Mini-disc players.

Hi everyone. What mini-disc players do you have and use? I have mzr-55, 2×mzr-91, mz-e900 and a mz-g750. I record from a de-j01 on to either the 55 or the 91 via optical cable and then like to listen through the 900. Recordings sound good to me. Haven'tried recording on to the 750 yet- don't have many recordable discs left.

 

I have many of them. Mostly Panasonic but have some Sony, Aiwa, Sharp...

 

Hi Boodokhan. Thanks for reply. Unfortunately have never listened to any other make. Wish i had now.

 

I got recently into minidisc; right now I have a boxed R70, two N505 (one is temperamental), one N510 and a player only E62. An R35 is on its way, but it will take another week before I can try it.
I also bought quite cheaply an entry-level deck MDS-J330 and I use that to record minidisc under the (maybe naive) assumption that a deck has a better encoder as it does not have the power constraints of a portable.
I do not have high-end models as it seems to me that they mostly differ in features and size rather than audio quality; so far I can't distinguish any player, they all sound all identical to my ears.
The net models are quite colourful and I like that instead of the standard metallic grey. I tried briefly recording in LP2 but compression artefacts are rather audible; I will give it a second try, but LP is by far better.

 

Hi enryfox. Thanks for reply. Tottaly agree with you. I don't have any of the later disc players as i did not have a computer at the time and to my ears these earlier ones sound good enough for me. The 55 disc player makes some very good recordings. I just hate computers but i wish now i had bought one while they were still available.

 

The first MD recorder I bought was the R70 which is somehow derived from the R55. It does play and record very nicely, also have the biggest and most readable display of all

Using a netMD today is rather convoluted: I have to use a virtual machine running windows XP with latest SonicStage installed. SonicStage supports formats which were popular in 2007 and that excludes any "recent" lossless formats leaving basically just mp3 and WAV. Converting from mp3 to ATRAC is a non-sense to me so I have to use WAV as intermediate format between my itunes lossless collection and sonicstage. But again sonicstage is unable to read wav metadata such as artist and title so I have to enter them again before transferring music to the netMD. Only LP2 and LP4 take advantage of higher transfer speed, but audio quality is rather questionable; transferring in SP format is basically like recording music in real time at 1X speed so I prefer using the MD deck. The only real advantage of SonicStage is the ability to add title to an already recorded MD using keyboard and cut & paste, but that is all.

Another big pro of the netMD's is battery life which is impressive, almost 40 hours with a single AA ! Players of 1998/2000 generation has a battery life which ranges between 6 and 10 hours which is not bad, but, with a moderate use, they eat batteries pretty fast.

 

Hi enryfox. Do you find a big difference when recording on to a hi-md as opposed to say one of the earlier models. I have never tried so cannot coment on that. I also just record in sp. Have never trid in lp or lp-4 because i want the recording as near as possible to the original. What are your thoughts. I'm old school and have no idea how to use sonic stage etc. I have tried recording on both the 55 and 91 but cannot hear any noticeable difference between them. Have not tried recording on to the g-750 yet to compare. I would like to listen to a recordind made on one of the hi-end recorders but i will not pay the rediculous prices on you know where and having no knowledge about computers would have no idea how to download music etc. Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

 

Actually I do not have any hi-MD recorder, they are too expensive and also discs are rarer and sell for crazy prices. And beside that I still prefer the original implementation of the MD, i'm not looking for ultra high fidelity, I'm just playing with a format that was out of my reach in the 90's and early 2000's. For the MD units I have, I have never noticed any difference during "normal" listening; the deck might sound a bit better, but i'm not sure it is mostly due to the more powerful headphone amplifier. As for the recording, I have never done a proper ABX testing, but I have not noticed any appreciable difference between portables and the deck.

Being ATRAC a closed format I could not find details on the actual releases, but I think that after 1998 the SP encoder hasn't changed much, even in the later Type-R and Type-S; Sony was trying to improve LP2 and LP4 to extend the life of the MD format fighting against solid state players and maybe for the audio standard of the day it was fine (128 kb mp3 are not that different), but for today standards SP is the minimum acceptable quality.

You know what I like of MD ? buying on e-bay collections of used and recorded MD's and listening to them to discover "new" music or rediscover music I already know but selected by other people tastes. It's like buying mix tapes, but being a digital format the recording quality is typically better than the average home made audio cassette.

 

Afew weeks ago i finished recording all the Bruckner symphonies on to some 80 min' discs in sp mode and they sound marvelous to my ears. I only have 2 normal mini-discs- Phol Collins and Titanic. I love to record all my own music. I agree with everything you have said about hi-md etc. One version of atrac sounds the same to my ears. I use mini-disc the way it was designed to be used- good quality sound and so easy and quick.

 

Hi enryfox,
I am running SonicStage on Windows 10 64-bit with drivers I found for my MZ-RH1. Caveat: I have not found any drivers for other machines, I tried another modern Hi-MD cheapie but it barfed. If you are interested I can post the details here - at work at the moment.
Cheers
Nick

 

Thanks, but i'm running MacOS and Windows 10 would be a Virtual Machine anyway. I browsed the web, but it looks like MD software was windows only, no support whatsoever for mac; but even if Sony had supported MD on the Mac in early 2000's it would have been PowerPC only hence useless anyway. Sonicstage in XP works fine, as I posted earlier, the only problem is having to use WAV files to import music, not very handy. Luckily I have a USB DAC with optical output and that connects directly to the MD deck

 

Hi Derek, I have used the MD format for 15 years and have tried most of the portable models from Sony through the years. The later models from 2001 and 2002 have a few extra features that make them my favorites for daily use:

* They use ATRAC Type R conversion that will give you better sound quality on recordings.

* They have a build-in EQ facility in the menues, allowing you to have 2 EQ presets available in addition to the un-EQ'd sound, by clicking the Sound button on the Remote Control. Very useful when recordings need just a touch less top and/or a slight bass lift for instance. The two EQ presets can be changed to your liking at any time from the Sound menu. Some recordings when recorded to MD can tend to be a little strident, so this is very convenient!

* You can very quickly go from one track to another by using the little edit wheel on the side of the player. Let's say you're listening to track 2 and want to compare it to track 17. No problem - while still hearing track 2 in the phones you roll the edit wheel and the track-list will appear on the display. You roll to track 17, press the edit wheel and track 17 immediately starts playing. This works very smoothly on the late models.

* A very nice remote control with more useful features than earlier models.

Early on I also recorded on the portable players, but for the last 10 years or so I do all my recording on MD decks, primarily due to the convenience and extra features not found on the somewhat fiddly portables ( - i.e. fade in and fade out option when recording). Currently I use a Sony MDS-JB930QS for recording and MZ-R910 or MZ-N1 for playback when on the go.

The N510 mentioned by enryfox above is a nice little player. It has the EQ options and uses a regular AA battery, which will be preferable for some people. It uses Type S conversion, a variation of Type R that according to Sony sounds slightly better on LP recordings. But for people who care about the best sound possible, Long Play is mainly useful for speech recordings etc. In SP, Standard Stereo Mode, Type R og Type S will give identical results.

Hope this helps
JB

 

When transferring music with SonicStage the compression is done by SonicStage itself via software and the netMD is just a disc writer. I have not found any detail on the software encoder used by SonicStage 4.3 but I hope it is equivalent to a type-S or better; as a consequence, when transferring music through sonicStage, all netMD's will record with the same quality, hopefully better than the on-board encoder (e.g. the N505 has a type-R).
If anyone has more details on the ATRAC software encoder, please share it, I have found very little details on the net.

 

Can't help you with that, I'm afraid, as I have never used Sound Stage and computers when recording music to Minidisc.
I record from LPs and CDs primarily, my own, friends' or from libraries, full resolution signal from the analog out of the record players and then line in on the MD deck. On rare occations when I can't find the material I want to record on record, I'll record from i.e. DAB radio, Spotify or Youtube.

If you search for 'Sony ATRAC versions history' you should find what you're looking for, I think.

JB

 

Hi JB. Thanks for reply. When i first started recording back in the late eighties and early nineties before mini-disc i did all my recording on to mostly tdk metal tapes using my Sony e,s, series of separites. Then when mini-disc appeared i recorded all my music on to either 74min' or 80min- mini-discs. For some reason i never added a mini- disc deck to my collection, wish i had now but i remember buying a car mini-disc player which i used all the time. As i never was interested in computers i never wanted to buy one of the later net, hi- md units- never mind i just enjoy rotating all my units every few days.

 

Really? I can't go on eBay without tripping-over several vendor's offerings.

When I got my first, an MDS-JE510, I just plugged into the audio-out of my hand-me-down HP CFF w/Windows XP. Hardest parts was setting the level for each piece of material--namely for anything on YouTube--and using the jog-wheel to input characters. I eventually found a proper remote at my local Salvation Army store, which itself saved many headaches, but still wish to use a proper keyboard for titling... along with a real "decent" soundcard for the computer. Be it in the back, it's still just a headphone jack, and we all know how that effects the sound.

I feel the same... only I rather make my own mixes. I even did so on cassette, sourcing stuff from the internet. Problem was, even when I got my MDS-JD510, I still had to use the computer's audio-out as a connection. At least I could monitor & set the level of the recording more easily with the MD deck.

Also, I guess I'm guilty of the same "Couldn't afford it at the time" curiosity... which explains why I have three CED-players, and two storage bins full of titles for sitting in storage--one being of Shannon Tweed's Playboy Centerfold shoot!

 

Several models in the Sony MDS-JB series of MD decks allow you to use a regular computer keyboard for titling discs and tracks - i.e. the -920, -930 and -940 IIRC. Unfortunalely Sony decided not to offer this on their TOTL JA series decks.

The problem with most computer sound card mini-jack outputs is the relative low signal level needed for phones. You will need to crank the output level to get decent levels to the MD player, and will increase noise. The mini-jack is not the problem, and I guess some computers offer a line level signal with mini-jack out? Haven't found one that does, but I guess they're out there?

Transferring music from Youtube is not ideal and many videos have poor sound to begin with. Spotify is better, but you still have the level problem/noise to deal with. I prefer to record my mix-MDs from CD and Vinyl to get the best sound quality. The -930 has great converters and tracks come out sounding as good as the source - and in some cases actually a little better - due to the Sony Current Pulse D/A converter!

JB

 

I had seen the later, higher-end models that allow use of a keyboard, and would prefer to own/use one of them in the future... providing I can afford one!

I know the story of playing around with the main volume control on-screen for best "recording" level quite well. This is what made me desire a soundcard like the Golden Tiger--with upgraded chips, from what I've read. But again, if I could afford it....

Much of what I recorded was sourced from Rhapsody, when they allowed free membership and full-length listening prior to purchase. Of what I did record, you can sometimes hear the clipped artifact of me having cued the track to start-over, after letting it play-through to a point where I felt comfortable with how I adjusted the levels. Guess my left hand has trouble staying in synch with my right!

 

I was not able to burn music on MD using SonicStage . Tried several times and found it incompatible with certain windows versions.
For now I copy my songs on a CD and then copy CD to MD using a MD/CD component.

 

To record music off of a computer I suggest the U-control UCA222: it is rather cheap but has great sound quality, RCA output, optical output and headphone amplifier.

Today I received my MZ-R35 and it is a beast of an MD recorder: it feels very solid and it is indeed rather heavy . But it sounds pretty good, the higher voltage of power supply allows for better sounding headphone amplifiers. I just ordered a new rechargeable battery, I want to play more with that recorder.

Actually back in the day I was more for Philips DCC, but in retrospective its failure was inevitable, a disk was far more practical than a cassette tape. Anyway I could not afford either DCC or MD so I kept going with CD and cassettes.

The CED is an interesting piece of technology, so flawed and late on the market it surprise me RCA had the courage to sell it for years. Maybe that is why it is so collectible now