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The reason I'm on these forums and the reason I've been playing with the Minidisc format again is due to hearing damage. I find I use music now to cope and need the best quality my damaged hearing can find. In a nutshell, I was operating a jackhammer one day. I had forgot my ear protection and was too lazy to go get some tissue or anything to put in my ear canals. I only ran the hammer for a couple of hours. Jackhammers are bad but not bad enough to have cause the damage I suffered. It was actually the sound of the breaking material that did the damage. That was several years ago and the ringing I thought would go away the next day, never has. It's called tinnitus and is actually damage to the brain's sound processor as opposed to the eardrums themselves. The brain simply cannot interpret what it's hearing resulting in a buzz or ringing sound instead. Mine is quite loud and degenerative. I find myself raising my voice to speak to people because I think I have to talk over the noise. Music helps because it takes my mind, or brain, off the noise. It's still there but it's less noticeable. It doesn't seem possible to drown it out with volume because the sound is in the brain and not coming from an outside source. So it's because of this that music has become all the more important to me, and mp3 players just don't cut it. I went out and bought myself a classic 80's Technics stereo system and a Sony MDS-JE320 (actually I was thrift-store shopping with my ex and we saw the JE320 sitting there for $39.00 and she said "If you don't get that you're an idiot and I don't wanna hear you bitching later cause you passed it up, so buy it, dammit!) and am very happy with sound again. Funny, until we saw the Sony in the thrift store I hadn't really thought about MD. I was thinking of getting a turntable and a nice tape deck or reel to reel. And I still may, but I'm very happy with MD at the moment. So obviously the moral is "Protect your hearing!" (And remain friends with your ex's because they know you, sometimes better than yourself)