Cons: Keeps breaking, costly to have fixed, distortion, non-user-friendly, no (known) digital output, really frustrating
The Bottom Line: Get something else. Make someone other than Sony manufacture it with better less fragile parts and greater durability and ease of use.
fiferjanis's Full Review: Sony Walkman MZ-R70 Personal MiniDisc Player
I dunno what everyone else is talking about, but my Sony MZ-R70 is a P.O.S. It didn't work right out of the box, but not knowing anything about minidiscs, I thought they were just prone to skipping all over the place... until it just finally couldn't find anything. After not really using it (out of frustration) I finally sent it out to get fixed (after the warranty was up, of course) and got charged 75% of the initial cost to have it fixed because the optical tracking was screwed up. Now a few years later (still after hardly ever using the damn thing) it's behaving the same way. The thing is just destined to never work. So the durability sucks, and my hesitation of buying Sony was justified once again. (I don't think I've ever had a Sony product work for me correctly). Except for the pseudo-monopoly they had on the market back when I bought it, I would've bought something else.
Also - gain control. There is little/none. If you put the automatic recording level (default) it squelches every time you start up - really bad when trying to record music. If you use "manual" leveling (which is a pain in the butt to start recording, hit pause, cycle through the menu, set it, and then go...) it's totally distorted for the type of stuff I've tried recording. (Bagpipes, drums, fifes, rock-bands).
In general, it might be ok for your average schmoe needs (play-back, voice-recorder in meetings, etc.) but if you're looking to actually record music even at an amateur level, you're almost better off with a tape recorder and dumping it onto a computer and mixing it there.
Also... I dunno if I have to buy extra stuff or what, but there's an optical-cable input so I can put pre-recorded stuff on it, but as far as I know, the only way to get music OUT of it is the headphone jack... which converts to analog, defeating the purpose of digital recording. So forget trying to digitally record and then ripping your own digitally-mastered CD's on your computer, because you can't get there from here.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if that's the case, it's poor design in general - I wanted something easy that would allow me portability and to capture some good stuff, not something that requires a sound-engineer's training and equipment. Instead, I have nothing but frustration for this product, and I'm ticked off that I've dumped hundreds of dollars into it for such a lousy return on my investment.
40-second shock resistant memory and high quality recording with digital automatic gain control Dual headphone jack allows use of remote control while...More at Amazon Marketplace
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