dr_g's Full Review: Sony Net MD Walkman MZ-N505 Personal MiniDisc Play...
Sony has created an awesome technology in the Minidisc Walkman. I’ve used everything in the audio world ranging from old-fashioned Tapes and CD’s to MP3 Players and even my PocketPC. The Minidisc player is easily the coolest gadget with the worst software I have ever seen. If that last statement confused you, hang on and I’ll explain.
The Minidisc can hold between 80 minutes and 5 hours of music or speech in a single $4-$5 disc depending on your compression level and you can write and re-write to it about a million times. So how is the sound? Essentially Perfect. You would have to use a pretty high-end digital recording system to equal this technology’s sound quality. The highest compression level (which gives you the longest recording time) is terrific for speech and will be acceptable to most users for music. The audiophile will have few if any complaints about the mid-compression level (2.5 hours of recording at this level).
The disc is always in its own protective casing so you’ll never have worry about scratching or dirtying it and it will always work. A combination of mechanical design in both the disc casing and the player makes the system virtually skip free. I’ve shaken the player well beyond what any reasonable person would do and I can’t get it to skip!
The battery life puts every previous portable technology to shame. A single AA battery will last so long (more than 50 hours) that you just might forget that you even need batteries.
The design and thinking behind this lightweight and exceptionally portable unit is so mind-blowingly cool, that’s its hard to believe that the same thinkers at Sony could screw up the software so effectively. Some quick research on the Internet will reveal that most users are frothing at the mouth over the OpenMG Jukebox software provided with the player and for good reason – this is easily to most user hostile product I’ve seen. Sony as a music publisher is trying to guard against piracy and OpenMG is their attempt to enforce good behavior. They shouldn’t have bothered as there are some simple workarounds and all OpenMG has done is alienate their customers. OpenMG is so bad, that Sony very nearly released a product that would normally be unsaleable.
Instead of ranting about all the failings of OpenMG, I’ll just move on to the workarounds. To Sony’s credit, they did ship a program called Simple Burner which is meant to rip your CD’s down to Minidisc. So anything on a CD can be easily recorded to a Minidisc. That means that users of Nero or similar CD writer software can create a CD image of any sound files on their hard drive, mount the image, and the record it to Minidisc using Simple Burner. If you don’t have CD image creation software, don’t fret as the kind folks at Real.com have provided yet another workaround. Just get the free Real One Player and install (under the tools menu) the Sony Music Device plug-in. Then you can record to Minidisc anything the Real One Player will play which is pretty much everything.
My other gripe with Sony is that although they provide for high speed USB transfer from your PC to the Minidisc player, you can’t transfer from Minidisc back to the PC by the same method. The only way to sound from the Minidisc to your PC (or any other device) is through real-time recording from the analog line-out port. This isn’t a show-stopper but it is annoying for those using the system for field or lecture recording and want to get their live recording back onto the PC. Sony doesn’t allow digital copying from the Minidisc to the PC to prevent piracy. Chalk one up for digital rights management proponents. Speaking of live recordings, the MZ-N505 (and some other models) doesn’t have a microphone input but you can still do live recordings through the line-in port using a pre-amped microphone. If you plan on doing a lot of live recording, you might want to consider the more expensive models with microphone inputs. For my uses, the cost and performance of the MZ-N505 are just right.
The Mindisc system is what a 21st Century digital player and recorder should be. Sony has done a terrific job of creating a next generation technology that can replace all previous portable digital audio technologies.
If you want to carry around hundreds of hours worth of music, record live performances, or just have fun with the best portable digital audio technology around, the Minidisc is definitely the way to go.
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