Tunster

Well, I've placed a pre-order on www.askdirect.co.uk! For £204! that is a fantastic deal. I bought my first MP3 player there (which I still have!) and are excellent, so I can trust them that they will have stock in beginning of June. I don't mind saving £50 which can go towards the HiMD discs I'm going to buy of eBay as soon as I know the RH1 is on my way .

The iPod Shuffle is the most useless invention made by mankind (the Apple Corp kind that is). Any standard flash/hdd player with a screen has it. For one, I do not rate the iPod SQ. For two, flash/hdd based players with lose everything if it breaks. I don't care if a MD disc brakes (very unlikely) or the player was to pack in (the data can still be accessed with another player). For three, I love being different and having a RH1 (compared to everyone having some kind of standard MP3 Player) will look brilliant in comparison ). If you love the quirkies of MD, go for it. Don't see why you cannot use HiMD as a playback format. For my main purposes (when I get the RH1), I'll recording my radio shows in LP2 on a NetMD deck and then uploading to PCM for archive. With regards to playback, I'll use the 1GB discs to store Hi-SP quality (from CD) albums.

As much as I love shopping with e-tailers; with lower prices etc, not knowing if they have any in stock is the bastard about buying from some of these places. With special products like this one, I normally phone around first. Very unlikely. All it does is show you the version and most probably helps if the unit gets serviced at all. Like all the other units, there has been no sign of firmware released to the public.

I wouldn't they were going to get any in before any Sony Centre. My Sony Centre in Chelmsford told me 6th/8th (one of the two) June. So that two weeks works out right .

You'd be safer to spend the full whack at the Sony Centre, be guarenteed you'll get one and be safe of a guarentee if it goes wrong. I've bought online before for my electronic stuff, but I'm not prepared to buy online for this, for the sake of £10 - £50 saving. If you've got the money to spend, spend it. Eventually, I'll sell my MP3 player on eBay which I should get £100 - £150 from it to recover my finances.

I think what they told you was the trade price. I went to see a guy face to face the other day. He quickly looked to see when they were in (June 8th - i think!). I asked the price and he stumbled to say £200, but then he said that was the trade price. He then looked at the till system and it said £250. I wouldnt reckon it would different prices across the country as that would be.......wrong.

The only downside for me is that I want the black version... (and obviously site only sells the silver one from what I read in the description). Is it really worth saving 50 quid for a colour I don't want? Great find tho!

I quickly popped into my Sony Centre (Chelmsford). I'm sure LION has said already, but as to my disappointment, they won't be getting them until the 5th or 8th July (cannot remember now). I did ask whether there would be limited stock as there hasn't been any news of any other 3rd Gen units of yet. He said they should be well stocked because there has been alot of interest in this model. As much as I don't want to wait, I may have to.

I wouldn't be recording my show on the RH1. I will be recording onto SP mode on the JE-480 we have at my hosptial radio station, then transferring it to whatever with the RH1. Radio uses MD an awful lot. Also, I won't be using the RH1 just for that purpose. I don't see the point having every single bit of music I own on my MP3 player (which is brilliant however). I only listen to certain stuff, and love the music on some physical media. A hard-drive is more likely to go than a MD getting broken. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind one MD going, with a small proportion of my collection rather than all of it on one HD.

As much as warrenty is quite nice to have, it's very unlikely the unit will go wrong. MD units are very well built together, and like my N510, its still going after several years. I'm desperate for the RH1 because I'm a radio presenter and recording onto my MD (SP/LP2/LP4) would be so much more easier than recording it on another PC in MP3 then copying and pasting to my MP3 player.

Well, I did jump myself into the deep end without doing my research. I just had the assumption that the Euro Editions were capped through PCB alteration. As much as the HiMD models can be hacked through firmware and the claim it would be pointless to create a limited PCB..... Why has there been no hacks for the NetMDs (especially my N510) if its the case of the destination code mod? Anyway, back on topic, I will most likely get a UK edition rather than importing from across Japan. I am just considering how much cheaper it will be in the end as UK prices are "normally" ripoff and overpriced.

Excuse me for my ignorance. No need to get like that. Yes, I completely missed those topics entirely admittedly. But it is only for certain models at the end of the day. Maybe we may get a solution for the Euro Model for the RH1. But I don't see the point of purchasing it if I can get a Japanese import for the same price.

I thought the restriction cannot be overcome as its to with the PCB rather than the firmware. Maybe I'm wrong with the new generation of models, but I'm sure I've read many times here, you can only over the european limitation if you purchase a portable amp. Not really worth spendin the extra money for that when you can import from Japan. Please someone correct if I'm wrong. I'm sure this is true unfortunately. Damn european legislation!

Very simply, if you have a european model, you CANNOT remove the limitations. Nothing to with the firmware from my knowledge. Its all down to a limitation placed on the PCB and output on the headphones jack. The only way is by purchasing a portable amplifier. If you search for removing european limitation, you'll find a nil result everywhere. Sorry.

This is why most MD Decks (not sure if the feature existed pre-NetMD), including my JE-480 can grab the last 5 secs if u missed the start or something important.

Ask Direct are excellent. I got my MP3 Player from there. I had trouble with the unit only after a week. My dad took the receipt and unit back to the shop, and they happily exchanged it. Glad to see more UK e-tailers selling it. But is it worth it buying from them as they'll have the untis with the sound restriction . I'll have to wait and see.

Japan-Direct have now started to sell the product! (which I'm really happy to see ) In black and silver! / US$466.01 inc. Shipping From the UK point of view, I could get it now for that price which is £250 and its uncapped as well. But, I'm undecided whether to wait and get it from soundprofessionals for £193 (inc. shipping) and not know what colour it would be. Saving £50, is it worth it? I love the black and I am so tempted to put the order in now.

I know it won't be the price in Britain (bloody rip off country!). As the topic states, it'll be £249 RRP and most stores (if they ever sell it) will keep close to the mark. I am so tempted to sell off my MP3 DAP Player (iAudio M3). Bloody fantastic player, but I don't use it enough now (as I don't go to college anymore). I will always love the MD format and this will be great to side with first purcahse of the MZ-N510 (which I still use now!). I'll now be able to make SP recordings with my MD Deck optically knowing that I can always upload them if I need to .

Why worry? Windows Updates are absolutely useless and only clog up your machine with more crap than it started with. I don't bother with Windows XP Updates, just turn them off. The only reasons I don't wish to purchase a licence of Windows XP: 1) Windows is still full of bugs that could of easily been ironed out. Also, it crashes too often to be worth paying for it. 2) Overpriced. Only because they have the monopoly and can charge what they like. If they charged £20 - £40 for a single license, that seems reasonable. Especially when you have to to pay crap loads of money for lots of off the shelf software (e.g. Office, Microsoft again!). 3) There are many free alternatives including a illegal version of windows . If they were that bothered that pirates were using their software, surely they would of clamped down on it many moons again. Probably, they don't mind pirates as it keeps users using their software, regardless of people not paying and still having a large majority of paying users.

$299 is £160! Christ! I may well consider one of these babies sooner or later . Having just regenerated my MZ-N510 back to life, I am now well on with MD again .

I for one have been a mixed user of both a MD (MDLP) Player/Recorder (including a deck) and an MP3 Player. I've got the MZ-N510/MDS-JE480 and the Cowon M3 40GB. I had the MD equipment. One of my mates introduced me into the format. I loved the small and durable discs, the sound quality and niche of the format. At the time, I was doing alot of radio and it was fantastic to record my shows using MD. It had uses with recording CD music straight onto MD also so I didn't have to take my whole CD collection in. I did this for a couple of years where I introduced a few other people onto MD. After I while (no idea why), I ditched my MD equipment for a brand spanking new Cowon M3 player. With my increasing MP3/CD collection, I wanted something I could just drag and drop my music onto and play. You can see I already I don't like the iPod. Many reasons is that its a fashion fad I didn't want to get into. Anyway, I've gracefully used my MP3 player for a couple of years and has been very useful having USB 2.0 support, radio, line-in recording, compatibility to many different formats (MP3, OGG, WMA, FLAC, WAV) and get sound quality. Now recently, I got my MD equipment back into action and oh my god....... what have I been missing!? Now I've moved along without MD, its nice to have music on something removable. Especially with my CD collection growing quickly and stopping downloading music. The point is about the big comparison between MD and HDD based players is very simple.... With a quality and well solidly made product MD is (especially the MD media itself), I am afraid that one day my HDD in my DAP player will just go and I've lost all my music! Eventually, people will start realising that iPods are not so special. With the large amount of iPods around, the build quality of them cannot be substantial at all. Everyone so relies on iTunes and HDD.... the fact that HDDs are cheap for space, but not for long-term storage. Especially constant use by users. All the easy drag and drop purchases of an iPod from iTunes will be gone with no recovery when the HDD dies. It will be the test of time of when this will start happening at an alarming rate. Especially 2nd/3rd/4th iPod generation users. On the other hand, MDs last a substantially long time. I download legal music quite often and I think MD is the best media to store them for a long time in regards to keeping quality (in SP mode). If Sony keep holding on to MD, I think very soon, people will start to walk away from iPods. Very optimisitc, but if Sony started to pitch the MD product right in terms of advertising and software (which they should of done years ago), it would/could become a very attractive audio player.