BearBoy

This video by "Spare Time Repair" popped up in my YouTube feed this morning. Thought it might be of interest to some people here 🙂

Hi @RomulusXXV. Are you asking about portable recorders or decks? The drive units for the latter are shared among multiple different models (e.g. you can put the drive unit from an MDS-JE480 in an MDS-JE780 or MDS-JB980). I think @kgallen might have produced a list on here at some point.

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.

According to the User Manual for the MZ-N910:

Thanks for posting the pictures. I love the look of those pro devices and what you've done with the Raspberry Pi looks really interesting. Can you use that to control what it plays as well as showing that it is playing? I know @kgallen has a number of the pro Sony decks (the rack mount ones). They also have RS232 serial ports on the back. I wonder if they could connect up in the same way? Anyway, should probably save the questions for your new thread. In battery related news, my gumstick kept going until 10.30pm last night, when I finally turned it off. I got another 2 hours or so out of it this morning before it finally gave up the ghost for good. I think in total I got about 14-15 hours out of it, although for around half of that it was displaying the low battery indicator. When I tested the voltage at the end it was 1.228V but I couldn't coax it into playing any more.

I've only just picked up on this. Would be interesting to hear a bit more about that (and see some pictures) if you ever get the time.

Apologies if the running commentary on my battery life is a bit tedious 🥱 Just wanted to record the results somewhere and this seemed as good a place as any. It's now been running for over two hours since the battery supposedly died. Still showing low battery. I tested the voltage using the AA battery case connectors and it's reading as 1.212V. I mentioned earlier that I'd had mixed results with some of my Vapex gumstick batteries. I've found one that is only registering 0.975V even after being charged with my USB charger. Looks like that one is destined for the recycling unless anyone knows whether Ni-MH batteries can be revived? I've found a couple of things suggesting you can bring a battery with 0V back to life by connecting it up to a working one (positive to positive, negative to negative) but not sure whether the same would work for one that's like mine.

About 15-20 minutes after I last posted, the battery gave out. I removed it and re-inserted and it's being playing for about another 30 minutes so far. Still showing low battery.

It's been going for over seven and a half hours so far. The battery indicator is flashing to indicate low battery (has been for maybe 30 minutes or more - didn't notice when it started) but shows no sign of stopping just yet. The manual suggests a playback time of 31 hours with a gumstick battery (with power save mode engaged, which I haven't). I don't think it'll keep going that long...

🤣 I did have a purge of my saved searches a while back but I could probably do with cutting it back further 🙂

They're in the actual saved search in the app, not separate "you might also be interested in" items. They often are higher up the list than the items the search was actually for too. I did always get a lot of crossover with the JB9XX QS decks but it seems to have gone a bit haywire in the last week. Maybe I'll delete my saved searches and start again. See if that makes any difference.

I bought one of the USB chargers that comes with two Doublepow batteries and they seem pretty decent. I've been playing my MZ-N910 for about two hours this morning and the battery is still showing as full on the player's display. I'll leave it running and see how long it lasts. I have had mixed results with gumstick batteries tbh. A couple of Vapex ones I had didn't hold much of a charge but I'd lost track of which ones I'd purchased new and which had come bundled with players I'd bought so couldn't be sure how old they were/how they'd been treated. I've also got a Jinmasi one, which seems fine. I have had instances where the player indicates the battery is dying only to subsequently show it as having plenty of charge left when you take it out and reinsert. Not sure if this is an issue with the battery or the player though. What I have found is that they don't always charge particularly well inside players. They never seem to charge long enough to get fully charged. A standalone charger does seem more effective in my experience.

@cgi_ tried it in my MZ-N710 with a Doublepow gumstick (freshly charged) and got 1.450V. Got pretty much the same readings when doing the same test with an MZ-N910 and just testing the battery itself (give or take around 0.005V). Does that help at all?

Not sure if this is a me problem or something more general but in the last couple of weeks my saved eBay searches have started showing up all sorts of irrelevant(ish) results. For example, my saved search for "Sony MDS-JB980" would often flag up 920s/930s/940s but I always assumed this might be because the seller was tagging those devices. Fair enough, they're all fairly directly related. Now, however, I'm getting MDS-JE480s, MDS-JE530s, MDS-JE330s, MDS-JE520s, MDS-JE770s, MDS-JE780s, MDS-JE440s, MDS-JE640s etc. Pretty much any Sony MiniDisc deck is now being flagged to me under my saved search. Same thing is happening with portables. My search for "Sony MZ-N920" used to throw up MZ-N910s on occasion but now I'm getting pretty much any Sony portable, including playback only models, non-NetMD recorders, HiMD devices etc. This evening I got the same 7 Sony portables flag up under my saved searches for MZ-E730, MZ-E720, MZ-E909, MZ-N910, MZ-N920, MZ-R909 and MZ-R910 (yes, I have too many saved searches set up... 🤣) and yet none of them were the models I was actually searching for. Anyone else started seeing this or has something gone wonky at my end?

I've been trying to remember why I sent you down one of the particular rabbit holes with regard to this. I think it was because my daily driver office deck, an MDS-JB980, doesn't have a coaxial digital output but my PC audio interface is coaxial only. In order to play MiniDiscs digitally into my PC I was running through an external optical to coaxial convertor, which isn't the most elegant solution. I could use the 940, which also sits in my office, but then I wouldn't have got the benefit, if indeed my ears could detect one, of Type-S decoding for MDLP discs. Since they added the ripping capability to Web MiniDisc Pro, I can get the audio off a MiniDisc and into my PC without recording it in realtime. I've actually only got very few MiniDiscs with audio that didn't originate from a CD I already own or from audio files on my PC. Just a few radio recordings from the late 90s/early 2000s and some home recordings. All of which were made with my original MDS-JE500 and are, therefore, SP so Type-S would be an irrelevance anyway 🙄 TL;DR I was almost certainly over thinking something. Sorry. Having said that, it might be a nice little project to create an MDS-JB980 with the more comprehensive connectivity of its QS predecessors. You can never have too many connectivity options, right? Alternatively, and potentially more likely, I could end up wrecking a reasonably valuable deck...

No need to apologise. Easy mistake to make when I was replying to a comment from about 6 months ago 🙂

I suspect this is one of the reasons sealed MiniDisc blanks have never got to the crazy prices decent quality sealed cassette tapes go for. That and the fact that one MiniDisc is exactly the same quality audio wise as the next. No point in paying a premium trying to get better sound.

Wow. Interesting that they're rationing stock. I've probably got enough spares to keep me going but I wonder if this will have a knock on effect on the, already inflated imho, prices people are asking for blanks on eBay and the like? Nothing like a bit of fomo to get people to spend more than is sensible...

Just did a quick test with my MZ-N710 and a pair of Beyerdynamic DT 990 Pros (250 ohms) and it was loud enough for me (although I did have the volume a fair way up). I suspect I don't blast things quite as loud as some people prefer though. That or my player has also been modified 🤔

Nice find! I don't know how common such mods were tbh. Back in the day, I wasn't aware of anyone who had modded their player and I never felt the need to. I wasn't a member of a place like this back then though so maybe those "in the know" were doing it to all their MiniDisc players?

Surely the more you use the more you save? Or something. Maybe I should be buying more blanks. Just to save money, like 🤔 Love the fact that children used to be able to send off for knives from the back of breakfast cereal. The mind boggles 😂

Would have been a good investment looking at what the 1GB discs go for these days.

That's probably for the best 🤣 I also double checked today... 🙄

I've got a feeling I looked into that once and they didn't deliver to the UK.

It's a sickness 🤣