MDX-400

Yep, I'll agree. I kinda laughed when I read that post at first. It is one thing to point out that one unit was made in Japan and the other in Malaysia but then to simply do that and then say "does that answer your question?" is a little silly. To put it bluntly, no that does not answer anyone's question! While the country of manufacture may play a role in a unit's quality you can't just state that and be done with it, you'd have to give reasons as to why it would be that way. (E.g. Perhaps one factory has lower QC standards and you know this because....). If it is nothing other than "it has to be worse because it is made in Malaysia" that kind of thing doesn't go over well. And if you think there haven't actually been series' of MD units where you'd wish you bought a Malaysia-made unit instead of a Japan-made one, you're dead wrong. Just check into how many Made-in-Malaysia N707s are still going compared to the number of problem-ridden Made-in-Japan N1s there are!

Funny enough a rechargeable NiCd shares the same discharge characteristics as an NiMH and can handle more current draw than an alkaline (like the Duracell, unless this is an NiMH Duracell we're talking about). The same story goes for the NiCd as does for the NiMH above--if it isn't worn out and is fully charged, it should work without a problem. The best NiCd AA you can get has a capacity of about 1000mAh, whereas NiMH AAs are better for the environment and are now up to 2500mAh. Using throw-away alkalines is fine too, but I would again recommend you get some NiMH AAs and a charger if you don't already have those. It is better for the environment (than throwing away batteries) and they'll be better for recording and last just as long for playback, AND it will be cheaper than buying batteries all the time. If you don't want to buy a charger, your NF610 will be able to charge NiMH cells (one battery only obviously)... All you do is connect the AC adapter and press the STOP button when the unit is already off. You should see the charge indicator come on. Note that your manual will tell you charge time will take something like 3hrs, but that is for the "cheater" NiMH Sony packaged... For a 2000mAh or higher AA, charging will take about 9-10 hours for a fully drained battery. NOTE: DO NOT connect the AC adapter and press the STOP/CHARGE feature if you have an alkaline installed in the unit. The unit may attempt to charge it and you might end up with an exploded battery which may damage your unit and/or cause you personal injury. Only charge NiCd or NiMH batteries inside your NF610.

Okay well I definitely know my soundcard (not the motherboard chip) does indeed output 44.1kHz when I set the rate in the mixer settings. My DA4ES (which displays all available info about an S/PDIF stream) clearly shows a 44.1kHz rate (Interestingly any PC device with digital output I've ever used only outputs 14-bit S/PDIF! I always thought that accounts for the missing subcode information such as SCMS and track marks, etc.) As for my on-board sound chipset, I'm pretty sure its drivers also have an option for 44.1kHz output, though I've never tried it. I am going to buy the ~$10 digital output bracket in the near future and try it out.

Yep. If you simply open the lid of your unit as if you were changing discs and look up at the lid of the player, directly above where the lens is (because the OWH is physically connected to the pickup sled) you will see the OWH. It is a very small (and therefore delicate) part. It is a little white square with a very small metal square within that. (Just like a cassette deck's record head, if you remember what those look like! Only a LOT smaller.) You simply have to gently clean that in the same manner as the lens. If the OWH is bent or misaligned in any way then that will cause problems too. That is why you have to be careful not to do that. If you remove the unit's lid you can do an eyeball check of the alignment. With the lid removed and then the frame of the lid closed (or at least lowered) the OWH should be precisely over the centre of the lens. Furthermore the OHW should follow the lens for the entire sled travel--i.e. if you push the sled to the centre the OWH should follow, if you push it to the edge it should follow as well. If all of this checks out and you've cleaned both the lens and the head, and you're certain that it isn't a problem with SS or the files being transferred, I'd say it is time for a new unit (yours could be repaired but with an N505 repair will definitely be more costly that buying a new and better unit, like a HiMD ).

I'm curious as to the right of the musicians to do this. Surely I can imagine that some musicians have in their contract the right to go ahead and do this, but at the same time wouldn't there also be a lot (probably even more) artists that do not have such a clause in their contracts making them able to circumvent Sony and take their music right to Apple? I'm wondering if Sony can take legal action against the artist and/or Apple for some of this "crossing the floor" that it looks like is happening. As for iPods I absolutely hate them! Like leonyuhanov said above (point #3), I'd also like to stab (or perhaps slap in the head, lol) people that just buy an iPod because it is an iPod. Like c'mon there are so many better players out there from different makers.

I dunno about that. There were plenty of Sony ES CD players back in the 90s that had very good D/A converters; not to mention offerings from other brands. Also about using the MD deck's analog line-outs I wouldn't go so far either. I have an MDS-JB920 deck and I connect it via optical cable to my STR-DA4ES receiver. First of all despite the 24-bit Current Pulse D/A on the JB920, I'm sure my DA4ES has better D/A conversion than the JB920 does. Afterall, it does have three 64-bit processors in it and it also contains the amp which is amplifying the sound. Furthermore, unless I use the "Analog Direct" feature on my receiver, the analog output from the MD deck will be re-converted to digital to be processed/carried inside the receiver using the receiver's A/D converter. Then before amplification (since the DA4ES uses analog amps) it will be reconverted to analog. Obviously unnecessary conversions going on there. This is "solved" by the Analog Direct feature but, in Analog Direct mode, no processing and EQing can take place, and if you have a subwoofer it will be unuseable as well because the receiver won't process the sub information. Most lower-end receivers, however, don't even offer an Analog Direct mode. Meaning that any analog signals will be converted to digital for signal processing and then back to analog. Any "digital" receiver (meaning pretty much any receiver that does DD/DTS decoding) will do this, meaning you're getting D/A from the MD deck and then A/D in the receiver and then the receiver's D/A again applied (if it is an analog-amp receiver)... Those "same" high-end D/As you speak of--in the SACD decks that would only be important in playing back standard CDs (or CD layers), correct? Because I was pretty sure that all SACD decoding to analog is handled by proprietary Sony DSD (Direct Stream Digital) decoders.

Hey, I dunno if anyone has asked/noted this already but I'm not seeing a NetMD logo on either of these decks, nor am I seeing a USB connection on them? Do these Hi-MD units lack NetMD capability or am I just not seeing the USB connector properly in the pictures? It would be quite strange to have a Hi-MD unit without NetMD!

More like SCMS, but I guess that is a form of DRM (funny enough SCMS has to be like the oldest form of DRM!). As for not being able to copy an MD copied digitally from a CD, that is true if you copied it from a standard home/portable CD player with digital output. If you had recorded it from a computer say, then you'd not have gotten the SCMS information the first time 'round so that disc would be able to be copied digitally (to another MD or to another format on a consumer/home digital recorder conforming to SCMS).

Wow what a nifty little device. It would have been even cooler if Sony developed a "Walkman version" or some such, where not only audio would be routed through the little guy but also MD/CD remote port signals--that way you could even switch to text/time display and have the thing double as a remote!

Hmm, so are you saying that most AC97 chipsets will convert a 44.1kHz file playing to 48kHz and then back to 44.1kHz when it outputs or that you can't get any other output than 48kHz? Just wondering because I use a soundcard with a C-Media chipset and I can select 44.1 or 48 on the digital output. My motherboard has another C-Media chipset on it and it comes up in Device Manager as an "AC97 Sound Device" and I'm pretty sure you can select 44.1kHz output as well there (but I've never used it since I've never bothered to buy the digital-out bracket for the motherboard). Does one (or both) of these chipsets convert to 48 and then back to 44.1? Even when using such features as "kernel streaming" (available in Foobar2000 to bypass WaveOut and DirectSound)?

This suff sounds like the "right tool for the job"; though as others have stated you'll find varying degrees of success with other methods. Toothpaste one is usually a good one. I prefer to use car polishes/waxes as these work quite well as well. For light "swirl mark" type scratches 3M Imperial Hand Glaze should be good as well (afterall that is what it is essentially for on cars ). But the Novus stuff sounds like it might be the best way to go since it is intended for plastic. Novus is that the same company that has the glass repair systems for automotive glass (like winsheilds, etc.)?

How old is the N505 and how heavily was it used? If it has seen a lot of use it may indeed be on its last legs. If you are considering cleaning the lens that is a very good start, however, you should also clean the OWH (over-write head) as well. There are separate discs (as well as 2-in-1 discs) that can do this for you. I prefer to do manual cleaning myself (q-tip + rubbing alcohol) but you should know what you are doing before attempting that. The lens is easy enough to clean this way but the OWH can be quite tricky and often requires the removal of the lid of the player (which I would not attempt if you do not know what you are doing). If you're unsure it is better to go with a commercially-available cleaning disc. If cleaning fails to clear up the problem and the unit is well-used and out of warranty, it is certainly plausible that you'd need a new unit. On the plus side, if the N505 still plays fine you could use it as a player upon getting a new unit.

Okay, there are a few things which may be causing this "problem" you're having. Sony does recommend that you use the unit with the AC adapter while recording or transferring from NetMD, whenever possible. The reason for this is because recording takes up a good bit of current and can "pull the battery down" while it is doing so. A NetMD transfer uses even more current than a regular (realtime) recording. The AC adapter feeds the unit 3V DC input (which lowers the current necessary to perform the operation) and it also can deliver up to 500mA of current to the unit (which is more than enough in any operation mode). However that said, the units can usually do recording/transfer on battery power without problems, but you should check the following things: Firstly, what kind of battery are you using? If you are using a brand new alkaline battery you *should* be alright. However note that alkaline batteries are not good at handling higher current loads and start dropping their voltage easy against a high load. If you are using a "heavy-duty" (non-alkaline, non-rechargeable) battery then that is definitely a bad idea since those batteries are trash before you even started--they aren't designed for much more than very low current loads and being cheap. If you are using the included NiMH, note that it is a "cheater" battery that Sony had used in that unit. I.e. Sony put a AAA NiMH into an AA casing, hence the 750mAh capacity. However capacity doesn't really determine current handling (though it does to a degree because pulling 2A from a 750mAh cell would be near to 3C whereas from a 2100mAh cell it would be less than 1C). To be sure NiMH batteries handle high current loads very well (hence why they work so well in digital cameras compared to alkalines). But it *may* be that you original NiMH battery is just getting a bit old. If you haven't already, please replace it with a 2100mAh or higher NiMH AA battery. This will net you about 3x the operation time in any mode as well. If you are using a good, fully-charged NiMH battery you should not get that message. In addition to either the battery getting old (or using the wrong battery type), what may also have happened is that the unit's pickup (laser) is has gotten weaker over time. As this happens the unit will automatically increase laser power to compensate and this will therefore also require more current from the power source. This may make tough work for even an alkaline, though I cannot see it requiring more current than an NiMH AA could provide, particularly a new & fully charged cell.

Well from my relatively small sample I can't be 100% sure how problematic the LCX-4E is but it seems way too much for coincidence to me. Furthermore how does one explain the strangely high number of E900 refurbs Sony was selling on eBay and likely in their outlet stores as well? As for the pickup, as with most MD units the price is ridiculous! From Sony DAPC USA it is $124.21 USD! Part number is X33798691 in case you were interested. And then you have to actually calibrate it when you install it which isn't the easiest thing to do, and you definitely require a prerecorded (PIT/CD) MD (non-MO I mean). Edit: If Sony is still offering their flat rate repair in the US, units within 5 or 7 years (can't remember which) of their last sale date by Sony qualify. The cost varies for the type of electronics (portable, home, car, etc.) but it covers parts and labour and return shipping all for one price. The range is something like $75-$150 US depending on what it is. However, even $75 is a waste of time, IMO. Too much to fix something like this when you might as well just buy a newer Hi-MD capable unit.

Wow cool that you made a recording of the noise! Actually it doesn not sound like the spindle motor but rather it sounds like a noisy sled. (The sled is what moves the pickup assembly side to side to read different parts of the disc.) Why it is so noisy I can't be sure... You could try opening the lid and *gently* sliding the sled over to the end of the track (towards teh outside of the player) manually... Once you put in an MD again it will automatically track back towards the centre (where the spindle is). Sometimes sleds will get slightly misaligned and sometimes using the sled-slide trick will correct it. However I've never really encountered a noisy sled, usually if anything the problem is that it simply gets stuck and cannot move properly. Replacement of the sled motor may correct the problem but I dunno if it is the motor making the noise or just the sled itself scraping as it moves or something. Either way if you aren't familiar with the internals of an MD unit or with any kind of repairs to electronics in general, you're probably looking at a trip to the service centre. If the unit is not under warranty then that may be costly. Since the unit still works fine you may just want to live with the noise and hope that it doesn't break. In any case I'd at least try the sled slide trick to see if that works (be careful though you don't want to break the sled or pickup assembly, just slide it over to the edge gently--it will often slide rather quickly after you push on it but that's okay).

Meh, don't bother. I have a partially working E900, blue model, that I paid like $10 US for because the seller couldn't get it working at all. (I did a simple fix and so it became partially working meaning it still reads discs okay but the laser is weak and it sometimes will skip or fail to read or take a long time to load the TOC or skip tracks). Great looking little unit though! One of my favourite designs for sure. As EJ915 mentioned it is a lot lighter than the E700 because of its magnesium construction. For that reason the E700 gives the feel of being more sturdy (and I guess Al alloys are usually harder than Mg, though heavier). The reason I say don't bother [getting another one] is simply because all of the E900, E909, E700, and E500/E501 use the garbage LCX-4E pickup assembly. (I beleive the E707 and E505 would also use the same though I haven't checked to be certain). This pickup is pretty unreliable, without a doubt. Just look at all the failures of these units--the numbers are quite high. Sony even had a ton of E900 (silver) refurbs available a couple years back for pretty cheap (I'm willing to bet pretty much everyone of them had the pickup replaced). In my experience I've had the E900 (granted was not functional when I bought it but that is the point/pattern you'll find with the LCX-4E), then the first E700 I bought which I recently learned had also stopped working (it was bought as a gift for someone), then I just bought a used E700 on eBay and guess what? Same pickup problems. (Seller has just offered a refund though.) My E500 still works but only because I've never really used it, LOL. I've even read about a few E707 failures... Then we have EJ915s broken E700 and Bananatree's mention of a broken E900. Does anyone see a pattern here? I'd say it is just as bad as the 2nd gen MD units unreliability rates (for those who recall *way* back when, units like the MDX-40/400/C150 and the MZ-R2 were all pretty bad for pickup failures) and, more recently, the MZ-N1. The E900 is certainly nicely designed and a great looking lightweight little player, but unless you're buying one to look at it, I'd recommend against it and any other units which utilise the LCX-4E pickup--it's terrible!

Yeah I bought one of these at my local Wal-Mart, was $1.00 though but for $1 I figured what the hell... I always clean my units "professionally" (q-tip plus alcohol--sometimes requires partial dissasembly) but it can't hurt to have one of these since it was only $1. Might use it to clean the deck once in a while, since that one is a little bit more work to clean (you can't just open the lid and put a q-tip in there, lol). Yeah this one is only a lens cleaner... There are head cleaners as well (only for recording units) which clean the OWH but they aren't available for $1 haha

Yeah there sure are a lot of losers about eh? LOL. Yeah that's one way of looking at it, but when you just buy a new CD from the store and pop it in your car CD player it isn't as easy to be driving around trying to read a jewel case. And once you put the jewel case in your house and keep driving around with the CD, it doesn't help either. Plus if it is in either my 10-CD or 6-CD changer in the car it gets even worse with all the CDs... Even at home, put a few discs in a multi-CD changer and then you're also screwed... I'm lucky enough to have a CDP-CX90ES 200-CD changer (a rare model--one of the only Sony mega changers that allowed you to input track titles as well as disc titles) but evenso inputting titles for each new disc is annoying and there is a limit for non-CD-Text discs for each track title... In the 5-CD changer, without text it's retarded. It would be fine if this were 1994 still and discs had no text but c'mon now, in this day and age? CD-Text which you can add in a few minutes burning any given CD to a CD-R? Or getting text via tags from MP3s and other files or by using MD? Pretty much every type of music media used today has artist/album/track text info available except CD, despite it being entirely possible and certainly *very* easy to include on CD.

I still buy full-album CDs... CD singles I usually only buy for remixes and B-sides not available on the album the singles came from. I don't mean any offense to anyone but I have to say that I've always been fairly annoyed at what I used to refer to, back in the day as, "radio junkies". I.e. people who only listen to music because it is popular and gets airplay on pop music radio stations, and television channels. In most cases these are the people that "get mad" about having to "buy a whole CD for one song" and other such nonsense. To me these are people who have no appreciation for artists and music at all--they are primarily interested in keeping up with the latest fads and fashions. I'll admit that in very rare cases there are single tracks from certain artists that will be the only music from that artist that I like; but that is more the exception for me than the rule. If I don't like the band enough to buy their whole CD and like either all or most of the tracks on it, I'm just not going to buy the CD in the first place. It is interesting that today you don't even have to go out and buy the CD single for a one-off song you happen to like--you can just pay for it online and download that track (or do it illegally and not pay for it, as is the case with a lot of people). I guess being able to buy single tracks like that is a good thing but the unfortunate part is that you can't really get these downloads encoded at good data rates, from what I know. The thing that *REALLY* annoys me about buying CDs in this day and age is *not* the so-called "high" price (really CDs are not that expensive in Canada, particularly new releases which are always in the $10-$15 CDN. range for single CD releases), but rather it is the fact that CD-TEXT was invented perhaps a DECADE ago and almost ALL CDs *still* do *not* have it! It even used to be that all labels associated with Sony in some way had CD-Text but now even those labels are releasing discs WITHOUT CD-TEXT!!! It is retarded that with all the music files, DAPs, etc. in use today that CDs aren't even released with a *tiny* bit of subcode that allows for text. The aging CD only shows its age even more when you buy a CD today in 2005 and you put it in your CD-Text-capable player and it is utter disappointment everytime when all you see is the stupid track number and playtime.

Using SS 3.2 now and encountered a problem where SS doesn't want to convert some MP3 files to anything but silence... I did a search and I've read that some other people have had this problem in the past but didn't see any kind of solution. Is there a solution to this problem? The weird thing is that the files that SS won't convert properly, I can tell before it even converts them that this is going to happen... If I try to play back these MP3s in SS it will play back silence *unless* I skip around in the track--like even if I skip a little ahead or a little behind, using the slider, then it starts to playback fine in SS. However converting files it does this with, results in a complete [ATRAC3] file of silence! What gives? Is there a fix/workaround for this? It isn't really important as I never really use SS to transfer anything (because I don't even use MDLP) but I was just fooling around with it today (since 3.2 was out now) and noticed this foolishness. The funny thing is all the MP3s I'm trying to convert were converted by the same process--LAME 3.90.x with --alt preset insane (320kbps CBR). Some files will convert fine or play fine without "skipping around" and then some don't. You'd think Sony would have that working right by v3.2???

That would be true if not for Sony trying to make the claim that ATRAC3plus at 64k is "as good" as ATRAC3 at 132k. I don't deny that ATRAC3plus should be better than ATRAC3 at the same data rate and perhaps with ATRAC3 even a little higher, but at twice the data rate, I just don't see it. And judging by people's comments here that assumption seems to be correct.

I too say "Eh-Track" like A-Track, close to 8-Track But I can imagine AT-Rack being used too, it still sounds okay like that...

Hmm. I guess you might be right. I'm not sure because I thought with the D40 that information came about from the user manual. However I checked the D40 and the D400s user manual and neither mention anything about ATRAC type used during realtime or highspeed SP recording. Minidisc.org's EB does indeed state that for the D40 and not for the D400, but I'm wondering where that info originally came from, about the D40?

Though I've never actually used ATRAC3plus, if I could only choose between those two I'd definitely choose ATRAC3 (LP2) @ 132kbps over ATRAC3plus (Hi-LP) @ 64kbps. Why? Well because despite Sony's optimism I just can't see a file at half the data rate being truly "as good" as the 132kbps file. In fact I've read the same comments from other people. Though Sony says ATRAC3plus at 64k is as good as ATRAC3 at 132k, it is more like wishful thinking than reality.

Not bad 9s on a P4 2.8 The P-M 1.1 will probably be a little longer, especially since it is a music encoding task and it is "only" a 1.1Ghz P-M. I have a P4 running at 3.2Ghz myself so that 9s would be even less which is pretty good considering the average compression rate I get for MP3 with --alt preset insane is something like 12x I think (so for a 4min track it would be around 21s or so). OT: Those VAIO T-Class laptops are quite nice eh? I was looking at a recent model T-class in the store the other day and noticed there is also a VAIO S-class which is a bit bigger than the T but not by too much. I think if I ever get a laptop something in the VAIO S line (or similar) would be what I'd get...