Leland

So, nobody can confirm if Sony has officially discontinued this model?

Well, because if they stop making them, eventually they won't be available anymore, so I have to act quickly to buy one if I want a new one.

Is Sony discontinuing the MZ-RH1? I went to look for it on SonyStyle to buy one online and can't find it on their website any more.

How bad is the scratch? I would offer $225. Let me know what you think. I forgot to mention, email me at leemca@adelphia.net so I can pick it up on my BB. I don't check the MD site much any more.

I have on R-900 I would be willing to sell. I also have an N-10. Email me at leemca@adelphia.net with your interest and price suggestions.

I bought a RH910 about 9 months ago with the thought of copying SP and MDLP discs to HiMD to upload, but never did more than a few since it is so time consuming. Maybe I will sell the 910 to get this or perhaps buy this, rip all my old MD's, then sell the RH1 quickly while I can get a decent price. Hmmm. I wonder if the upload of SP preserves track titles?

Nice. Between the replaceable Li battery and the USB charging without a cradle and 30 hours of battery life at 128kbps encoding, this unit closes the book on battery life. Outstanding. Search by track will be interesting. The speed and acceleration for lists will have to be improved from the HD-1 I have to make this useful when searching a list of 5000 items. If it works well, it will be nice. The size is interesting as it is only marginally different from the HD-1/2/3: about 1 mm thicker. Slightly more weight at 135g vs. 110 for the HD-1. Too bad they didn't announce a larger HDD. I would like minimum 30 Gigs as my HD1 is full. That should be coming soon. Excellent.

Well, I just got back from BIC camera in Shibuya where I was able to handle the new units in my very own hands. Some of this might be known already, but just in case, I'll just say what I saw. Unfortunately, neither BIC nor Sakura-ya had the RH10 powered up, so I couldn't tell what the display looked like. The unit is almost entirely plastic, but pretty good looking plastic. The build quality seems good. There is a standard Mini USB port on the unit (yeah) and a 3V input. When the USB port is open, the 3V input is closed by a sliding cover that goes between the two, so the USB must power it just fine. The analog input also has optical digital, which I wasn't sure about before. The unit seemed light enough, but not ultralight. It also seemed fairly thick, much thicker than the top end NH1 model. The cradle seems to be only for charging based on the type of input it has and when in the cradle, the USB port seems to be inaccessable which seems weird. The orange one looks VERY orange. The black one and the blue one looked the best to me. The portable player only unit is also thicker than last years model. Nice looking. Overall, the addition of MP3, some nice industrial design, but with the plastic housings etc. obviously designed for a lower price point. The NH1 is still being positioned at a higher price, selling for about 5000 yen more than the RH10. The DH-10 is metal and the body has a curvature to it that is pretty cool. I took a picture and it took a long time to save it to disc. I suspect the reason for the low megapixel count might be due to long write times making the system not well suited to large file sizes as with a 5 megapixel ccd unless they were to build a big memory buffer in. Afterwards, I could not figure out how to display my picture on the unit, even after changing the menus to english, but I was a little rushed for time. That's about all I noticed. I'll try to answer any questions and sorry I couldn't view the display on the RH-10.

I got one about a month ago. Gran Tourismo is pretty cool, but a somewhat repetitive. I'm waiting to get more games when its released in the US so I can read the menus etc. Also, there need to be some better games. The screen is incredible for a handheld game machine. Only problem with buying in Japan that I didn't think about is that even though the games are region free, the movies most likely will not be and the system I got is region 2, not region 1, which would serve me better long term. On the other hand, I really don't see watching movies on it. When I travel I have my laptop for that. When I'm at home I have my 60 inch HDTV

Thanks atrain, but in this case, I was not using CDDB or a CD. I was importing an mp3 file of an entire album that I found somewhere. Any idea why the software would have a thumbnail of the album. If I call up the album art, it doesn't show any pictures either, as it does when I drag them over from Amazon (I use the same method you mention.)

Another thing I have noticed, when I import some MP3 files, it seems to come up with album art. Does it go find this or would it be embedded in the MP3 file somehow?

Thanks, bug80. I just tried this at home and you are absolutely right. I plugged in my N10 and the choices changed. Phew! Now, with the PSP and the memory stick pro duo. Interesting. With my 256 meg memory stick pro duo, SS recognized the device but complained about the memory stick not being compatible. No go as reported by lamewing. However, when I used the 32 meg Memory stick duo that came with the PSP, it worked! What is stranger, it would only transfer the file after converting it to ATRAC. Both Atrac and atrac plus worked. However, it would not transfer it as MP3 (the file I was using is an mp3 I imported but did not convert just for this test.) even though the PSP is quite capable of playing MP3's just by dragging them into the PSP/MUSIC folder. So, perhaps the PRO duo is the problem, since the stick that worked is a non-PRO stick. Weird. Fact is, for a proprietary format, the whole memory stick history is a joke with lack of compatibility etc and now at least 3 or 4 different varieties.

Installed fast and fine on my laptop which only has a small database. Interfaced with my Clie and tranferred. I have a 256 meg MS Pro Duo that says "MagicGate" right on it, I will test it tonight at home with my PSP and report back. Now, BIG potential problem: In the bit rate selection list for transferring, there does not appear to be a "Stereo" selection which used to mean standard MD (pre MDLP) for compatibility with non LP enabled devices (such as the head unit in my car). I will try again tonight when I have a MD recorder hooked up, but if this is true, it is a deal breaker for me at the moment since I could no longer create MD's for the car. I can see not supporting this with the new HiMD recorders perhaps, (well, not really) but why they would take it out of SonicStage beats me. Can anyone confirm or deny this? Otherwise, performance seems much snappier.

Hobgoblin, The point of carrying lots of MD's or having an entire music collection on a HDD player is because music is mood driven and mood is unpredictable. Sometimes I want to bang my head, sometimes I want to sooth it, sometimes I want to educate it. I never know what might strike me as fun to listen to over the course of a 3 to 5 day trip. With my NW-HD1, I pick it up and go and I'm done, loaded with 20 gigs of my legitimate (95% anyway) collection. I love it. When I used MD all the time, I would carry 40 discs sometimes and still not always have what I wanted.

My kids still use tapes by preference for audio books. It is the best way to be able to stop a story and start up again at the same point, especially when you might remove a tape, play another one, put the other back in, etc. The physical linear format does that logical job better than any other format. That said, last Sunday I spent 20 minutes repairing a tape that had been mangled by it's tape deck. I certainly don't miss that.