Hi there, I am new to this forum. I just got a Onkyo FR-N9 (Japanese Page: http://www2.onkyo.com/jp/product/products....08?OpenDocument). I´m not quite sure how to call this thing, probably it´s a bookshelf system? The Japanese call it a Mini-Kompo. It´s no single MD-deck for sure. I thought of getting one of the two Onkyo HI-MD-decks, but then they had this thing at the Sakuraya in Shibuya, and I got it for 48,000 Yen after negotiating for half an hour, together with the Onkyo D-N8 speakers (Japanese Page is here). It is a display item though, so maybe it wasn´t such a bargain. It is in good shape though. I enjoy the possibilty to have the RH10 for recording and transferring music, the EH1 (which I found for a bargain 15.000 Yen in Akihabara a while ago) for portable listening and now the Onkyo-thing (please tell me the correct term for this!), for listening at home. I used to connect one of my portables to desktop-speakers to listen to MD (since I live in Japan and haven´t owned a stereo system until now), but such an Onkyo-thing is so much more convenient, because of the large volume-nob and the display, wich is as blue as the RH10-schreen, but a lot bigger. Just by the way, I was just wondering what do all the iPod-users do when they want to listen to music at home? Do they use some kind of stereo docking station? Even if there are remotes for those things, I think MD just makes more sense for home listening. I might write a little review later, here just some first impressions: It sounds very good to me. I am no audiophile, but I think I can say that it sounds good. The main thing it does is playing music (and that´s most important isn´t it?), it doesn´t have that much playback features. For example there´s no possibility to let it playback only the songs of one artist or one album for example. You can´t even search for songs by artist or album name, only by group. So concerning these features my small EH1 can do a lot more than this home system. At first I was quite disappointed by that, but then I thought that it isn´t that bad, because it´s HI-MD, and not Hard-disk or something like that. If I had a huge collection of albums on one MD, it would be quite hard to find one specific song, but because it´s MD and I recently produced a lot of LP2 MDs of one artist, on 80min discs in HI-MD mode, the navigation through the disc works OK. Actually I like the minimalistic design on this, as I also like on the RH10 and EH1. Not to many buttons a things to play around with, no video playback or swiss army knife included, so it just plays music in great audio quality. I might be getting a little off-topic, but I am getting a little bored by devices, that have a thousand features and fancy displays, so you keep playing around with them all the time, which actually distracts you from listening to music. If I want to wach video or play games, I prefer a different device for that, one that mainly does that one thing! I took some pictures of my new Onkyo FR-N9 mini system. I tried to cover all parts of it, that may be of interest. Maybe this is the first time that there is a pictoral of Hi-MD home audio here, at least I haven´t seen any yet. I think it´s a beautiful system! The aluminium front and the buttons of this unit really give an impression of high quality! The unlit parts of the display aren´t actually as bright as it appears in the photos. I hope you can enjoy the pictures! Post updated by Ishiyoshi
