g52ultra

i've had all three. MH900, NZ1, and RH-10. Personally i feel the NH1 was the the nicest looking, but the WORST HiMD model to date. Proprietary and flimsy USB cable and it was dependant on the cradle to charge the battery. When sitting in the cradle, you cannot open the door, making it worthless for any serious use. Given the choice, and you'll save bucks too, buy the MH900. Little secret: it's in a metal case too! The RH-10 is sheer joy, though. You'll love the OLED display. I have a Zen Micro HD player but I make excuses to play with the RH-10 as much as possible. I use it primarily for field work, but that display is so cool that you find yourself just always wanting to use it for everything. It will also charge itself off of USB (unlike the aforementioned units).

Not true. I still have a perfectly working MZ-1. 12 and a half years old. Probably the most reliable toy I ever had (the heads in my pro Sony pocket casette recorder wore out sooner). However, these units will get destroyed if you mistakenly plug them in on a 12V adapter. And I'm NOT the "beginner" here!

I got ahold of one of these Edirols and it's horribly overpriced and just feels and looks cheap. It misses the mark. Aside from being 4 track, it's not even on par with Creative Labs first recorder (digital and analog i/o) of 5 years ago! Comes with 64mb of flash? You will not even be able to record ONE song using all 4 tracks at 24bit/48khz! To do any bit of field work (and if you taking advantage of all 4 tracks) a GIG is about the minimum you would want. CF is getting cheap, but a 1GB hiMD cartridge is cheaper. Yes the concept is here with Flash and microdrive, but nobody has YET to get it right: So if I wanted a pro solution with Digital and analog I/o and USB upload and download capabilities. 1. Sony HiMD with 1GB cartridge $300. Pocket sized. Rechargeable. 2.Edirol with a 1GB CF card (so that you could actually USE the thing) $530. NOT pocket sized. Not rechargeable. 3. Creative Labs Nomad with 20 GB. Thats over 50 HOURS of nonstop recording in 16bit 48Khz .WAV About as big as an Edirol. The last of them sold for $229. Rechargeable batteries. I got drunk one nite and left it in live record running on batteries overnight and it was still recording at noon the next day. I agree on the fact that HD or perhaps a 4GB CF card based machine with digital and anaog I/O is the future-and it has been for about 6 years now. There were ones on the market! For pocket recording solution, HiMD is the best solution currently, has a rechargeable battery that LASTS (unlike the Edirol, which takes alkalines)and will be until somebody makes a pocket sized one that has ACCEPTABLE storage capabilities. The technology is there. It has been.

You bring up a very good point and that's where Sony has an advantage. Fully support portable digital and analog "recording" and playback - not to be confused with "downloading," in a pocket sized format. They've always been there on this frontier with MD. A lot of the first gen HD machines had this like the IRiver IHP's and the Creative Labs Nomads (actually the Nomad 3 was the only one that did it flawlessly), but neither were really what you would call pocket sized. And those companies gave it up, about the same time that the IPOD revolution took full swing (ironically about the same time as the release of HiMD, too). I find it interesting that these guys got out of it when there is clearly a market for these machines. Creative Labs, being a soundcard manufacturer, would have had much to gain, if they cotinued manufacturing the Nomad and marketing it to the Pro user. They never did this and instead focused themselves on fighting their losing war against the IPOD. They went from being the innovators in the market they helped to create and went to being copiers. And the evolution of pro audio took a step back when they dropped these features and solely focused themselves on making IPOD clones. I noticed Edirol (Rolands techno spinoff company) now makes a pocket sized four track now that's rather expensive and poorly designed and is doing fairly well with it! And the Edirol uses removeable CF cards. Removeable media is cool. Expensive media is NOT. Some ebay shopping turns up 512MB CF for $20. At 24bit, 48Khz on 4 tracks of digital..You can't do crap with 512MB! A gig would be about right.. ..on that note, let's imagine this: a 4 track pocket sized HiMD with an OLED. It'd be like the "IPOD of the pro market." And actually sit down with the guys over at Cakewalk and Cubasis and develop a software solution that actaullyWORKS. The door is waiting to be opened.

a lot of people tend to have this attitude that when a product, or even just a model gets replaced or discontinued, that the product becomes "obsolete." If you folks ever read any of those kooky IPOD forums, there's people who are really upset because they discontinued the IPOD mini for the Nano and think that because of that, their Mini is now "obsolete." Why should it even matter. You bought it. Enjoy it. I imagine Apple will still support it, in the way Apple supports everything: poorly. Whether they still make it or not. I have dealt with Apples customer service on th phone, and it was somewhat comical, and I also feel that they tend to look down on their customers. I have looked at Sony and Panasonic as being the tops in customer service. That doesn't mean that I am loyal to them (and I'm not), but I do know that I was still able to get parts for a 20 year old Betamax machine from them, back in 1999. I do remember Sony launching a big advertising campaign to revitalize minidisc and that was around the turn of the millenium. I saw more ads for Minidisc than in the earlier years. Forbes magazine had a writeup on it. At that point sales had dropped and I would believe that they did this because they felt their was a more of a market to reach out to. Apparently they never did. And this was when porta HD players, like the Remote Solutions PJB, Creative Labs Nomad 1 and the Rio were in their infancy. The word with Apple at that time was "IMAC!" -"IPOD" was still several years away. And perhaps the Sony reorganization may be a good thing. This is a company that has been at odds with itself- a company who had the resources to revolutionize, develop media, but was also a publisher of video and music. Not only was it at odds with iteslf because of this- it's been at odds with the consumer too! Sony pissed off a lot of people who bought their products because the interfaces (things like the way Sony chooses to do copy management) frustrated people. And right now, for the first time in their history,Sony is in trouble. They are out of touch with the market, they don't have the huge cash reserves like they had and like most manufacturers, they are getting their butts beaten trying to compete with manufacturers who have the advantage (and take advantage)of labor laws in some Asian markets. Perhaps, for them, it's a good think they rattled their management before it gets worse. I can understand this. Because it is going to get worse for them I agree with a lot of you folks that marketing was a disaster. I do believe that it was a case of poor marketing (The went through all that trouble and money to develop HiMD, but never backed it up). You can't design a product, produce it and then just stick it on a shelf a store and expect any success, unless you promote it. You do that so people will see it and you hype it. HD players were a cult market for years because although they were pretty cheap to make(all industry wide standard parts) the companies that were marketing them didn't have huge resources to market them. Apple changed that and they did it with a good product, although inferior to some of its rivals. By marketing. Lot's of it. Make it hip. Promote ease of use. Maybe Sony coulda had enjoyed some of this sucess if they hired Paris Hilton to demonstrate a HiMD and made the discs lime green and pink to boot.. I find it amusing that Sony brought out HiMD about the time the MO optical data drive market collapsed. Anybody ever seen how much an MO disc was a few years ago. No wonder they failed, and Iomega built its former Zip disc empire at the same time that MO came out. Zip discs weren't cheap either but MO was outright obscene in price. The technology to fuse MO and MD and create HiMD was their since the mid 90's! I remember looking at an MO drive in the late 90's and thinking this. Sonys MO drive market was one of pure greed. I also believe that Sony marketed to the wrong audience. It should have been the Professional user. The packaging is all wrong too. Sony could make a real jewellike player along the lines of the MZ-NH1 and put OLED in it it like the R10 with full digital/analog I/O and USB2.0. This would be a standout machine. Even Creative Labs and IRiver abandoned full digital and analog I/O on their current HD players. And that's a tough market for those guys. They can't compete with IPOD! Rio just went out of buisness over it! All of us here on this forum are not the masses! For whatever reason we chose to use MD, it's because what we found is what is comfortable for us. For the masses, Minidisc is not the way to go. Looking back at the evolution of portable music for the masses, it went from the casette to the portable CD player to HD/Flash machines. Minidisc was a sideshow attraction that did fairly well, but never captured the masses. To capture the masses, you have to think like the masses and you do it by this assumption: "the masses are lazy." I don't mean that to be patronizing, but it's a reality. It's because a lot of people do not want to have to deal with technology to get enjoyment. Or are too busy to deal with it. Look at all these IPOD places that specialize in copying your CD's to an IPOD for you and they actually make money doing that! So you either spoon feed the technology, or you make it as simple as possible. Casettes were so popular in part, because at the time they were the most portable solution, perhaps the only solution- I never saw anybody carrying around a portable reel to reel or record player in their pocket, and we wont even mention 8 track. AND you could buy casettes prerecorded! Minidisc never got that full support. And even in the era of casettes, portable recording models were just an audio lovers toy. It was not a toy for the masses. Today, an IPOD is the masses dream. No fuss, no having to carry media. The masses dont care about optical and analog I/O! they just want a headphone jack! I find myself this way too, at times. I love my HiMD, but I find myself grabbing my Zen Micro more often. Just for the sheer purpose of listening to music. No fuss. Anybody remember that Betamax, although a failure in the market place (another one of Sonys marketing disasters and self serving attitude, too), was the choice of professionals for years after. Media was and still is available. Just my feeling, but I would expect that even HiMD media will still be produced for some time. Considering that I can still get ahold of Sony UMatic tapes, thanks to the wonders of Ebay and a really long production run of MD, in the event Sony does drop this format, I would expect that even in 2025, you'll still be able to find this media. We al know for a fact that it was, and still is a good technolgy. For us. The questions is that when Sony came out with HiMD, how much of a market did they expect to get? Who did they expect to be their target consumers? By the amount of models they came out, I figure they were expecting a lot more out of sales. So there's a couple options here. 1. Repackage the products into one or 2 models and position it in the marketplace with a clear strategy as to who your targeting this product to. I really doubt (especially given the fact that Sony is coming out with 2 HD based players with OLED by Christmas) that they would target HiMD against the HD player market. That's a lost war. My feeling is that the target market is the Pro user. 2. Abandon the whole idea, but offer support and media, because you don't want to alienate a consumer by feeling that they just bought an Oldsmobile. That's not a goodwill gesture. That's just good PR and smart marketing. This way they come back to a Sony product when they go shopping. I expect these two things to be their stradegy because this is what Sony has done in the past. Sony is not in buisness because of peoples emotions. They are in buisness to make money. Just like everybody else is in this world. We sell products tailored to peoples emotions, but if the product doesn't sell, then we don't eat. It's a case of Sony weighing out how much they spent on development, what their manufacturing costs are and how much of a production run they need to achieve to make money so that they can recoup those costs. I would think that Sony's technolgy in MD, for the most part, has been paid for long ago, so it becomes a question of if they feel they can make money manufacturing MD in the future. Even so, these are still fairly complex constructed machines (a heck of a lot more production costs when your doing it alone, in a world of HD players made with worldwide standardized components that are shared in the manufacturing of other items) and they are never going to even come close to achieving anything beyond a "prosumer" market.

I'm in Dex's and bri's corner on this. I have a Zen Micro, a Creative Nomad, and have played with numerous Karmas, I riv's and I-things and have gone through a fleet of MD players including HiMD's. For just pure listening pleasure and minimal fuss (easy to use), for a newbie- as much as I hate to say it, IPOD wins. Ya don't go wrong on it. My girfriend liked to play with my toys, but she'd always get pi$$ed off at dealing with their quirky interfaces- and each one of them has its own unique anomolies. I got her an IPOD. The headphones suck, but they sound pretty nice with a decent set (actually any headphones sound better than the IPOD issued set) Lack of .wma support is actually a GOOD thing! Windows Media is not a music format- it's a disease! If your brother is fairly active, perhaps a Creative Labs Muvo might be a better choice. It's solid state, much more durable than an hard drive based IPOD for active people. Not as simple to use, but I didn't have to fuss so much with listening to music on a Muvo than with others. If you want recording capability, The HiMD rules. The only thing I found that I liked that had that kind of recording capability was the Creative Labs Nomad 3. IRiver made some really nice looking pocket sized 20 gigabyte recorders, but users report a horrible popping noise in their recordings about every 30 seconds (the Nomads didn't do this).

One word. PAYPAL. Perhaps you never heard of this thing called Ebay either?

Anybody got a part number for this cable or where i might get one, short of ordering from Sony direct? What other models share this USB propietary cable? I need to get one to hack so I can rid my MZNH1 of its cradle dependancy for charging the battery!

..and even without the cradle you can't plug the charger in while on USB, as the little cover that protects the USB connection slides over the power connector jack. BUT, at least it does charge its battery off of USB and uses a non proprietary USB cable, too... that's a big plus. Sony got that right. My favorite toy of choice, the Zen Micro is the same way. Still think that if they could have taken the MZRH1 and packed the RH10 features into it (OLED, non proprietary USB cable, and USB battery charging), my Zen Micro would be history The Japanese RH10 that I have (silver) does have a 110volt US plug for the charging cradle. And the LED remote. BTW, the guy selling the $335 units on Ebay is a good guy to deal with (Jun Ibaraki). 3 days to the East caost from Japan. $35 shipping is fair when it travels half way round the Earth in 3 days. And you wonder why the Space Shuttle is such a grotesque expense! Another option to consider is that the MZRH1 remote will work on the RH10. I tried it this way. I kinda think I went overkill on getting the Japanese model, as I don't care much for the cradle, or its remote. After playing with this thing for a little while, my feeling is that the OLED display alone makes a difference in having a simple non LED remote.

thanks Ishiyoshi.. I knew I came to the right place on this. Got it in English characters now.

My girlfriend just sent me an RH10 from Taiwan, and it's the Japanese local market model and all the scripts are in Japanese. I cannot read Japanese characters (didn't evolve that far in my 3 years over there). Can somebody be specific enough to walk me through it. Simply pressing menu and scrolling down gives me no clue as to how to do this, because I don't understand the characters!

I understand that the USB charging on 2nd gen is does not fully charge the battery. What has been your experience of this?

It's probably a good idea that Target does not require their employees to wear the company logo on their uniforms.

"nonchalant": behaving in a calm manner, often in a way which suggests lack of interest or care. I'm new here too, but that doesn't mean either of us are stupid in your reference to being "nonchalant." I though this was a forum. It appears you have a personal issue with the comment more than a professional one. It is this persons feeling on this issue. "A person who has no hope in having a quality of living has no concern in productivity"- Deming, 1938. Check out a McDonalds or a Walmart sometime.

sorry man, i just abbrieviated NH1.. yeah magnesium

they could get some of the IPOD/Zen Micro market if Sony had packaged and markets them right. 1. Kill the Walkman branding. People still think of casette players when they hear that word and it's synonomous with $9 Walmart products. 2. Package the best features of the RH10, MZ-NH1 and the MZNH900 into one package. The beauty of the MZ1 in its aluminum, OLED of the RH10, and the standard USB mini cable and power supply (you NH1 users know what I'm talking about) jack of the MZNH900 that doesn't require a cradle. 3. USB charging. "USB powered" does not mean "USB charging" Sony MO technology has been around years longer than HiMD. Been around longer than IPOD. Was around longer than even the very first "IPOD"- the Creative Labs Nomad. The most beautiful product they made was MZR-900. They missed the mark with overpricing the MZNH1 and crippling it with that horrible charging cradle. Apple has the ability to manufacture an aluminum IPOD mini and sell it for $179-199?!You can't tell me that Sony,a much larger company than Apple can't match this? Where were they 5 years ago with MO technology when Creative Lab Nomad players and Iomega Zip Drives ruled? Oh, thats right.. they were overpriced back then! It took Sony 10 years to match the capability of their own MO drives to Minidisc? Hardly not. The technology was there all along- they invented it! I find it interesting that Sony unveiled HiMD when perhaps they finally realized that the MO storage market collapsed But Sony makes a lot of money in publishing music, too. Perhaps their interest is not in making a more versatile player/recorder like the competition does (they have their own genuine interest in the phrase "copywrite infringment"). Sony is at odds with themselves. Because of that, they are at odds with the consumer market. Unlike the past, where a few other manufacturers jumped onto MD, this time it's not gonna happen. Crutchfield used to be a big supporter of MD. They were one of the biggest supporters in pushing MD in the US market. Check out their website now regarding HiMD. They rave about HiMD, but they will only sell the discs and no players! That in itself is an alarm. It's all about Hard drive and flash card based music players now. IPOD had nothing to do with it- Creative Labs had been doing it years before anybody even heard of the "I" word. It's just cheaper to build pocket music players that way. All the stuff is over the counter non proprietary stuff- labtop drives, microdrives, flash cards- it's all standardized across the border stuff that ALL manufacturers have accepted. Supply and Demand, folks. The market is saturated with this stuff. You can build em cheap. You don't have to buy expensive licensing from one group that holds the patent. And those parts ain't cheap either, because the industry is not embracing it. It's not in anybodies best financial interests to embrace HiMD. That's why Sony needs to push HiMD as an alternative to IPOD and Zen Micro. They have to do that by packaging all the great things they make into one (or several) products and market it as such (the nice aluminum of the MZ-NH1, OLED display, USB charging capability and unlimited I/O in digital and analog). Then HiMD stands up to those products. Afterall isn't that why we like HiMD? If Sony doesn't change the packaging and marketing approach to HiMD, then we all bought Studebakers, my friends.

Was there NON US versions of the MZ-NH1 that had the USB jack built into the charging cradle? If so, where can I find one of these units, or just the cradle itself, as I already have an NH1 (US version)?

..uh, sorry, atrain. you can nuke my post or perhaps move it. It just kinda bothers me to see so much fawning over these things on this forum and there is a lot of misleading info out there about the HiMD players- and it's Sony that is the primary misleader. As a result I now have two HiMD players (MZ-NH1 and MZ-NH900) and each one is a compromise. I used to have a Sony MZR900. This was the STANDARD OF EXCELLENCE in a pocket music recorder: 1. Shirt pocket sized portable recorder 2. Metal construction 3. Versatile I/O (lines in/out/digital/analog, ya name it) 4. Manual recording level adjustment 5. Fully functional when plugged into a charger (I never would have even thought of that being a consideration in buying ANY pocket music player,until I bought my MZ1). 6. Killer looks. Did I say metal construction? I would have hoped they would have evolved with HiMD. It would have been audio extacy if they had all that AND the ability to record and play WAV files. They didn't evolve. Sony was (and is) marketing all this technology for years and they still refuse to package it that way into one clearly defined product. Sad thing is that MZ1 would have upstaged MZR900, except for one severe crippling feature- that charging cradle: 1. Not only do you have to carry a wall wart with you, you also have to carry the charging cradle with you! 2. There is no "normal" power jack on the MZ-1. It get charged through the Sonys proprietary jack- ON THE CRADLE. There also is no "aftermarket" charger that will allow you to charge the MZ-1 in a car- unless YOU USE THE CRADLE! 3. Cannot change disks if you have the thing plugged into the wall, because THE CRADLE prevents you from opening it. What were they thinking? MZ-NH900 is the closest you can get- you get the aluminum (most of it anyway)and most importantly you get the versatility, because you are not dependant on the charging cradle. The beauty of the MZR900 was captured in the MZ-NH1, but Sony's choice in using that horrible proprietary connector and it's dependancy on that charging cradle ruined it. WHY couldn't they have just built a standardized Mini USB connection and a power jack into it like they did on it's slightly cheaper cousin- the MZ-NH900? They got all the stuff to do it! If Sony thinks that they can go up against the Zen/IPOD market, they need to stop making white elephants and build one hot player to go after them and catch a little of that market! And throw in OLED, to boot! Nobodies got that! My MZ-NH1 really has only one use for me: It's the ultimate (and best looking) MO drive for file storage and file transfering on the market! USB powered, a gig of storage, all for $300, too. No fudging around with burnin' CD's or having to find drivers for USB pen drives or flash card readers. The player AND the discs will fit in your pocket! Try doing that with an Iomega or a Castlewood Orb drive! Don't even need to find drivers. Plug and play/drop and drag on everything from Windows 98SE to Windows 2003 server. Not what I intentionally bought it for, but at least it's worth something to me. I actually like it better than my pocket USB hard drive. But perhaps it would be nice if Sony would actually let you LISTEN to music files that were transferred this way. Creative Labs and IRiver players let you do this, through the players BIOS (firmware)- and CL and IRiver even built versatility into the players for firmware upgrades. I guess heaven forbid that Sony (being a music publisher) would even think of offering the consumer this feature! Geez, where was all this great MO technology 5 years ago when Nomad players hit the market and the hottest thing in file storage was Zip 100/250's (oh, I forgot- Sony MO drives were overpriced!) Too bad my IPAQ PDA wont read HiMD media. That would be one less thing I'd have to carry to work. Sony really needs to look at things like IPODs/Rio Karma's/IRiver's, Zen Micro's and even the Nomad 3 (which despite its horrible packaging is still the perfect compact digital recorder, not quite pocket sized, but smaller than a porta CD player). USB charging for one and no weird cradles. And take every best feature that they have packaged, and package it into something clearly identifyable to the consumer. Kill the "Walkman" name too, cause everybody thinks of casette players and throw some marketing behind it. Nobody has that OLED feature! And the Sonic Foundry software isn't a bad piece, it's just the Sony machines proprietary (and hostile) firmware that makes it bad. I was tempted to modify the MZ-NH1 USB cable for charging. Somebody here claimed they were going to attempt this but never followed up on it. I don't want to be the guinea pig on this-i'd be destroying a perfectly good portable USB MO data drive!

lets see "eye candy display over metal quality construction" looks like MZ-1 wins. I have MZ-1 and MZNH900. I prefer the 900 better and it's slightly cheaper. 1. Contrary to popular belief, the MZNH900 IS made out of metal too. The plastic is on the LCD, just as it is on the proclaimed "All Metal" NH1 2. Contrary to popular belief, NEITHER model "USB charges." Despite Sony's deceptive ad, "USB powered" does not mean "USB charging!" IT CLEARLY STATES THAT IN BOTH MANUALS. It will not charge the battery on USB! Perhaps Sony needs to learn things from Zen Micro. 3. The MZNH900 uses a standard USB cable with the small connection. MZ1 uses a proprietary one and its larger and flimsy. 4. On the MZNH1 the docking cradle must be used to charge the unit. You do not need to carry around the docking cradle to charge the 900. 5. 900's display is easier to read. Too bad Sony cant make an OLED unit in an aluminum structure with USB power that actually charges the battery, too!