Joanne_Chan

You really really need a decent 'table anything from Rega or Pro-ject upward with a decent phono stage to get decent copies on your PC from records.

Usually I copy via the digital output of my NAD CDP and make a coffee ready to read online news sites while it gets on it. To play on my all units I keep it in SP (not keen on MDLP 2 for quality)

As far as I can recall they upgraded the capacitor and 'tuned' the model to UK tastes but how much of this marketing hype and how much can proven is hard to tell. It was rife with Sony in the late 90's. I only have the 940QS in its UK form.

You need to define the main use of the machine, for a home based deck either the Sony 555 mentioned above or the JB940 which is what I have are reliable and do sound very good. I'm inclined to think as portable recorders go look for the youngest with the features you need as they are statistically more likely to be 'much loved' being used in the field in all conditions and do take a blank plus a recorded desk and fully check before handing over money.

Depends on the mix but it is certainly true that Phil Ramone's mixes for Billy Joel have a lot of centre information which would be at risk in joint stereo based codecs.

The HIMD NH600/700/900 units were only the market for a short period in the UK at least and didn't really sell when all the attention in personal audio that year was on the iPod so there's not as many about compared to the earlier NetMD models pushied in the early naughties.

I have one of those bought new in 2004 which is in great shape to replace a problematic Sony LP playback only MD portable. I liked the record quality a lot on it (Type -S made a difference to LP sound) but for personal reasons struggled with using the jog wheel to input titles (the << and >> key routine on the Sharp may of seemed cumbersome but I could use it better with my hands).

I think LP4 was really for background music and audiobooks as the notes I had with those home and portable units that featured it referred to random noise that could occure while using it. LP2 wasn't bad but could ( in personal experience did) trip up sounding 'phasy' on music with lots of high frequency transients such as cymbols playing. This said the type -S version of LP2 on my HiMDNH700 was noticable better in that regard.

I recall around October or Novemeber of 1994 Q had a mountain of rovelled up casette tape stuck inside the magazine as part if an advert for MD

A few thoughts on getting quality program on to your MD discs. Try to keep with the original SP/mono formats becuse the codec performs really well like that although Hi-SP ain't bad for long stereo programs and PCM is awesome (provided you have the 1GB HiMD discs). The very best quality can be usually achieved transferring from CD matching the levels up if it's a compilation you're making assuming the cd was well mastered. You can have the convienence of download stores with MD by downloading high bit rate files (a certain store in the UK that's not Amazon does Mp3s at 320 and or very high bit rate AAC) and burning them onto to re-writable cds and copying that via your cd player. They often sound better than played native in a personal player. It's ironic my laptop sounds much better over HD565 headphones than any personal player using Winamp! Finally buy or borrow the best headphones you can.

I came by this today as a frequent reader of the old board with a smile on my face.I've been through a number of personal solid state players some even supporting Lossless Audio and still I found they were lacking the expressiveness of something that was only stored away namely my Sharp MH270 personal MD recorder running on discs recorded at either monural or SP stereo mode. Lossly ATRAC4.5 might of been but it sound more musical than the lossless files on my Sensa clip digital player.