Nh900 New User Observations

[bigtallrichb]

Hello.

Cant really complain as I am one of the lucky people who goat a £70 unit from Amazon . . . Its a nice bit of kit and am happy with purchase.

Anyone else sharing these niggles though?

USB power - only works for sonicstage / or datafile operation - why cant you use usb power just to play the unit?!

Recordings in HIMD mode from SOnicstage. Having transferred tracks from a CD via sonicstage from a "mixed" CD on the md unit I now get an annoying jump in sound when it moves to the next track. Shame.

Had read all the moans about SStage on here but cant believe Sony put their name to something this poor. Quite odd really. I am holding out hoping that a new proper version of sonicstage must come out with the lauch of the HIMD units, please?

Cheers,

RB

nb - one odd little thing is if you are using sonicstage and scrollbars in a dialog box are being really slow, click into explorer, whizz the scrollbar a bit, go back into sonicstage and it has freed up. Not very useful really but.....

[merkin51]

Have you upgraded to SS version 3.0? I'm not sure if it fixes any of these niggles, but I've heard it's a hell of a lot better than the 2x versions. I have just received my NH1 for £109 from Amazon, very very happy, not found any niggles myself yet

[gmk]

I bought the same NZ900 but have problems with SonicStage 2.1 coming with it. When I format MD80s to HiMD it doesn't transfer. I wonder whether there are some MD80s which don't work in HiMD mode?

I also had a problem with the 1GB MD which came with it. After I had successfully transferred quite a lot of music, I got an error message (can't remember what it said) and the whole thing collapsed. The disk now seems to be damaged. I have formated the disk but get "read error" after formatting seems completed. When I try to read it into SonicStage I get into a loop and have to shut down SonicStage.

I wonder whether a higher version of SonicStage e.g. 2.3 would work with the NZ900

[merkin51]

I bought the same NZ900 but have problems with SonicStage 2.1 coming with it. When I format MD80s to HiMD it doesn't transfer. I wonder whether there are some MD80s which don't work in HiMD mode?

I also had a problem with the 1GB MD which came with it. After I had successfully transferred quite a lot of music, I got an error message (can't remember what it said) and the whole thing collapsed. The disk now seems to be damaged. I have formated the disk but get "read error" after formatting seems completed. When I try to read it into SonicStage I get into a loop and have to shut down SonicStage.

I wonder whether a higher version of SonicStage e.g. 2.3 would work with the NZ900

←

Well, I haven't used anything over than v 3.0 as I upgraded as soon as I installed 2.1, as per recommendations on here. I recommend you do the same From what I've heard, v 3.0 is a million miles better than v2.1, and quite a bit better than 2.3. I can tell you that I have not run into any problems with v 3.0 at all yet.

You can upgrade by downloading the upgrade-installer here:

http://sonicstage.connect.com/SonicStageInstaller.exe

[matrulesok]

I put vesion 3 on my pc a few weeks before I got my nh900, and all seems well. I has not done anything wrong (eg bad discs/crashes), but it is still troubled by the restrictions applied in the first place:

Can't move songs done in simple burner back to pc via sonicstage

Fairly slow and ungainly peice of software etc ah well, the benefits far outweigh the negatives!

[malheuresement]

I have been SS3.0 for a while (I "downgraded" from an HD3 unit to NH900 - arrived today) and have had only experienced one problem, arising when attempting to write more tracks than can be fitted on the HiMD. The end result was that the prog couldn't finalise the disc so the 99% that had completed ok was unusable because the last 1% didn't get written correctly (SS3.0 forced -itself?- to shutdown).

I erased the minidisc on my '900 and recopied without any problems - SS3.0 even realised that the disc had been reformatted and transferred my the copy rights back to the PC from the HiMD, so I should be able to continue to transfer these tracks without issue.

Does this imply that there is a finite number of times that I can transfer tracks to a minidisc? If so, I guess that I need to make sure that I 'sync' the MD and SS3.0 so that I don't run out of copies. I knew that tracks recorded on the MD unit could only be transferred back to your PC once, but I didn't realise that there are limits on tracks already in your library, going back the other way (if, indeed, this is the case).

I have managed to copy these tracks onto the MD that experienced the problem with no issues, I just took care when getting close to the 960MBmark on the disc!

As a new user to HiMD, I can say that, compared to both the NW-HD3 and the D-NE700 (ATRAC CD player), I think that the sound quality is the best on the '900, which I am pleased about. This is a purely qualitative statement, though the music (Atr3+ 64 kbps) and headphones are the same in all cases, just the player has changed. My main reason for moving to HiMD was a question of power and capacity - I wanted an AA source available, but with a significant amount of music on-hand. In addition, size/convenience was important, and throw into the mix the recording capabilities, well then the NH900 achieves everything that I want/need, and an improvement in sound quality to boot.

Nice one, Sony, this is a very versatile piece of kit. Very pleased.