Solid Snake

Oooh..I had that happen to a pocket calculator before... not pretty. You need a new LCD, and the cheapest way to get one would be to find a unit that's broken in other ways for a low amount of money, and swap out the LCD yourself,or just get a whole new unit. Repair shops have a habit of ripping people off.

I see what you are saying, I just honestly am quite against the foundation of NetMD, because of all the DRM bullsh** behind it. I have an iPod, and until I can get a "pick up and play" MD deck that DOESN'T cover your files with DRM (or at least lets you EDIT THEM ON THE DISC, AND NOT GIVE YOU THE "TRPROTECT" crap) my S1, which I am never using with OMG again, will be my activity machine (I only use the iPod when I'm walking around, in a car, or at home. When I'm running around or biking, or the like, I'm a little paranoid about damaging the HD)

I have an MZ-S1 that is made in Malaysia...

Sorry to go a tad off topic here, but I've always wondered why they do that to European CD players. Can anyone shed some light on the subject for me?

Alright, let me explain one thing here: I'm a member at H-Audio too, and from what I have seen, it's just a bunch of golden ears who seem to think everything has to sound exactly like the original or it isn't worth their time (in a way, they're worse than Head-Fi users). Now, I don't want to start a huge war here, but the problem comes with the fact that ATRAC was never made to be "exactly the same" as CD. It was made to be a good approximation of it, but you also have to remember that the main point of it was to make editing songs easier and the like. No solidstate MP3 player has the same flexibility as an MD player when it comes to recording, swapping tracks, naming tracks, and the like. With those type of devices, it's all done through the computer. With the MD, you can do it all through the player, which puts it outside of everything. Now, I'm not trying to say ATRAC sounds horrible, because it doesn't. I quite enjoy the sound of it, although I am not going to go and compare it to CD quality, because obviously it would lose. I'm just saying that sound quality wasn't the main focus here. To me, it's like comparing apples to oranges. Explain to me if I misunderstand something, as I am not the type of person who likes to spew bullsh** off as fact, this is just the way I have been informed, and I figure it's at least an interesting read.

Did the LCD "die"? As far as I can remember, LCD displays don't contain "liquid" in the form we think about it, in that it can't "leak out", but the display can die after a while, because its conductivity becomes less with age... if you can explain a bit better, I may be able to help.

ATRAC, although arguably quite better than MP3 in terms of generative degradation, still suffers from it. I used to know about this website (Can't remember where it was) that showed what happens when you ATRAC files over and over again, and it had samples for the first 20 gen copies, and another sample of every 20 gens after that, up to about 200, I think it was. First 10 times really weren't that bad, 20 had noticeable degradation, 60 was horrid, and I don't even want to mention 100...

Thank you very much, and to the above poster: With me, I don't have an old non-MDLP deck, I have a MZ-S1 (it worked wonders on it, by the way) and I had used it for months, and then I got an iPod for Christmas. I'm quite satisfied with the iPod, except for the fact that the battery life is dismal and it isn't as easy to just "grab and go" like my MD deck. So what I was planning on doing was wiping the MD I have clean, and using the MD player to have a few of my favorite albums on it, and swapping them when I got bored of them, and recording all of this through the line-in, so I wouldn't have to have the horrible software known as OpenMG touch my computer again. The problem comes in the fact that I used that software before, and I couldn't wipe the disc completely clean (WTF is with that, Sony???) without reinstalling it. Not wanting to do that, I decided to look around on minidisc.org, and I stumbled across this little gem. Without this, I probably would have just let my player sit and collect dust. Once again, thanks a lot. The DRM sh** is the only reason the minidisc player is semi-failing, methinks.