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Spoken like a true portable sound connoisseur. I feel exactly as you do (right down to my 2 RH1s). Bravo! Although I must say that so far, only the iPod touch with the latest firmware comes close to acceptable audio quality. Cheers

Awesome! Which makes me ask (I have two silver RH910s and one RH10) - how many people here have had their EL displays burn out? Really curious...

Congrats on your new toy!! I also have a (5G) iPod, and boy, sonically, does this thing run circles around Apple's hit product. Speaking of Apple, do you happen to have an Intel-based Mac? SonicStage (latest version) runs great under Boot Camp or Parallels Desktop 3.0. Cheers

Nope. You can argue with the rest of the world on your own. Don't need my help, apparently.

Good sense, you speak, wise one! Except for Mr. Hard Drive, here I believe we know what were talking about when it comes to long term backups. In my organization with many thousands of employees (that narrows it down a bit ) people get fired for using our many Terabyte arrays for backups. In fact, I recall having to lay off a couple of them for not taking this seriously enough. 'Nuff said.

Hoooray! No more backups needed - who'd a'thunk it?! Back from the land o'dreams, increasing optical disk density is inevitable, and barring some miracle, it ain't gonna be in the MD format. But let's see who really will win the new DVD format war first? Cheers

Actually, many of us don't like the PortalPlayer's Wikipedia sound colorations, and consider Sony, Sharp, Marantz, etc. as known good purveyors of excellent, minimally-colored sound. More quality, and less bling, please! PS Hard drives as an option are terrible in so many ways it's not even funny. The least of which is the reliability issue...

Thanks for the link - very interesting reading, and confirms what my ears have been telling me for over a year!

Congratulations, alrose312! Drag'n drop works great with the RH1 and Mac combo, and I believe you can use SS 4.3 to do it as well - ever try it? Requires a Core 2 or Xeon multiprocessor computer to work optimally, but still... Cheers

Or, you can walk into a SonyStyle store such as the one in Seattle and buy them off the display rack (they have 'em currently taking up an entire row)...Cheers

Cassettes are still being manufactured. But Type II and IV are getting very hard to find compared to the ubiquitous Fe Type I. Minidisc production, as expected, is slowly being scaled back as well. Neither format is even remotely dead. It's just that fewer and fewer people in the world are interested in making their own recordings. The industry is just reacting to the changing customer tastes, as well they should. Both cassettes and MD blanks will be available for years to come (tape recorders are still being sold by the thousands, if not millions!). I suspect that home recording/concert taping/"copyright violating" is becoming more of a niche market primarily due to the efforts of the commercial recording industry trying to hang on to a "completely dead" business model. Cheers

Useful, years ago, this information would have been. Late, it is. Penetrates, The Force does, even the densest of us. Bend over, we must, for 85's ministrations! Cheers!

All, I'd like to share my recent Sharp UTOC ERROR experience in the hopes it might prove useful to owners of other Sharp 7xx machines. I recently won a new, sealed in original box Sharp MD-MS702 MK 24-bit ATRAC 5.0 recorder. The eBay seller really went the extra mile and, in addition to careful packing, threw in a Sony 8x74min blank MD box and an extra 800mAh Li-ion battery at no charge! Anyway, when I received it, I promptly tested everything I could - i.e. line out, phones, remote (backlit), optical in, line in, etc. The sound just blew me away. For the first hour, at least. Uh-oh - what do I see trying to commit my track edits? The dreaded UTOC ERROR!!! I had thought myself safe, given that the recorder has never been touched since leaving the factory, "Made in Japan," and it was the MK revised 702. Wrong! So, here I had a device (paid < $100 for it) that was player only now, and wouldn't record at all anymore. Bummer. Time for some Googling. I quickly found one fellow owner that managed to fix this problem by taking off the top cover (it's a slot-loader!) and applying some VCR-grade white lithium grease on the worm gear and track, since it seems to come from the factory with too little lubrication. So with high hopes I put some grease on the moving parts and had the machine seek back and forth a few times to evenly distribute it. That made the already very quiet mechanism even quieter, but no luck on the UTOC ERROR problem. Sigh. Look at all those shiny metal parts in there. Sure don't make 'em like they used to. There's gotta be a way to fix this thing... Turns out that observing the machine while it's running can give you a more complete picture of what's going on. The trouble spot was right in front of my nose the whole time: The magnetic modulation head was nowhere near the disk! No wonder it couldn't write anything, be it music or TOC data. There's a lever mechanism that lifts the magnetic head out of the way to allow the MD door to close and eject the disk. This lever has a little spring that is supposed to help push the head to the disk upon insertion. It was too stiff for the spring, resulting in the head being 3mm away from the top surface of the MO platter. With a bit of effort I bent the lever down just a tiny notch, which did the trick, allowing the head to just gently touch the disk. Thank goodness these parts are not plastic. Whew! Reassembly and some more testing. Everything works, and works quickly now, even quicker than my Sony HiMDs! Recorded a couple of disks just to make sure. I also opened the door on the MDs to make sure that the head didn't scratch them. The platters still looked pristine. The test recordings this little 24-bit AD/DA machine sound so much better than my flash recorders (m-audio, etc.) using the same source material. What a gem - so what if it's all real-time? Quality is more important to me than a minor inconvenience. If I'm in a real hurry I can always use the speedy Sony MZ-RH1/M200. So there you go - it's worth a shot if you got a broken Sharp 7xx lying around. Cheers

"Speechless in Seattle" - hey, I resemble that comment!!!

While I'd just love to see ATRAC opened up, I'm not holding my breath. Sony is simply too hamstrung by the ruling media cartel, something that Roland/Zoom etc. don't have to worry about that much. Still, the world would be a sad place without their quality portable music machines, and other amazing gadgets that so many other manufacturers, from Apple to Roland and beyond, tried to emulate with varying success. Where would we be without them? Why, with only whithering, dying Hydrogen Audio-like forums to laugh at. Cheers PS Just picked up a NIB Sharp 702mk MD recorder (yeah, the 24-bit old-skool one) on eBay for a song. I'm really excited about giving it a listen when it arrives. Long live ignorance!!!

Macbook Pro C2D here as well, my wiser brother!

Now I understand (85 IQ, what did you expect?) - no, the driver was written by Sony for OS X. Sorry about not being clear. Cheers

That's pretty funny. I'm talking about Hi-MD Transfer for the Mac 2.0. It's really mostly just a driver, and the "program" only consists of a window to drag'n drop. Make sense now?

Correct, and as long as you stay away from ATRAC, no encryption per se either. For the RH1, this leaves PCM/WAV and to a lesser extent mp3 (download only). The transfer software (really just a driver) is much less powerful than SS4.3, but seems (to me) to approach flash drives in speed. How about that!

Actually, I had the DAT fiasco in mind. Or any other leading technology (at the time) that got killed in the consumer market due in no small part to the criminal activities of the media cartels. A lot of people still think that Sony bought a small part of Hollywood when in fact it seems, looking back at who took over, to have been the other way around. Anyway, getting back to software, drag'n drop with HiMD works great for those of us using OSX, with no encryption whatsoever. Right now my MT is an expensive paperweight, as nobody wants to buy it from me.

M-Audio and Edirol put together are miniscule grains of sand compared to the beach that is Sony, which experienced crippling historic threats of lawsuits from a certain group of US lawyers years ago and now is itself being run by the same scummy bunch. You know, the slime that is currently threatening civilian populations with similar lawsuits around the world if they had the chance? They even tried to put copy protection on CDs, but since those are also in common use on computers, they faced a tidal wave of resistance. But enough with the history lesson. Oh, and by the way, as you mentioned iriver used to have the option of creating home recordings of sorts. That capability disappeared fairly quickly. I wonder why? Is it because the US mass market wouldn't allow it? Hmmmm... I for one am grateful that somebody somewhere got around this "reality check" for so many years. Cheers EDIT: Fixed a bit of the abysmal grammar. Sorry 'bout that. PS: PlaysForSure, anybody? I'll take Sony any day.

Without that encryption, HiMD would've never been allowed to exist. Welcome to the real world. Cheers

I just noticed that you're using a Mac Mini (gotta learn to read ) - virtual machines such as Parallels need huge amounts of RAM, i.e. 2GB minimum. Just a heads-up.

That's one of the funniest posts I've seen in a very long time!

As with Windows XP (Simple Burner won't install as is on Vista btw), you can only use LP2/LP4, not SP. What I end up doing on my Macbook Pro is use SonicStage 4.3 to import the CD using ATRAC Advanced Lossless, and then do the usual SP transfer to a standard MD in my RH1/M200. All via a very speedy USB 2.0 bus. Painless, really - and it sounds awesome, as expected. If you like to stick with HiMD, just put in a HiMD disk, and you can use Simple Burner to do a direct CD-MD transfer in Hi-LP, Hi-SP, or PCM format. Your choice. Cheers EDIT: Just saw raintheory's response. D'oh!