Sony MZ-NH1 Silver Hi-MiniDisc Walkman

First, the bad news, much of which is more due to dodgy advertising than flaws in the product itself: Sony say you can get over 10 CDs onto a single standard 74 or 80 minute MiniDisc, but this is at 64kbps, which doesn't sound all that great (comparable to 96kbps MP3). Another gripe is that the MD SimpleBurner software will only copy CDs directly to a Hi-MD formatted disc in either 64kbps or 256kbps, and nothing between. It is possible to use a 132kbps setting, which will let you fit 4-5 cds onto a 74 minute MD at decent quality (which is more than enough for me, having used MiniDisc since it first came out), but you will need to copy the files onto your computer's hard disk first (although this is easy enough). However, these are the only negative points I can think of, and they are very minor. It'll take about 3-5 minutes to copy from CD to MD, (maybe longer if you have an old PC).

A complaint many people have is about the software. I have a word of advice. SonicStage 2.0, which is bundled with the unit, is naff, but you can download version 3.1 for free (check www.download.com). I must say that this software is perfectly stable on WinXP (I had it on for over 3 hours in one sitting copying my fave CDs to MD and it never crashed once). Its dead easy to use, very stable (although it can be a little bit slow at times) and it looks just as good, if not better than iTunes.
Another thing people have complained about is the fact that the charging station is not a docking station. And this is not a bad thing. The charger looks great, but isn't something you want to carry around with you, its pretty bulky. If you're using the MD in place of a flash drive, it really does help that the USB connection is independent of the docking station. And when connected, the MD will power itself through the USB.

The remote on this unit is easily the best I've used. You can control just about every feature of the device from it, and it has a 3 line backlit display. The headphones are useless, but then again, I've never seen a Sony portable that has come with decent headphones.

I agree totally with everyone that has said that this is NOT an MP3 player. If you want a fashion accessory, or to keep your whole music collection on a player at fairly low quality, go buy an iPod. If you want a solidly built, versatile little player with excellent sound quality (thanks to a digital amplifier and the excellent ATRAC3 compression) that is easy and fun to use, this is the one for you. I'd quite happily pay the full price for this player (£200), but at £110, it's almost stealing. And when it comes to sound quality, I'm one of those fussy types with an absurdly expensive stereo system...

I'd never thought I'd hear myself say this (I work for Panasonic), but well done Sony! This is a brilliant player, and at such a great price from Amazon, I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a portable.

This particular recorder has a line-in and a mic in. The Mic in supplies phantom power of around 3V (the manual doesn't specify) so it can use certain condenser mics that are on sale on eBay. Type in "Minidisc microphone" and you should find what I mean. I have also managed to plug in a bass into this input and it recorded, although there was a fair amount of clipping (obviously this can be sorted by the volume pot.) The recorder has a setting for anti-clip which works for a very loud venue, but I turned it off because it makes some of my recordings sound a bit strange with sudden drops in levels. It works nicely when it's constantly loud though!

The Line-In is used for plugging into televisions and hi-fi's and the like.

Adding track numbers can be done at the time using the T-mark button. I'm not sure about this, but I think this button is absent in second generation Minidisc recorders.

For getting the music from your Minidisc onto the computer, you can do it, but only if you have recorded in Hi-MD mode and using the line-in or mic input (digital input is a no no). Normal Minidiscs (eg. "74 min" ones) can be converted into Hi-MD mode, and 1Gb discs only come in Hi-MD. Also, you need the latest version of SonicStage, which is downloadable from Sony. The files are saved on your computer as ATRAC3plus or Wav, depending on what you choose.

In terms of how much music you can record on one disc, it depends on the compression, of which you have a choice of three. If you want it saved as PCM, a 80min disc in Hi-MD will take 28 minutes and a 1Gb disc will save around 1 hr 34mins. Hi-SP will record 2hrs 20mins and 7hrs 55mins respectively (incidentally, Sony say that Hi-SP is CD quality anyway, which is strange considering they offer PCM recording as well!!) In Hi-LP mode, it records 34 hrs and 10 hrs 10 mins respectively.

Quality wise, PCM is CD quality exactly, Hi-SP is very good, but Sony are lying when they say it's CD quality, and Hi-LP suffers from horrific artifacts on drums and other instruments. For recording lectures it's well up to the task though.

You can record using its rechargeable battery or from the mains. A word of warning though: when using the mains, the recording has a bad ground loop hum which always annoys me whenever I use it. Battery life while recording is adequate, around 8 hours in my experience. This model doesn't have an AA battery expansion pack like other recorders though, so take that into consideration. Also, the battery it uses, a Li-Ion 4WM isn't the standard one that Sony uses for its minidiscs and is expensive to buy (£50 from Sony. You see it on Ebay for £25 but it's shipped from China and PnP on that is £8)

To correct what other people have written in their reviews, yes, you can use the minidisc as a data disc. 80min discs hold ~280mb data which can be accessed via My Computer. Seems to me that Data transfer is too slow for anything large. In fact, I don't think the thing uses USB 2.0.