microscan5528's Full Review: Sony Walkman MZ-R70 Personal MiniDisc Player
After much thougt on whether to purchase a minidisk player or and mp3 player, I finally worked up enough courage to purchase a MiniDisk player once sony started bundling and MP3 to minidisk converter with their players. I hopped on over to CircuitCity and bought their last player, the Sony MZ-R700.
When you first open the package, the unit seems much bigger than it seems in the package because of a large hump for a battery on the rear panel. You also notice that this is a quality piece of electronics. No cheap plastic filling this machine, it is heavier than it appears. The top cover is 100% magnesium and can surely take a beating. The rear panel is plastic, but fell very solid not cheap like other minidisk players. In the package all accesories you need (except for minidisks) are provided.
AC adaptor
ni cad battery
headphones
optical cable
remote control
pclink
instruction manuals
The sound quality of this machine is superb no matter what source you use. The optical cable provides 100% digital signal, and thus provides the best sound quality. However, in the real world, the quality difference is unnoticable between analog source and digital recordings.
The pc link is the Xitel DG2. It is both PC and Mac comatible and installs without special drivers. It consists of a small box that plugs into your computer via a USB cable and into your minidisk recorder via the optical cable. It converts the digital signal from the computer into an optical signal that the player can use. This is also a completely digital process so the quality is excellent but no quite up to the quality of the original mp3 recording. The signal is decompressed by the computer and sent of the link cable, when it reaches your minidisk unit, it is recompressed in another format, thus there is a sligh drop in quality, but is is hardly noticable.
The remote is useful to a point, it would be better if it contained an LCD display like other minidisk recorders, but it serves its purpose.
The headphones are average at best. Sony doesn't seem to shop very good headphones with any of its portable electronic gear, so an investment of $15 or $20 would be advised.
There are several recording modes on this player. Stereo, mono, MDLP2, and MDLP4. Stereo can store 80 minutes of music on a single minidisk, mono 160 minutes. MDLP2 uses a higher compression ratio than stero and can thus fit 160 minutes on a single disk. Use of MDLP4 causes a significant drop in quality, but allows the player to record 320 minutes of stereo audio onto a single minidisk.
The battery life on this unit is 56 hours.
Overall, this is well-made unit that serves its purpose well.
**The following has been added 12/18/01**
After owning this player for several months, the "Gee-Whiz" factor has worn off, but the usefulness has not.
I can use this player whenever i want to, wherever i want to. My friends love it, and wish they had one also.
As far as durability is concerned, it is topnothch. I have dropped it from several feet (and once off the lifeguard stand) without a problem except a few scratches on the faceplate. Note however, this player is not water-resistant. I learned this sad fact when i was pushed in the pool with the device in my pocket. After several hours of drying it began to function again
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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