Leon

LOL. I said that because a lot of Chinese people - whether from China, HK or Taiwan - tend to assume some kind of cultural superiority, and look down on these South East Asian countries. Then if I tell anyone in the general Occidental direction about Thailand, all they can think of is also the prostitution. All right, so it might've been so bad it inspired "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy" (or maybe I got my reference wrong), but whatever!

Good news for people who need portable, live recording. Thank God Sony wasn't serious about making every buy a Vaio U with SonicStage Mastering Studio to replace their DAT portables. Bad news... It's just upload for Christsakes Got nothing to do with making a Mac the new mothership of your network walkman. I know even just this will be great for many musicians, but that's all. I think the reason UMD was created (instead of an Hi-MD that encompasses the DRM they need) is simply because there are so many divisions within Sony, like the Vaio Pocket versus the HD1/2/3/5 situation.

It's been in my "from" thing for a while, but allow me... I'm Taiwanese. I say that for geographical distinction, not political. I was born here in Taipei, up north. I'm ethincially Chinese; 3 of my grandparents came from different parts of China. This is quite typical if you know Chinese history circa 1949, I'll just skip that. The remaining one arrived earlier, and lived through the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. When I was 9 we moved to Bangkok, Thailand, and I pretty much stayed there until I went off to college in the US. I never learned Thai but Bangkok is great. don't let the supposed prostitution situation preempt/prevent your appreciation of the country. My first US stop was Los Angeles: I was an unhappy Trojan for two years, then I burned out and took a year off. Then I moved East to Buffalo, NY, which must've been a good move cause I started getting a lot of good words A year ago I finished college and came back to Taipei because, well, 4 years is enough for me to appreciate the US

Recording, recording, recording. There are many MP3 players that claim to record, but few have rec level control, and pretty much none of them can split tracks like MD track marks. MD portables are also surprisingly reliable for this purpose. I had the iAudio 4 once and it kept crashing or running out of juice mysteriously; ditto my current iRiver 790. Like bland, I use MD to record radio shows. Wait wait... is one of the few shows I can still laugh my body parts off to.

Oh Wow, I love that show! I'm a sucker for BBC radio 4. Actually not big on radio 1 or 2 or the other ones, but I really enjoy radio 4. Otherwise: the two local NPR stations where I used to live in the US: KCRW's "new ground" if I need new music and/or brag about how forward-thinking I am. WBFO runs a lot of jazz which helps me relax. A couple of mainstream FM stations in Bangkok. I listened to that kinda mushy mix of pop growing up, I'm not detaching from them no matter what. Plus when they do pick non-mainstream stuff they make some amazingly inspired choices. They taught me not to draw little boxes of genre thinking all music can fit neatly into one or another - meaning I was quite dazed when I realized in the US Badly Drawn Boy and Frou Frou were NOT considered to be pop somehow! Gaydar Radio. The "Oasis" show is mainly the Cafe Del Mar CDs plus a few love songs tossed in, but that's what I need. Nova 969 in Sydney used to have a nice chill out/ambient show which sadly disappeared before christmas. A nice chill out show should have a 'fatalistic' tinge to it, you know? that's my definition. Ah nevermind.

1. Better user interface. Any chance of bringing the fluidity and ease of the XMB to Hi-MD? That's by far my favorite Sony UI in ages. It - or its mutations - deserve to appear in more Sony products. Larger screen real estate should be put to better use. Stick to LCD - the HD5 screen probably outdoes OEL/OLED for outdoor visibility. 2. Faster transfers, faster TOC read/write - perceptively as fast as Lo-MD please. 3. Watch the units' size. I know you might need over 20mm thickness to install a jog dial in front, but come on! Do what Panasonic did, use the back as the front or something. 4. Something for myself: Recording timer. 5. Some kind of Mac support. Don't get mad, Sony, just because you didn't get to license MacOS in those early days... Or are these all in vain... MD is Norio Ohga's brainchild, so if Sony's just eager to leave his legacies behind...

Oh honey, that was Sony's argument for the size of the original MemoryStick. Witness how many people bought that argument?

So that's why my CBC3 downloads kept failing yesterday huh

The 847/848 might be a bit hard to find, I think they were discontinued a while ago. However Sony's current "standard" earbuds, the E931, have a smaller sized counterpart - the E930. http://www.ecat.sony.co.jp/avacc/headphone...8&KM=MDR-E930LP The drivers are 13.5mm instead of 16mm. The E930 comes in SP, LP, MP (2.5mm plug) and MM (sony's own micro jack). The E931 seems available worldwide but I don't know about the E930. Availability probably varies from one region to another.

Hey there! What I've done is to make playlists for all the 'single' songs that don't belong anywhere. This must be done on the PC, in SonicStage: you create a list, add songs, then hit the "--->" button so the list will appear on the HD5. If the songs are already on the HD5, there won't be duplicate copies. drag & drop... might be possible, I haven't tried it. You can always find the songs, right click, there's an "add to playlist" option. If you might want to change the list later, don't delete the list. It seems that even when you make another list of the same name, it won't be recognized as the same, and you'll have no way to update it. The other method is to use bookmarks. Find the song you want on the HD5, then add it to one of the 5 bookmark lists (you can add to all 5 if you want). You can edit the order of these lists. This is different from the iPod's on-the-go, because you can only add a track whilst it's playing

I got fed up with cooking so I'm going to eat oatmeal for a whole week and cornflakes. I'm not creative unless I starve myself...

Woo, in order of their impact on me. 1. Panasonic RQ-SX60, 1996. This cassette walkman is advertised for 40x speed. In theory, 4 minutes of tape can be wound up in just 6 seconds. The transport sounds incredibly smooth and it "takes off" like a jet. In answer to Sony's MD-like eject mechanism, the cassette lid came in two halves, one recedes behind another when you open it. And Apple-style battery life LEDs. Matsushita can be very radical when they choose to; I think this was the finest moment for Panasonic portable audio - almost as glamorous as the S60/80 and more competent than Sony in mechanism. I mean, I had the 15th anniversary Sony EX1/FX1 (both) and they wouldn't wind tapes properly 2. Sharp Zaurus SL-C760. Huge impact, because it showed me my future is NOT in computers, no matter what anyone may try to tell me because they're too dumb to wade through windows xp, use photoshop, or too dumb to protest that dreamweaver actually sucks! I had it for only two days cause people would post command line tricks and NONE of them worked. 3. Lamy 2000 fountain pen. The design will be 40 year old next year, very supple to write with. Together with those Rhodia notepads, these showed me I should've never never never never ever bought PDAs. I always had a tough time trying to get PDAs to work, and more creative/efficient with just pen and paper.

I think Sony is always capable of churning out appealing products, they've got an innate understanding of the human need for glamour. They just have to be prompted that something requires serious effort, or they'd slack. They've placed a lot of emphasis on DVD/HDD recorders (Cocoon, sugoroku), Vaio, the playstations, even Wega. Portable audio hasn't been high priority for (what I think must be) at least a decade, so it's not going to be able to compete with someone like Apple. Apple doesn't bring new concepts to the table, but their products make it obvious that a lot was at stake for them - they're so meticulous with every piece of the puzzle. Same with Sharp, which was piss-poor in the whole of 70s cause it invested so much just to get LCD to work, then suddenly every music video insisted on Aquos. The one thing Sony invested heavily in those times was the CCD - I'd like to think that's got something to do with CyberShot's staying power. The duplicate product lines happened because there were multiple "companies" within Sony and their competing with each other was considered a good thing.

Get the NH1 if you like having a remote, and the NH900 if you prefer doing without one (ie. grabbing the unit in your hand - the American way). Very important consideration, this one!

With SonicStage and its related software, there's the danger that you're not using the bitrate you thought you're using. If you find 48 and 256 to sound exactly the same, you might in fact be listening to one of them twice - do double check. The other possibility is that you're already satisfied with 48, and/or you don't really need 256. The sound will degrade when it's encoded twice, but can your ears hear the degradation? Go with what your ears are satisfied with. Sony's official roadmap suggests that they think 48 is comparable to MP3 @ 128, 64 is comparable to 192 MP3, and 256 is very near-CD.** IMO this is why they didn't set another bitrate between 64 and 256 for lay people use. ** YMMV of course, but I definitely don't mind music re-encoded with A3+ 64.

Sharp's press release makes it sound like the DS30 doesn't use metal on the bottom side (the top lid is aluminum).

I'm not telling him to switch to an iPod - I'm only saying that I know as a fact that no MD portable has a means of jumping very quickly to a specific spot, the way it is implemented on the iPod and perhaps some other products too. Yes, in fact I did use that slider just two days ago, but does SonicStage or OMGJB on a computer meet the criteria for portable listening? Maybe if he shells out $1500 for a Vaio U or $2000 for a VaioC1? :roll:

Uhm, because we're dumb brand followers and don't know better? Just kidding. Sony's the creator who's made themselves responsible for proliferation, and the survival of Sharp's entire audio division hinged on their achievements in MD, so these two companies seem to be more dedicated to engineering MD portables that attract us. I was a big Panasonic fan until 2 or 3 generations into their MD portables - they really aren't as well thought out as Panasonic's earlier CD and cassette portables IMO. Instead there was quite often the tendency to slack and attract people with specs (battery life, size), sacrificing real performance/utility in the process. I read the comment somewhere that since Panasonic is huge (Sharp only has like 1/6 the number of Panasonic's outlets in Japan), they tended to take things easy and assume they'll have current owners as dedicated customers who'll sign on to the new products... and I agree wholeheartedly. The Japanese review is really very good - lots of detail is the norm and not the exception for these guys - they've got a way of reasoning that makes so much sense to me.

FF/REW in pause is still much slower than what the iPod can do, plus the iPod doesn't involve pausing/unpausing. Not bashing MD at all here - it's just that MD portables haven't been designed to do that. Track mark is a difficult thing unless you've got a current Sony model.

Since US models usually don't even have katakana, I'll bet money that Kanji is also removed from the N10 8)

Yes, Sharp tends to have a nicer user interface even with less number of text display lines and a menu hierarchy (i.e. it doesn't get better with more expensive Sonys). I have sworn by Sharp for a few years and they've yet to disappoint me. Sony these days is known for sacrificing ease of use in the name of elegant design... others do it too but they're far less pretentious than Sony. :roll: A lot of MP3 players are way more generous with the display and user interface than MD portables. The iPod or something else will beat even the Sharps for that cozy generosity (more text scrolled at once, more info, more options - if you own a SlimX you know what I mean). Personally I've bought two iPods, been fascinated and then disappointed at them, and in the end sold each of them and came back to MD... it depends on what your priorities are. I think radio recording in portables wasn't implemented because some form of shielding is required to prevent MD from interfering with the reception... something like that. Hooking a pocket radio up to an MD portable isn't that hard, though. There are quite a few MD portables that come with speakers bundled. They're not the cheapest though, being imported from Japan, and they're for those "to have is better than not have" occasions, usually don't sound very passable. No bookmarking specific points in a track in any MD portable AFAIK. And yes, I agree that's lame The bookmark function on new Sonys and Sharps will always start from the beginning. You're better off getting an iPod if that's top priority. You know how you can press one button and "scrub" the wheel to jump to wherever you want in split seconds... no MD portable will do that. I can sympathize because I record 10-15 (sometimes 20) hours of radio off the web every weekday.

No English reviews simply because there isn't much enthusiasm about this model among us... here's a Japanese one: http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/200...20725/npp32.htm I'd be happy to help translate this one, but not today, I've got exams coming up... tell me what you want to find out and I'll do it within the next few days.

I downloaded a Japanese E10-E12 catalog a while ago, and it says these decks are SCMS compliant. I guess that means you'll have to look at other solutions.

I believe the JA333ES is the latest ES deck.

The MD format itself has S/N ratio that's comparable to CD; in theory it's even capable of better than that. However, the S/N ratio of portables is often less than what the format's capable of, usually because... (a) the D/A conversion IC used has not-so-good performance. I recall a few years ago seeing Japanese discussions on the D/A, A/D ICs made by Asahi Kasei (used in some Sonys), that they have the same S/N ratio spec no matter if they're 16-bit, 20-bit, or 24-bit... ( The power that the amp is allowed to draw has really been cut down, to allow for better battery life, and that somehow hurts performance. Digital amp is a very exciting technology for us, because it can incorporate D/A conversion (in the form Sharp implemented it, at least), and can do a better job of it. When a lot of people say the DS8 and DR7 sound better, I believe that's at least partly due to better S/N ratio.