Sugo

Sharp MD-MT770/MT888 and MD-DS8

ecost.com has it for $120 including shipping. You can probably find a new one at ebay for around $110 shipped. I didn't like gold either. But I only use it for recording so I went for the price. oh by the way, I strongly recommend sonicstage over openmg or realone. Once you tried all of them you will know what I mean.

The only major difference is that n707 has a mic input and n505 doesn't. Sony's mic input has pretty bad reputation. Spending the price difference on a decent mic with preamp and use the line-in jack is a better way to go. I heard the internals of these two models are almost exactly the same. n707 costs much more just for marketing purposes. So I think n505 is still the best deal.

In that case it will be good to have netmd. IMO sony MZ-N505 will be your best choice. ubid.com is selling it only for around $83 (new and shipping included). You can spend the rest of your budget on blank minidiscs.

It really depends on how you will use the MD unit. Live recording? Playing your CD collections? Playing mp3 from your computer? If you can live without netmd, Sharp MT770 will be a great unit that will be worth every penny (it's about $220).

For me, if source is CD, ATRAC SP is definitely worth it. But if source is mp3, I would just use LP2. However, if you pretty much listen to them on the go, LP2 will probably be a better option because there is so much environmental noise and it's unlikely for one to tell the quality difference. Best thing to do is try both and see which one works better for you.

It's mentioned on the sony manuals. You can also search on this forum or T-Board for more information. I wished what you said is true, then we all don't have to mess with real time Toslink recording anymore ...

I don't think it's fair to say ipod (or any mp3 players) is absolutely better than MD players/recorders or vice versa. It really depends on what you use your player for and what you care. Some people think that ipod is much bigger and heavier than MD portables. A lot of people also believe that MD portables offer way much better sound quality than mp3 players from an original audio CD. I suggest you to give both a try. I love MD.

When recording in SP mode through netmd, the software enocdes the audio file into LP2 ATRAC3 format, decodes the LP2 and sends encrypted PCM raw data to the MD recorder. The recorded track is in SP format, but quality wise it's only LP2.

Have you tried importing a different song after setting device property to use LP4?

There is a 3 checkout limit, but you can get around it by re-importing the same mp3 file. This works for both OpenMG and SonicStage. Or you can use Nero + Simple Burner method which does not have any check in/check out at all.

If you can connect with realone and simple burner, then your netmd driver and physical connection should be ok. Was it not working already when you only had OpenMG installed? I would try uninstalling both and just install SonicStage to see if OpenMG is causing troubles. Make sure you install with the setup.exe in root of the zip file, not the one in sonicstage directory.

Very noticeable background noise was reported by some Sony MZ-N505 and MZ-N707 users when a sensitive earphones such as MDR-EX70 is used. The comparison here is the sound (noise) you can hear when a silent track is played versus when the unit is in pause state. Since MD units do not have signal to noise ratio labels, I wonder how do the other units perform?

MZ-R37 does not support MDLP. Thus it cannot play LP2 or LP4 tracks on your discs.

oops ... I double checked, Mystyler is right.

sorry, it's more like IM-MT899 is for Europe and IM-MT880 is for the rest of the world.

They are basically the same, one is US version the other is Europe and Asia. You got the best of both worlds. The only 2 drawbacks are: netmd is not as fast as Sonys (about 8x in LP2?), it is quite expensive (even more expensive then DR7).

I am no expert, but I would think Sony MZ-N707 might be better for you. It uses common AA battery and has a much longer battery life. Frankly netmd is a pain to use, but it is a good feature to have. When you want to download audio files from computer to MD, netmd can do it pretty quickly. Have you considered Sharp MD-MT770? Its battery life is far away from N707 and it doesn't have netmd. However, as a recorder, it is very very good.

E10 does not take external battery add-on.

ATRAC (SP) is virtually indistinguishable from CD quality. LP2 is comparable to mp3 somewhere between 128 and 192 kbps constant bit rate. Most people think LP4 sounds much worse than LP2 for music. Note that comparison between ATRAC(3) and mp3 is highly subjective. The mp3 encoder and encoding option can make a huge difference here even with the same bit rate.

Audio files cannot be uploaded to a NetMD recorder in real SP partly because the NetMD protocol doesn't support it. The software provided by sony only lets you encode in ATRAC3 instead of ATRAC. It is not obvious if the hardware can support it. In short, it just cannot be done for now. Any MD recorder (whether NetMD capable or not) can do real SP recording via optical as long as it has an optical input.