MZ-NH700 [subjective] Review

[Christopher]

My MZ-NH700 arrived yesterday. Here are my thoughts on it after a day and half's use.

Please note that everything expressed here is opinion and should neither be taken as gospel nor completely invalid because of that.

Opening the package:

Before ordering the 700, I did read what was expected to come with the unit. I mustn't really have paid attention, because I was surprised by what I found in the plastic store-shelf container it came in.

The contents were: a felt carrying bag, earbuds, basic remote, NiMH battery, USB cable, AC adapter, the Hi-MD recorder itself, one blank Hi-MD, two clamp-on trap filters, the software CD, and a crapload of paper.

The felt bag seemed thoughtful, and I'm actually using it.

The earbuds that came with the unit aren't worth the plastic they were made with, though.

The 700 itself is all plastic except for parts in the transport, inside the unit. Despite this fact, and the fact that it is so light that it seems like the battery is most of the weight, it doesn't have a total aura of cheapness about it; it appears to be rather solidly built for something with an all-plastic case. None of the panels are even remotely loose and there aren't any obvious pressure points where the case bows with moderate finger pressure.

Use:

The controls are fairly easy to use. The jog-wheel and menu system is fairly intuitive - I haven't even leafed through the manual and can get it to do everything I want to, including changing record settings and playing with the EQ.

As foretold, Sony does still make you go through the hassle of switching to manual record levels through a menu system that takes at least 5-10 seconds to get through and set. The fact that after years of customers griping about this, yet it still doesn't remember the setting, says something about how Sony engineers think, I think. One thing they -have- changed since the previous standard-MD models I've used [mostly a couple of MZ-R70s] is that the jog wheel stays as the record level control - and stays active - while you're recording. No more having to pause to turn the levels up or down. I prefer it this way - at least they finally have half the equation right.

Note: at first this might seem great, but it does pose a problem if the wheel gets spun accidentally while you're recording. I don't expect this to be a problem in my case.

Everything else is standard fare for MDs, IMO. The only really annoying feature I'm finding is having to hold the menu button down for 2-3 secs to get into the menus. To me that means lost recording time.

Listening:

I ripped some CDs I'm highly familiar with and converted them to atrac3plus 256k in Sonicstage 2.1. Conversion and transfer times were reasonable in that they were a bit faster than I'd expected from reading others' experiences.

The first thing of note here is that the included earbuds are useless for anything more than making sure you got the take you were after. They're uncomfortable, and they sound just plain bad. The sound from them is shrill and highly distorted even at low volumes.

As I said, though... they're great for quickly checking your recording on-location - mainly because they're so cheap that if they got destroyed in the field you wouldn't miss them in any way.

I tried the 700, playing the material I'd ripped, converted, and downloaded [download, upload, Sony uses the terms backwards if you ask me] and listening on my Sennheiser HD330s. The 330s are obviously a bit much for the analogue headphone amp in the 700 to really drive, but the sound not only isn't unpleasant, but is better than what I was expecting.

I then tried it with my Koss noise insulating in-ear phones to test the EQ. These are the quick $40CAD at RadioShack solution to needing just a bit of isolation on location - the result of needing some kind of monitoring while videotaping an entire weekend last summer. These do NOT sound wonderful: they have horn-sounding mid-bass; terrible, muddy lower midrange; and an extremely exaggerated bottom end. On the other hand, they were cheap, they stay in my ears well, and the in-ear part [being much like a pair of EAR earplugs] is effective at isolating things enough to monitor on location.

The 700's equaliser does a fair job of making these phones -almost- bearable for general listening. The phones that came with the unit are beyond salvaging with the EQ, though.

At best, I found the unit fine for portable listening - as many others have said. I'm conscious of the fact that it's portable and running on low power, so I both expect and accept certain compromises. As a consumer portable music player, it seems to function very well.

The next part is what surprised me, though..

Recording:

The following is highly unscientific and should not be considered a real technical review, as I lack professionally-calibrated test equipment.

The output of my Revo7.1 is calibrated so that 0dB digital is very close to 0dBVU when the volume is wide open [having measured this with a VU meter on a Nagra tape recorder as well as several pieces of consumer equipment, as well as having been told by M-Audio that that's what it should be].

I used Sound Forge to create various test tones. First was a -12dB 880Hz tone to do a very rough calibration of the line-in on the Hi-MD.

I connected the main stereo out of my Revo7.1 directly to the line-in on the Hi-MD. Using the -12dB 880kHz tone, I discovered that "sloppy unity" is between 18-20 [out of a max of 30]. I set the unit to 20 and left it there.

I then ran a -12dB 10Hz-40kHz sweep [24 bit, 96kHz] into the unit and recorded using PCM mode.

I also recorded 10 seconds of silence using both an open input and a grounded cable plugged into the line-in. I followed this by plugging the grounded cable into the mic in and recording with the level set to 20 for 10 secs, then at 0 for 10 secs.

I transferred all of these back to the computer using Sonicstage, then recorded the files using Total Recorder.

This is the part that blows me away - though I'm not sure if Total Recorder is really taking all the data.. because the results of the silence tests [checking the noise floor while recording] were .. too good to be true, maybe.

I used several analysis tools to look at the noise floor, including the simple analyser in Sound Forge 7.

* line-in with grounded cable: average level of noise measures around -120dB, which is outside the dynamic range of 16 bit quantising. There was a peak at exactly 60Hz which reached -92dB.

* line-in with open input: average level of noise was about -120dB, with a peak at 60Hz of -100dB.

* mic in with grounded cable, level at 20: average level is about -120dB, 60Hz peak up to -78dB but nothing else above -102dB.

* mic in with grounded cable, level at 0: average -128dB, peak at 60Hz of -98dB.

There was no sign with any of these of EMI other than 60Hz from house current [possibly from being run off the AC adapter] being picked up.

Yes, I realise that these aren't scientific measurements. And to be honest, they're so far outside the range I was expecting that I can hardly believe it's close to accurate - except for the part with the sweep tone.

The recording of the sweep, transferred back to the computer as PCM and copied with Total Recorder, has a flat response curve from 20 to nearly 20kHz; it gets down about -3dB at about 19.5kHz and slopes off gently, brickwalling just past 21k.

It's also interesting to note that the sweep as it continued past 22.05kHz kept on showing up as a half-volume downtravelling harmonic of the actual signal - i.e. the sweep goes up to 22.05kHz and then appears to come back down at half volume. This would suggest a lack of filtering above 20kHz when recording from analogue sources - meaning that exposure to high-energy ultrasonic "sound" would cause clearly audible distortion in recordings. Recordings made with atrac or atrac3plus might be severely affected by ultrasonic signals [as the harmonics would already be in the signal before it reached the encoder].

Like I said, I'm not sure what to make of these results. Either I'm doing something completely, utterly wrong [which it doesn't really look like, to me, but then.. I have been smoking the ganj], or this unit is vastly outperforming in at least one minor way my expectations of it as a recorder. My tests done [even less scientifically] with the MZ-R70 gave it a noise floor of about -70 to -75dB, which is more what I was expecting, to be honest.

Of course - this says nothing whatsoever about the distortion levels of the mic preamp, linearity of the A/D convertor, etc. But it was fun to do.

I made some other recordings using the line-in coming from the Revo7.1 and the results, once transferred back to the PC, exceeded my expectations in every way. Keep in mind that so far I have only used PCM for recording; I haven't had it on Hi-SP or lower at all. It was one of the first settings I changed after taking it out of the package.

Overall, the unit records very well in PCM mode. I've had no trouble copying things to or from discs, including data, and Sonicstage has been stable so far. Total Recorder seems to work very well, even if it requires things to be done in real time; I'm used to transferring the analogue way, so it's no biggie to me.

I bought this with the intention of using it for field recording. I've already started using it as a music player, which I hadn't really expected myself to take seriously before. As a portable the sound quality is good enough with the earphones I have [not the best quality] to be listenable, even for long periods.

The recordings I've made so far have completely exceeded my expectations. While not audiophile-quality, this is such a significant step up from the previous generations of anything I've used except for DAT that I'm -extremely- happy.

If anyone has questions, please do ask. And sorry for blathering on, so. I'm just having fun with my new tool/toy.

[greenmachine]

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[jonny mac]

Nice review, too much detail in the recording for me (way over my head) and great photos too - I've never seen the NH700 look so sexy

[KrazyIvan]

I noticed you are in the US. Where did you get your NH700 and how much did you pay?

[bwerbrou]

I noticed you are in the US.  Where did you get your NH700 and how much did you pay?

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are you sure the nh700 you bought is new since there's so much dirt around the notches of the wheel? which etailer did you use?

nice pictures though, very very nice

[greenmachine]

The review has originally been written more than one year ago by dex Otaku. I just thought about adding some pictures of my used unit (although it still looks like new, i've just been too lazy to clean it - maybe i'll consider it for the next 'shooting').