
Another annoying thing was that it required intensive attention to record music onto the MD media. I had to switch CD’s and record them via analog because my portable CD player didn’t have an optical output to allow true MD ‘digital’ recording through the optical input of the MD Player.
In short, the MD at that time was no better than a cassette tape based portable player for convenience except for ‘digital’ track access.
I thought and thought about getting a MP3 player that ran off SD’s cards but even with the significant price drops of SD’s, it would still be expensive to have 3 or 4 cards to store all the music that I would want to have at hand in addition to the cost of the player. I also thought about getting a Nomad with a 30 gig hard drive that would do the trick. BUT, the thing was big and bulky and there was that annoying monkey of short battery life again.. I wanted something durable for rigorous activity and small enough to put in my pocket.
I have a Panasonic CD player that plays MP3 tracks as well. It is a great player that easily reads the MP3’s but is very slow about it. When one song finishes, there is a noticeable lag before the next one even if it is the track beside it. Also, the volume is not very powerful so I can not drown out the music played at the gym that I hate.
Hence, the Sony Sports MD MP3 MZ-S1 player fit the bill. Here are some of the features that were really important to me that this fit:
• It was small enough to fit in my pocket without pulling my pants down.
• Rapid track access
• Loud
• Each disc held enough music for each genre that I wanted. E.g. rock, classical.
• Battery life is amazing at 50+ hours with recording and off/on sporadic use.
• Mini discs are cheap and totally re-recordable and easily labeled (I have SD’s for other devices and they are really small and hard to label).
• No skipping whatsoever with every possible shaking and moving.
• One can record 5+ hours on a single MD which is nothing to sneeze at. I get just over 10 hours on a CDR loaded with MP’s which is great but the CD player is just a little to big to fit comfortably in my pocket. Carrying extra MD’s are also not a problem because they are durable, small enough to be convenient and big enough to manipulate easily.
To get 5 plus hours on a MD, one has to record it on the LP4 setting which means it is 4 times longer than ‘normal’ stereo play. So if you have an 80 minute MD, you can get 320 minutes of MP3 format which translates to 5 hours and 20 minutes. There is a LP2 mode which means two times and a stereo mode which would just give you the regular 80 minutes of music.
Sound is great even in the LP4 mode. I have recorded stuff in the LP2 mode but have not really heard a difference through the supplied headphones. Plus, the Sports MD MP3 player is for activities and not for audiophile referencing. As long as the quality of sound is decent and not sounding like a tin can, I am a happy camper.
At first, I thought Sony was nuts with the joystick control but I found that ones left or right hand naturally fits in the large part of the curve and the thumb naturally moves to the joystick. It allows easy access to the features one really needs when being active: track selection and volume control. I think one does not have the track title or remaining time left in mind when one is in anaerobic threshold.
What it does is start the MD to play a song, you can then advance or reverse tracks with it and increase or decrease the volume as well. To stop the track, press the joystick down.
With great effort you can also adjust all the settings, such as desired play mode, by pressing another button then selecting the choice with the joystick. It is cumbersome and tedious to adjust things. It is easier to edit the track titles (if you ever feel the need to read them on the MD Player) while it is connected to the computer and use the MG Jukebox software that came with it.
The good thing about the joystick thing is that once you set everything, the joystick frees up a lot of clutter on the MD itself. Accidental editing and skipping of tracks is greatly reduced with the joystick. There is no need to feel for or guess if one has the correct button to increase or decrease volumes or track selection, the joystick makes it pretty easy.
I do not use the other functions and doubt that if there were even more features that I would fiddle with them. All I want is something that plays music whatever I am doing. My wife uses the supplied headphones with the Panasonic CD MP3 player when she works out. I use Sony Foldable Sports Headphones. These fold into a very small packet that is great to stuff into your pocket but I digress.
I do not use the ‘end search’ function as well when recording MP3’s onto the MD. I did use this feature though when recording with the old MD. When you press the button, the MD player goes and calculates the remaining time left for recording further music. Great for regular SP mode but useless to me when transferring MP3’s because the computer software automatically stops downloading when there is not enough space left on the disc.
So, from a veteran of portable music devices, the Sony MZS1 is a definite winner. I would definitely choose it for music listening when doing anything. Yes, again, one can go into all the technical jargon like frequency response and all that. If you want to know the specs, click on the ‘details’ option of the epinions.com subject header. I could cut and paste those into this review but…why?
Perhaps a hard drive player will be in the future some day but I would not really have the opportunity to use it for the full potential. Plus they still weigh a ton and the battery life on those players still suck (the Nomad 20 gig needs 4 AA’s and only lasts 4 hours…no thanks). As the Old Knight of The Holy Grail said to Indiana Jones ‘choose, but choose wisely
Record MP3s or CDs at up to 32x from multiple sources (PC, CD, radio, and more) Plays back in ATRAC3, supports MP3, WMA, and WAV formats Easy one-hand...More at Amazon Marketplace
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