syko

The hissing in the background is normal. It happens in all MD players (including my MD-MT20, MZ-R500, MZ-N707 and MZ-N910). It directly relates to the sensitivity of your earphones/headphones. Assuming that impedance is sensitivity (it probably isn't but oh well...), the earphones are at about 16ohm impedance and the headphones are about 24ohm impedance so I guess that the earphones play louder because of a lower impedance and therefore higher background hiss. I too play my MD players at night just before I go to sleep and background hiss can get me off my nerves. The good thing with the N910 is that if I find that Vol 01 is too loud, I can adjust the EQ settings and lower all bands. Also the bass is not *muddy* when at very low volumes. Blame it on MegaBass. I hated the MegaBass when at low volumes because it sounds horrible.

When I had my N707 serviced at Sony, I previously had hacked it to add the extra features. I was able to revert back to my old settings by using the values listed in the hack guide http://www.minidisc.org/mzr700_to_mzr900.html. Go into service mode and: FCode 0 60 change the last two digits from FE (or FC) to A0 FCode 0 61 change the last two digits from 7B to 50. Those are the only two values you should have changed. Otherwise, you'll need to reset your MD player's EEPROM values.

You probably don't want to enter service mode for the N910 unless you were trying to fix something. The N910 has the features of just about all current MD players, unless I'm mistaken (I bought my N910 in Australia and it's got everything I ever want in a MD player).