ro0tz

Encoding an audio stream TWICE gives an incredible amount of quality loss, artifacts and distortion.

Well, I totally agree with you. The HD-5 seems a very decent quality machine, it feels very sturdy, but if sound quality is the goal, I prefer an MD device. And I'm not on the road that much, so I am very satisfied with 1gb discs.

Well, mp3 sucks. Ogg vorbis on my computer, Atrac3Plus HiSP on my portable device, woohoo!

The mp3 files that I tested those hdd players with, came from the recommended LAME binaries, with the recommended settings, all info from hydrogenaudio. Ripped with the highest possible settings, all with high quality equipment. And still it sounded worse than a decent MD device using Atrac3/Atrac3Plus.

Twist and turn it any way you like, there is not a single mp3 player that has better quality than a mid/highrange MD player. I've used an iPod, a Creative Zen Micro, a Sony NW-HD5 and an iAudio X5v, and none of those comes close to the sound quality of a Sony MD device.

In what quality/bitrate are you recording?

I had the hissing sound with my Creative EP-630 in-ear headphones... Was quite annoying. My NetMD with the same headphones has no hissing at all, and it sounds much "warmer", don't really know how to explain it... The NW-HD5 sound quality is definitely better than the iPod 4G and Creative Zen Micro that I've tested before, but still no match for an MD device it seems...

Since a short while, my MZ-N510 has been acting strange. When I try to record things @ LP2 using Sonicstage, and I try to transfer an album, sometimes all songs get transferred okay, but some songs don't. Then I try again, and still the same songs refuse to transfer. Then I switch disks around a bit, and then it works, but very slow. Also when I want to delete some songs/groups from a disk, it takes AGES to complete, and sometimes the devices just keeps spinning for hours, all frozen up... Yesterday a certain disc played perfectly fine, but today the same disc takes 30 seconds to spin up, then finally plays. When I switch to the next song, again it takes 10 seconds to start... Does this mean my optic lens is dying? Should I try to clean it with a Qtip and some rubbing alcohol? By the way I use 80 minute Sony Premium discs (the gold ones), and I've always handled my MD with care. I'm using SS 3.4

Well now that I have heard the not-so-fantastic sound quality of the NW-HD5 I think I will either stick to my good old NetMD, or upgrade to a HiMD (RH910/RH10/RH1) soon.

Well I have borrowed the NW-HD5 from a friend, and I'm not very impressed by the hissing sound... How in the bloody hell can it be that this player has lesser sound quality than my ancient Sony MZ-N510 @ LP2?

I'm not interested in mp3 support, I only do HiSP Atrac3Plus. Hmmm I'm a little worried about that hiss culp4684 is talking about.

Hmmm this sounds like good news. Well I found a brand new NW-HD5, the silver version, in a local store for 195 €, which seems like a pretty good deal to me. For example the cheapest I can get an MZ-RH10 for is 265 €. One last question, I once owned a Creative Zen Micro for a few weeks, it had a micro-hdd, and the hdd made very annoying high-tone noises, and spinning noises, especially at the beginning of a songchange, do the sony-hdd players have this problem too? Because I find this very annoying.

Hmmm, sounds good. Because the thing is, I really like MD-devices, but I am not interested in the recording aspect. And now I can get my hands on a NW-HD5 really cheap, like 75 € cheaper than an MZ-RH10... All good, but I want to make sure that the sound quality is atleast as good as the HiMD-devices And gapless output with Atrac3/Plus codec too I assume?

First off, I am only talking about sound quality, and overall build quality, nothing more nothing less. How does an NW-HD5 (hdd unit, 20gb) compare to a high-end HiMD (think MZ-RH10) on the front of quality? Do they have identical sound quality?

If Sony actually dares to reduce the 6-line display to a 1-line display, and then has the balls to stick a non-LCD remote with this device for the European model, they can go and f*ck themselves, cause they won't receive any of my money.