Spare Tire

I wonder what sticking a magnet onto a flash memory stick does.

Amen to that brother. Minidiscs are cheap, small, robust. Flash memory and HDD are in different categories. I see minidiscs as floppies. Those stayed there for a long time despite being slow, fragile, and limited size. We just need something cheap and durable.

I don't see the point of having a wireless remote between the wireless headphone and the wireless unit. If it's already wireless, why don't you just drop the remote altogether?

A software upgrade of the MD? Running mp3 decoding in software? Would kill my batteries and reduce the memory buffer, that'd suck ass. Rather wait till they get a new MD out that has an native support.

MZ-NH1, that cable is just gonna get you an analog upload. Basically it doesn't solve the problem people have been complaining about and that marcnet solved with his program, that is DIGITAL (and high speed why not) uploading. Neways, people have been doing 3.5 to 3.5 plug-plug recording for ages since tape recorder.

When the md loses power, doesn't it switch to the batteries right away?

With the classic MD, you only had mono for SP, not for the LP2 and LP4. Just a note. Also, if the LPs are joint stereo, it's pretty much pointless to do mono of those.... i don't know if that going through encryption would really double the runtime.

You mean old-md---->mdlp----->netmd----->hi-md takes more than six months between those steps. Only thing that's coming out will be a second generation of Hi-MD with technically the same functionnalities but refined. I really look forward to them refining that damn battery life they battered ( :laugh: ) in the first gen Hi-MD compared to the older MDs.

Well, the music is probably buffered in memory anyways so... Constantly accessing the HD is pretty bad for it so i'm pretty sure it's all on memory and only on rare occasions would you drop it and coincidentally it was reading from the disc. One would have to be lucky to make use of that G-Sensor shock. You could always time your shot and when you feel the disc is being accessed you drop it off and see if it stops :laugh:. Who has time to lose.

Another question concerning random play. My sharp MT877 seem to physically spin the disc like a russian roulette when in random mode (you can hear it spin the disc). I was wondering if sony units do that or just pick a random song from software? I think it would safe on battery life to pick from software, and they could also buffer the next song before this song is finished.

I have a question, DVDs are capable of reading CDs, is it by using the same head or do they have multiple heads in those readers? Perhaps you can still read a lower wavelength MD with a new generation higher wavelength MD (which you can also combine with the actual technology of "magnification" they use in Hi-MDs).

The advantage that an MD-camcorder would have over Mini-DV or other digital tapes (much like MD over DAT) is that it's not linear so you can more easely edit the content directly on the disc. I suppose an option to defragment the disc from time to time would be good too. If writting speed is a limitation, i think a MD digital camera for only still shots would still be a good product. An MD is just as good (size wise) as an old 35mm and a lot bigger. People nowadays have to transfer their photos to the computer and then burn them to CD, you wont need to do that if you can just cheaply stack up a bunch of MDs full of pictures. And MDs last longer than those CDs that decay after a while.

I suppose Aiwa will jump in, after all Sony owns them. I heard Panasonic will also jump in sometime. Well, as of right now i think all they do is just like... singing up to the rights to use the technology or something something....... yeah.......... :wacky:

I understand that the new disc technology makes the battery life shorter than the old one, and as Andy said we don't have to cut it any slack at all since this isn't gonna change anything to the fact that i'm getting less music. About the bitrates, i don't intend to use PCM so i don't expect it to get a shorter battery life. The thing is a larger disc but less battery life does not seem like a good tradeoff for me. I don't use the lower models that run only on AA (because it's fat, and i think MDs' flatness is another attractive factor that shouldn't be discarded lest you become just another fat HDD player) and it's a pain always having to recharge the battery. I have a sharp MT877 and now that the battery is two years old it holds less than half of its innitial charge. If an MD like the NH900 has short battery life to start with, the rechargable battery providing half of that after being worn down would be horrible. Larger discs just doesn't cut it. A disc you can carry more than one to cope, and you reuse them time after time. But batteries, they die a little everytime you use them. On a long run, i don't need a disc that can play music for a week but a battery that wouldn't even last a fift of that.

Battery life of a NH900 PCM/Hi-SP/Hi-LP play record NiMH NH-10WM: 5/8/10 hr 4/5/6 hr AA x 1: 10/18/23 hr 3/5/5 hr Both: 15/26/33 hr 7/10/11 hr SP/LP2/LP4 NiMH NH-10WM: 9/10/12 hr 5/7/7 hr AA x 1: 18/22/25 hr 7/8/10 hr Both: 27/32/37 hr 12/15/17 hr Battery life of a comparable classic md recorder, the N910 NiMH NH-14WM: 31/38/45 hr 11/16/20 hr AA x 1: 47/57/69 hr 11/16/21 hr Both: 80/95/114 hr 29/38/50 hr We can't compare with the NiMH specs because the NH-14WM has more charge than the NH-10WM. But we can compare the AA battery. And clearly, the classic MD's battery life is more than twice that of a HiMD. Playback only MDs can reach battery life of more than 200 hours, and now our battery life is nothing more than on par with MP3s and HDDs. This IS crap.

That's crappy. Go compare that with the classic MDLPs and you'll see.

Battery life seems good. One of the things that was most attractive about MDs was the battery life of it's players, surpassing anything i know in mp3 players and discmen. Now the Hi-MD has a very crappy battery life, it lose that up and can't compensate with anything else, it's just going into the same market field as everyone else, trying to have a big disc space but certainly failing as well. I'd rather buy an a classic MD player with long battery life and change disc more often. Now that even HDD players can beat battery life of MD.... I shake my head in shame.

I've done mp3 to cd (using nero) and then cd to lp2 via optical link, and it's fine. Mp3 to SP should be even better.

Its silly to compare the NH600 with the N10. It's not because it's a Hi-MD that makes the NH600 fat, it's because it's a low end model that uses AA size battery. The 500, 600, 700, and 800 are the low end series that are fat because of that, even in the old MDs they were fat. The NH1 and the NH900 i presume will be a lot slimmer. And a floppy drive is only magnetic. Here you have the laser too. It's mostly the laser that's thick. I've checked out the internals of my MT877, the laser was 5mm high, the magnetic head was just 1 or 2mm high. If they decided to put two sets of heads into a high-end recorder, like the 900 serie, i guess it would make it as fat as a 600 serie. Not very pretty. And i don't know how much more power it would consume if it had two heads.

I would greatly mind a larger player. To top that off, what's the point of having 3 months of music if your batteries don't last a tenth of that. Battery life and portability is everything in a portable player.

Blu-ray is like DVD, but with a blue laser, thus, it is not magneto-optic, if i recall correctly. Minidisc here probably means litterally a smaller disc. And you can't flip a minidisc backward and put it into the MD, it doesn't go in that way, so you can't have double side. Unless the reader has a laser pickup on the top and the bottom at the same time, which would make your MD huge ass. Add to that that a MO disc needs the magnetic part, so you gotta have one laser and one magnect on each side at the same time. I don't trust blue rays, the early ones burned out too fast. MDs wont last as long as it does now.

The aiwa F90 is a clone of the sony R900. But the looks aren't exactly the same. I was wondering if the battery door of the F90 is as flimsy as the legendary flimsy R900? It's a clone, but since the shell isn't the same........

Sharp HAS pulled out of the north american market. For quite some time already.

Yes, you are right, i've also read about G-Protection being the 3 somethings about the laser recovering faster or stuff. But every minidisc HAS anti-shock memory, due to the fact that the music is compressed and it needs decoding, so the information has to be loaded into ram. I think with the old MDs it was mostly 16meg. The 16 meg used to give a stated 40 seconds of anti-shock protection for SP. I don't know what the bitrate of PCM is but if they keep the 16meg, it's gonna be pretty damn short anti-shock protection. EDIT: Oh, and other companies than sony (sharp, panasonic, kenwood, aiwa, etc) don't have G-protection, or at least they don't say they have. Do they have something similar but they just don't say? Are sony units the only ones with these, making them more skip free than the rest?

No wait, everyone seems to think that Sharp is getting out of the whole MD market. What i read from those places only indicate that they pull out of France. On what do you people base yourselves when you affirm that Sharp is out of the whole MD market? Are you just all assuming? Stop scaring people god damn it!