Hungerdunger

Yes, you can also include the NH1.

Yes, but in this case, the disc which the music came from wasn't even in the machine, and came at the start of over six hours of recording, which had just finished playing.

Something spooky happened today. I'd just played one Hi-MD disk through to the end on my NH1. I ejected it and put in another disc and pressed play. The music which came through my earphones was the music from the beginning of the disc I had just ejected. It lasted for about a minute then stopped and was replaced by occasional blips and beeps until I pressed "stop". In all my years of listening to Minidiscs I have never had this happen to me and I wonder whether anyone else has experienced it? Any idea how it could have happened?

The only downside to your suggestion is that no player (as far as I'm aware) will play MP3s.

If you liked the EX90s, why not try the EX500s - my current favourite.

Definitely not. You can never have too many MD units.

Yes, I discovered Geocaching last Christmas after being given a Garmin SatNav. Great fun, although my wife is normally better than me at spotting them. We're still relative beginners, but hope to spend more time on it this summer. On a recent holiday in the Canary Islands, I left a Travel Bug in a cache with the aim of getting it brought back to Wales. It's currently in Germany, and you can see its progress here, (although I guess you'll need to register/log in to see that) Apologies to anyone not familiar with Geocaching - this must sound like a load of rubbish.

According to this, it was 2002 onwards.

Apart from a reasonably large collection of music I've ripped from CDs or converted from MP3s, I record radio plays and other spoken-word programmes onto my JB940 deck while I'm out at work. Also, using one of my Hi-MD recorders, I set it up to record nearly 8 hours of music from the Internet station Radio Paradise overnight, to be played back over the next few days. Last week I tried an audio book from the local library. It came on 8 CDs, with a playing time of 8.5 hours, but using Hi-LP, it fitted fine on one 74 minute MD, with acceptable quality. I do a lot of repetitive outdoor work, so having all these recordings at hand makes the time pass much better.

[bump] Anybody?????

I've got a couple of spare LIP-4WM Li-Ion batteries which I intend to keep in storage until the ones which are currently in use can't hold sufficient charge any more. I'm sure I've read somewhere that the best thing is to put them in the fridge; is this right? Also, should they be fully/ partially charged or completely discharged when put into storage? Any other tips would be very welcome.

I've just received an email about an update which might be of use to you:

IMHO extremely unlikely. Which shop was it? If it was Currys / PC World you can definitely forget about it.

I've just listened to a few recent downloads too, and while I have to say that the stereo effect appeared to be very negligible, playing them in Total Recorder I could see from the meters that they did not appear to be mono. What I'm not sure about is whether the original programme sounded like that or whether something happened in re-encoding.

It's good isn't it. If you find yourself using it a lot, I'm sure the author would appreciate a small donation.

Surely a lot of the problem was the price. You could get a cassette walkman for less than 20ukp several years ago, but IIRC, even the cheapest MD portable was well over 100ukp, while the RH1 originally retailed here at 250ukp. Luckily I've always been in a good enough financial position to afford MD, but it would have had to be much more affordable before it became acceptable for the mass market. And of course MP3 players have also become much cheaper. I could buy an 8Gb Sansa Clip+ with an SD expansion slot (which consistently gets good reviews) for around 50ukp, so unless you're into live recording, how many people would be prepared to pay more than twice that for a basic MD player/recorder?

I used to use the timer facility a lot - for me it was usually the afternoon plays on BBC Radio 4, as well as general interest programmes like Home Planet, Monebox, Analysis and Americana to name but four. However, as more of these programmes are now available as Podcasts, I tend to subscribe to those instead and transfer them as MP3 files to me RH1. There is also a brilliant programme called Radio Downloader which will save just about any BBC programme in MP3 format, and can be set to save a whole series or just a single programme. I'd probably have bought one of the Onkyo Hi-MD decks by now if they had a timer switch, but unfortunately they don't

It might help if you told us where you live.

I completely agree with your sentiment, but here are a couple of things I do with my MD equipment which make it so convenient: 1) With a few button presses I can set up my deck to record radio programmes for me while I'm away from the house. If they are speech based programmes, then using my RH1 or NH1 I can play them back at much-faster-than-real-time speed if I'm pushed for time. The recording also comes divided into handy sized tracks, rather than one long mp3. If I want to save the recording I can easily transfer it to my PC via my RH1. 2) I can set up one of my portables to record nearly 8 hours of music from an internet radio station overnight at Hi-MD quality. I can then play this back over the next couple of days while I'm working, and if there's a song I particularly like, I can put track marks at the beginning and end of it; transfer it to my PC; and then edit the resulting WAV file for fade in and fade out if necessary. I'm not saying that these things can't be done using other equipment, but with Minidisc it's so easy.

It has just gone for 76 UKP (including postage), which seems like a pretty good price. If I didn't already have two, I might have gone for it, partly to get the MC40 remote.

If anyone from the UK is looking for an MZ-NH1, there's one on ebay at the moment. The seller has not mentioned the model number anywhere, so I'm wondering whether it will be chased by less people than usual. Currently stands at 41 UKP with 2 and a bit days to go. See here for details.

Surely things are worth what people are prepared to pay for them. I presume that these vendors are fairly confident they will get the asking price sooner or later; if they don't they will eventually have to lower their prices.

Is there any reason you're collecting only 2nd generation Hi-Mds, apart from them looking more attractive?

Sorry; my oldest one has started misbehaving recently, so I'll probably change my profile down to 2, and I really need to keep both of them for future-proofing. But keep checking ebay regularly. On the UK ebay, you find they tend to go for around 170 - 200 UKP, but then one slips through at a much lower price for no apparent reason. Maybe you'll get lucky.

I've just transferred an 11.5MB, 25 minute, 64kbps mp3 podcast, converting it to 256kbps, using a 1Gb disc. On my NH900 it took 5 minutes, 35 seconds; on my RH1 it took 4 minutes, 29 seconds. If you were happy to transfer it in its native mp3 format, it would take something like 20 seconds, but then of course it would only be playable on the RH1 and RH10.