syn010110

So... I'm broke. Really really broke. Had some unexpected and unavoidable expenses come up that totally wiped everything out, leaving us with less than fifty dollars to get us to April. In order to facilitate eating and bill-paying, I've decided that it's less important to have minidisc stuff than it is to have food. So I'm clearing out everything, every MD-related thing I have. It's not something I want to do, but I don't really have much of a choice if I want to be able to make it to April without having to go hungry for days on end. I'm looking to get $200 or best offer for the entire lot: MD units: Sony MZ-E520 (pink) - in near-flawless condition and perfect working order. Sounds absolutely lovely and gets ridiculous battery life on a single gumstick. Sony MZ-R700 (blue) - in near-flawless condition and perfect working order. I have done the Type-R firmware hack on this unit so it records SP at higher quality than stock. Sony MZ-N505 (silver) - in fair condition and perfect working order. Cosmetically it's a bit beat up but it works just fine--I've been using it to make digital recordings via optical and title tracks in SonicStage. Sharp IM-DR80 (silver) - in excellent physical condition but unfortunately works only when it wants to. Sometimes it refuses to spin up and requires percussive maintenance to get it playing. I don't know what's wrong with it, but I suspect it may be a loose connection, possibly power to the motor. Accessories: Sony RM-MC33EL (white) - in near-flawless condition and working order. Sony RM-MZ4R (black) - in like-new condition and working order. Sony MZ-E520 charging dock (pink) - in like-new condition. Sony 100v 1A 3V AC adapter (center positive, fits all three Sony units), this one came with the E520 Sony 120v 500mA 3V AC adapter (center positive, fits all three Sony units), this one came with a recorder I don't have anymore, but it fits and works with all the others HQRP 1450mAh 1.2v gumstick NiMH battery - nearly new, has had only four full charge cycles Sony 900mAh 1.2v gumstick NiMH battery - the original pack-in battery for the E520, it still holds a charge, but only for about 12-14 hours in SP mode vs the 36+ hours for the HQRP battery Repurposed Sony earbud slip case - this nylon hard pouch fits three MDs very easily if you slide them in shutter-side first. Sony MDR-E808SL earbuds (pack-ins that came with the E520) Discs: 10 Victor CLEAR MD 80 min 20 Sony Niege 80 min 6 Memorex Crystal 80 min (with Memorex Crystal 6 MD box) 6 Fuji MD black 74 min 3 Sony Color Collection 74 min (2 red, 1 orange) 1 Sony Color Collection 80 min (blue) 5 Maxell Color MD 74 min (1 purple, 1 pink, 1 blue, 1 green, 1 yellow) 1 Hi-Space Color MD 80 min (blue) 1 Minidisco.com Robot MD 74 min (cyan) 2 Daiso 28 capacity MD boxes with latching lids (pink) I will ensure that all discs are erased and cleaned of labels before shipping. I'm looking to get, as I said, $200 for the lot. Best offers may be accepted depending on situation. Buyer pays shipping. I'm going to put these up on eBay eventually, but I'd like to avoid the headache if at all possible.

The generic green 1450mAh gumstick battery I got from Amazon holds a fantastic charge. I managed to get two and a half weeks of near-daily use, around 1.5-3 hours SP playback per day. The original Sony 900mAh gumstick it came with is quite old and thus holds only about a third of that (it still works, though).

It would be sensible to keep the RH1 at home and safe since it is hard to come by and has unlimited transfer capability. If you need to use something on your bike I'd suggest solid-state.

I think what the OP means is that by using their RH1 to transfer directly to PC, they'd lose resolution and bit depth as it would force a conversion to 16-bit LPCM. It's entirely possible that their PC doesn't have an optical digital line-in.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Hi-MD-MiniDisc-player-CASE-holds-walkman-recorders-w-shoulder-strap-EXCELLENT-/121272051208?pt=US_Personal_MiniDisc_Recorder&hash=item1c3c60a608 I saw this on ebay while searching for deals on MD units.

I have a Sharp IM-DR80 that I'm trying to sell. I don't really know anything about fixing MD portables or anything with this many mechanical parts in it (I'm more about fixing smartphones and other solid-state devices that have no moving bits and pieces), but this unit is not quite... right. Currently (as of five minutes ago) the DR80 is playing discs beautifully. Sounds fantastic and all that stuff. The body is in really good shape with only a few small scratches; the worst physical damage is the small tab that locks the battery door in place has been broken off, but you could fix that pretty easily by replacing the plastic piece with one from a dead unit, or using some epoxy to re-create the missing bit, or (what I had planned to do) simply use some stick-on velcro strips to keep it shut. The problem with the unit is sometimes, whenever it feels like it, it'll quit working. Put a disc in, it'll give you the "beep" feedback, but the motor won't spin up and the disc won't play at all. Every time this happens, I've tapped the thing lightly-ish against my palm (flat against it, striking my hand with the back of the unit) and the motor seems to wake back up, spinning and reading the disc without issue. Once it starts working again, it seems to stay working unless you let it sit for a few days or it gets jolted around too much. I'd guess that the device has a loose connection somewhere, probably power to the motor that spins the disc. I don't really have the knowledge to repair one of these and since it actually does work (when it feels like it), I'd rather not sacrifice it to my own curiosity. I don't have the money to ask someone who knows what they're doing to repair it, and the four-poles headphone thing is getting annoying anyway since I can't use my UE600 headset with it (as the earphones have a four-pole arrangement for Left/Right/Ground/Mic rather than Left/Right/L.Ground/R.Ground) and I end up just using my Sony E520 pretty much 100% of the time, at least until I get a new pair of earphones. So I'll put it up here to see if anyone wants it before I toss it to the dogs on eBay. Please be aware that this is just the main DR80 unit and the external AA battery caddy. I don't have the remote or the docking station that came with it, and without those parts it can only really function as a player. Someone else who has a DR80 may want to make use of it, though, either for parts or as a backup main unit. I'm willing to either sell the thing for $30 plus the cost of shipping from Oakland, CA, or trade it for something. I'd be willing to trade it for new or used blank MDs (I can always use those), especially if they're cute or interesting looking. I'd also be willing to trade it for another recorder or player. I would be willing to add cash on top of it to trade for a player of greater value (I'd be especially thrilled to get my hands on a fully-functional Auvi portable player such as a DS8, DS70 and the like, or any of the Kenwood versions). Payment would be through either Paypal or Amazon Payments in the case of a purchase. Anyway thanks for listening to my long-windedness. If nobody has much interest in the thing I'll move it to eBay after a week or so.

So on a whim I put a battery in the DR80 again and again it just beeped, but I decided to apply percussive maintenance by bashing it against my palm. This randomly caused the motor to spin up and the disc played beautifully. So I'm wondering if the problem is an intermittent short on the motor's power. I wonder if taking it apart would reveal more...

No, the N505 is not spectacular. It beats most cheap MP3 player audio quality, but it sounds worse than my Nexus 4 and my partner's Sansa Clip. It can't even touch the audio quality of my E520 or the sometimes-functional DR80.

Really? Huh. I always thought it would be very similar sounding (as in, decent but not great) to the N505 I already have.

E-mailed!

!!! I want those! What would they cost me?

Well I've been using my generic green gumstick battery for about five days now and it seems to be doing quite well. I've been listening to my E520 for about 2-ish hours a day on average and the battery hasn't been charged since the day I got it, and it's still at 3 bars (though it sometimes drops to 2 bars and then goes back up to 3).

Out of the ones you have, I'm most interested in the Axia "select your style" and "lego" discs as well as the Daiso Cube Mix discs. Still trying to find someone with first-run Sony Lumina in pink. They are quite rare!

I don't mind if they're used as long as they're not dirty or horribly mangled. If they've been recorded on a few (or even a lot of) times, I don't mind because you can record on these things zillions of times before something goes wonky. Max price per disc depends on what disc it is. I'd pay more for something like, a brand-new sealed first-generation Sony Lumina in pink than I would for a used Axia lego disc.

Yeah, I figured it was an impossible pie-in-the-sky dream.

RH1s are in extremely high demand because they're the only unit that can transfer from MD to PC regardless of format or recording method. This has resulted in eBay "speculators" sniping them for 150-200 from people who don't know any better and then re-listing them for hundreds of dollars more. I saw a local computer shop in my area with four of them, brand new in box, just a month ago... they wanted $200 each. I would have bought one in a nanosecond if I could have afforded them. When I went back later with money, all four were gone... presumably to end up on eBay for $600+. I hope I can get one before they all disappear or become (even more) ridiculously expensive... but I don't do enough recording to really justify spending hundreds on one. :/ Sony should really do everyone a favor and release firmware updates that unlock the security bits and let all HiMD units transfer as freely as the RH1, but I am not holding my breath.

Most of the really readily available blanks are the boring ones. I've got a bunch of those... 20 Sony Niege and 10 Victor CLEAR MD. That's nice and dandy, but I'd like to get some cuter ones. :3 I'm looking for: Sony Lumina (1st gen) in pink or blue TDK HO TDK "WA" Design Axia "lego" color discs Daiso Cutipop Things of that nature. There were a lot of really neat looking blanks out there, like the bit-club ones, but I'm specifically looking for "cute." Also not Hello Kitty. I don't care about capacity; if I have some album that actually does go over 74 minutes (almost never happens except those with bonus CDs) I'll just record it to one of my boring discs.

So I also noticed when attempting to set track marks that the Memorex discs would sometimes not seek properly. I'd hold the seek buttons down and it'd just sit and spin, the time neither decrementing nor incrementing. So yeah, they've been junked. The Sony Niege discs track, seek, play and record flawlessly with no problems; same with the Victor ones. I played with one of the Memorex discs for a minute and realized that the discs rattle around inside the cartridge way, way more than the others. Oh, and the metal shutter actually got hung up in my recorder when I removed it. >_>; That sealed the deal for me. I'll stick with the brands I know work well... fortunately there seems to be a pretty good supply of new Sony and Victor discs floating around out there. Edit: The clear plastic box is amazing. I threw out the discs, but totally kept the box. It's perfect for taking albums with me and tossing them in my backpack. It's a bit bulky for my purses and handbags, though.

It's only doing it with the Memorex discs. None of my others, the Sonys or the Victors, make this noise. I'm just going to set them aside and not use them. I'd hate to wreck my E520, finding another pink one would be super hard. Edit: Well, okay, the other discs make the ticking noise too, but it's almost totally inaudible. The Memorex ones were ticking so loudly that I could hear it over the sound of music on headphones. Also I noticed the seams on my Sony and Victor discs are very even, where they're so uneven on the Memorex discs that I can almost fit a fingernail between the two halves of the outer cartridge casing and pop 'em open. Well, I know which ones not to get in the future. I remember back in the old days I had bad luck with Maxell discs as well. I'll stick with Sony, Victor, TDK and Axia...

I don't have a lot of discs, so I'm hoping that my discs aren't actually bad, but I wonder if they are. I have five Memorex clear 80 minute discs. When I record to them, and only to them, they make a "tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick" noise every so often. The recording does not seem to be affected by this. I have 27 discs total; 10 Victor CLEAR MD 80 minute, 10 Sony Niege 80 minute, one Sony Color Series 74 minute and one Sony Color Series 80 minute, and these 5 Memorex clear discs. Only the Memorex discs exhibit this behavior; all the Sony and Victor discs record with hardly anything other than the whirring of the recorder's internal mechanisms. They do not appear to be damaged in any way, and my recorder is still just chugging along. The ticks seem to last for about 10-15 seconds and then stop. The volume of the ticking sound can vary. Wondering if this is anything to worry about, if I should avoid using these discs? I'd rather not throw them out, but then again it's better to lose five discs than damage my MD units.

Got my generic gumstick battery in the mail. It's supposed to be 1450mAh; I'm charging it up right now. Like the old blue ones I used to get, the plastic is a little loose around the negative terminal and I had to trim it up a bit so it'd go into my E520 easily. We'll see how the capacity is soon enough. :3 The NH-10WM that came with the E520 is only 900mAh and is the same age as the player (several years old) and still gets about 25-ish hours of SP playback. If the generic green battery can get ~35 hours I'll be pretty pleased.

Probably list it for sale here as repair/parts, try to get back some of what I spent on it.

Finding an RH1 for sale will usually result in the loss of anywhere between $300 and $900 from your wallet. Blame the eBay speculators who bought them up when Sony announced the discontinuation of the format, sat on them for years and decided to sell them on eBay for twice their original value. >_>;

I don't have the accessories for the DR80, which is why I posted a thread looking for them in the classifieds a while back. The eBay seller I bought the thing from claimed that all the accessories were included and they were not. The seller also claimed that it was in perfect working condition. It was not. I guess I can sell it to someone else marked "for repair or parts" but meh. It wasn't a lot of money but I'm not happy about it. :/

I bought one HQRP gumstick to see how it goes. Kinda surprised really. The NH-10WM inside my "new to me" E520 is the original battery shipped with the unit... which means it's like almost 8-9 years old at this point, yet I spent probably 7+ hours listening to music on the player since I charged it up. Battery hasn't friggin' budged.