Back to MD!

[tw]

Greetings all

As the title says, I'm back to using MD after 12 months of flash mp3 playing (iFP390T to be precise). I'd had a mzr900 for a couple of years which I really loved. Although I treated it like it was made out of spun glass, it fell victim to the dreaded optical block problem and stopped recording (played OK though). MDs are very difficult to get fixed here in Australia, so I ended up trying out a flash player (had no desire for a HD one like and iPod). Got the iRiver iFP390 and it worked well, I even got it behaving on a linux box. Ripped all my Cds to VBR mp3s and they sounded pretty good on it.

I thought that would be the end of it until on a recent trip down to Melbourne my brother in law generously gave me his old mzr70 (!) since he had fallen victim to iPod disease. I took one listen and immediately fell in love with the format again - they just sound so good, and look cool too. I'm a complete sucker for cool electronic gadgets, and MDs have it all over flashplayers in this regard!

I immediately went home, got my mzr900 repaired ($300!!!!) so that I could play all my old LP2 disks, and to the disgust of my wife also went out and got a shiny new mznh700!

I've got to say, I'm very very impressed with HiMD, even with my budget model. I record everything in HiSP and it sounds brilliant and sharp. I couldn't care less about SonicStage etc since I use linux, so I just take the time to record stuff in real time. Having the option of using it as (slow) USB storage is nice. Unlike some people I've read here, $8 HiMD blanks are easy to get (JB Hifi), and I've reformatted a whole heap of 80min blanks as HiMD too.

I've spent a lot of time reading up on this and other forums, and there's no doubt Sony could have been a bit less restrictive on the copy protection etc (my dream MD = USB2 which plays mp3, ogg, wav etc natively as well as atrac, with no need for SS/SB), but I don't really think it's a dying format at all. In fact I talked to the Sony rep at the shop I bought mine at, and he says HiMDs are selling extremely well in Australia (obviously things are a bit different in the USA where MDs are a niche market). At the end of the day I don't really care, I've got 3 cool MDs and odds are that they'll give me a lot of enjoyment for a good few years, until 50Gb flash players can be bought for $20!

Sorry for the rambling post, just thought I'd share the love!!