MWielage

Yeah, I did all that. C'mon -- I didn't just fall off the turnip truck. What I'm saying is: the moment you use a timer to kill the power to the unit, if you then apply power to the deck again, it stays completely dead. No other electronic audio recording device I've ever owned has acted this way. Cassette decks, MD, open reel... hell, even DCC worked fine (though the machine was flawed in other ways). The following MD recorders work fine: MDS-320 MDS-JB920 MDS-JB930 MDS-JB940 MDS-JA20ES plus a few more that I have and can't remember the model numbers. Also, it didn't seem to matter whether I turned the power switch off on the deck itself before I hit the X10 power switch, or not. And, yes, the deck was always in the REC timer position mode. Once power is killed on the deck, it's dead for almost 24 hours. Nothing -- not even plugging the deck directly into AC -- brings it back to life. If you leave it unplugged for a day, it eventually comes back. But the moment you try to use it with a timer, it goes dead again. I have two 333's, and they both act the same way. Very discouraging. Trust me, this is a huge design flaw on Sony's part. I bet you anything the morons never actually tried using the timer switch, and what's going on is they made a radical change in the power supply of the machine, and it's "losing its mind" when power is killed in this way. I'll try another timer system and see if that solves the problem. --Marc W.

You might be able to get a replacement remote from Sony parts, but they won't be cheap: Sony National Parts Center 8281 NW 107th Terrace P.O. Box 20407 Kansas City, MO 64153 (800) 488-SONY / 7669 (816) 891-7550 http://servicesales.sel.sony.com/web/index.jsp I've seen the G750's go for as little as $100 on eBay from time-to-time. I gotta say, though, the radio on this thing sucks. It's amazing to me that they haven't figured out a way to put an FM tuner inside an MD recorder; I wonder if the theories about radio signals interfering with MD circuitry (or vice versa) are true?

I got a deal on a Sony ES 333 MD unit a few months back, and liked it so much, I found a second one. Both work great, and might be the best-sounding MiniDisc units I've ever heard (at least until HD is here). BUT: I just tried to use the MDS-JA333ES with a timer to record a radio show off-air. Unfortunately, when you use an X10-type switch to depower the deck, it stays off permanently. You can't power it up at all! Even worse, the unit is totally brain dead when you bypass the X10 module and just plug it directly into AC. I had to unplug the unit for a solid day before it would finally come back to life. Since I have two decks, I was able to confirm that this is a design flaw with the MDS-JA333ES. My older 920, 930, and 940 decks work just fine, and I've been using MD for about ten years. Anybody have a solution to this problem?