Pros: Great Design, battery life, performance, sound, quality of construction
Cons: Some inconvenient features - rec. volume, stop button
The Bottom Line: It's a great unit for music lovers, and for those who love opera and classical music, the long-play feature is fantastic. Love the optical cable!
wforrest's Full Review: Sony Walkman MZ-R70 Personal MiniDisc Player
This is the second Minidisc recorder I have had, and by a not so wide margin it is the better. The other one was a Sharp MD-MT88. The Sharp is a teensy bit more solid, having an all metal body and rather sturdy metal buttons, but the Sony is also well made and is much much lighter. I have found that the Sony is very reliable and that it gives excellent sound - though I am not using the headphones supplied with the set. The LP4 feature works very well, though I have found that it depends somewhat on the source material. For example, some recordings (these are all classical music) which I have put on minidisc using the LP4 compression have suffered from a funny switching back and forth from left to right channel during very very quiet passages. But this only happens at the beginning of the track, and I've found with very good quality recordings, this does not happen, even though the music being recorded is of a similar volume. For example, yesterday I recorded Das Rheingold from the Karajan Ring, and despite the opening being very quiet, the sound was perfectly solid and did not suffer any artifacts of the compression. In fact, several times today I've checked the recorder just to make sure that I didn't perhaps record it in LP2, because the sound quality is so surprisingly good. The full orchestral volume is faithfully represented, and the singers' voices are clear and unclouded. I used the optical cable to make the recording, and this is a very well remastered CD, so I think these factors probably have a lot to do with the cleanness of the final product. I would say the sound quality on LP4, provided that the source material is a good quality recording and the digital cable is used, is slightly less brilliant than a CD, but far superior to the quality you'd get on a casette tape copy of the same thing. This machine is brilliant for opera lovers, because you can fit a whole opera on one tiny disc - the entire Ring (made up of 14 CDs) will fit on four minidisks - smaller than a pack of cards!
Recording with the digital cable is very easy. You can set the recorder to start recording at the point where you are, or to follow all the already recorded material on the disc, so as not to erase anything. This is a preference which is retained when you eject a disc or even disconnect the power /battery. The 'sync' record function is similarly retained, so if you have both these preferences on, all you ever have to do is plug in the optical cable, slide the record button on the minidisc, and then it waits for the digital signal and starts to record. It does not start to record when it hears sound, but when the digital signal begins, so don't worry about the start being clipped off. The track numbers are also transferred to the minidisc copy, so you can skip ahead to exactly the same places as you do on the CD.
When using the non-optical line-in or the microphone, you have to change the setting each time you record to manual record level (if that's what you want) - you can't leave it on the same level all the time. This is inconvenient. The unit always reverts to auto record level, which for music is a bit silly. The Sharp is not like that, and in fact it remembers two levels: depending on whether you use microphone or line in. But this is good because once you set it for your system, it pretty much doesn't need adjusting. Sony should have done this with their unit. Another thing which is a bit funny is the fact that when it finishes playing a disc, it reaches 'end' and then if you want to play from the beginning, you can't just press play, you have to jog back through the tracks - or eject and reinstall the disc. On the Sharp, the stop button switches the unit off, which would have been good here to, as there isn't really a way to switch it off, it just does after a few seconds of not doing anything.
Another excellent feature is the bass boost. I don't know how it works for pop music, but for classical music (and the headphones I am using, which are just little Sharp earphones that fit in your ear) it's excellent. I have the bass boost on 2 and the sound is so full and you really have a sense of hearing a whole orchestra, which you never really get on those tiny earphones. It's very surprising to listen to. You sort of think - where does it come from? The other great thing about it is that it is clean and does not alter the detail of the rest of the sound spectrum. The bass boost also doesn't 'wear' on your ears, as you might think it would. In any event there's a setting on the player that prevents higher volumes to protect your hearing. You can change this setting and the setting is remembered until you decide to change it back.
In short, without getting into the technical things that are discussed in other helpful reviews which I read on this site prior to buying, the MZ-R700 is a gem for music lovers.
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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