New Generation of MD Players for me

[Loque]

Hi there,

I have actually made a massive U-turn on pretty much everything Audio based now.

Last night I got my iPhone stolen, I have no music player and I miss the fantastic Build quality/audio Quality of a good Sony Minidisc Player. Personally I like to have a uniform setup for everything that I use.

At the moment I have a Nakamichi Minidisc Head Unit in my car (honestly, if you get a chance to obtain one, do it) but it's a net-MD one, and an MZ-N510 net md portable recorder.

I'm after a Portable MD Player, new Head unit, and a deck (WITH AN OPTICAL SPDIF Input) and they all have to be HI-MD. Does anyone have any ideas at all?

Price doesn't matter so much as I know these things last for bloody ages, and I want a quality product.

[sfbp]

Echoing over 99% of Wiz's post.

However one quick comment: you can have HiMD in your car, effectively, with AtracCD (now withdrawn). All or nearly all the (Sony) headunits made between 2004 and 2007 had the feature.

Gapless playback is no good (something in the design?) but apart from that the quality for 256K is superb and you will get about 6 CD's of music onto 1 physical CD.

[Loque]

Thanks for the replies guys.

I'm well aware that there are technically more capable alternatives that are around, the only things that are remotely in consideration for me are other Sony flash based solutions, and I do have an NWZ-A816 kicking around the place somewhere, and it's not bad. I just have many good memories with the minidiscs, enjoy using them and.. Grh.. I can't really explain it, but I actually just enjoy listening to music on them, not just particular songs.

That flash player you specified looks interesting, do you have any ideas on a price? I'm not up for parting with a few grand for it, but it does look like something I'd be interested in, almost for running alongside MD.

That's some bad news about the headunit. I really don't understand why anyone wouldn't make one. Minidiscs seem to me to be perfect media for cars; shock proof, you can throw them round the place as well.

I actually have my eyes on that Onkyo 275 system. Are they actually any good? Any other alternatives around?

The MZ-RH1 is quite an aesthetically pleasing unit, what's the extra features you describe? I actually had a NH600, which was built, in my eyes like a tank. It got ran over, and shot four times with a pretty powerful air rifle, I have retired the unit with honours!

[sfbp]

  the wizard of oz said:

The above mentioned proposition by subtle, fast, brisk and polite Stephen would be called Atrac3Plus algorythm coding in Hi-SP 256kbps flavour compressed digital audio on CD media, which agrees very little with moving vehicles as soon as the road isn't perfectly tarmacked, resulting in dear scratches and thus other unwanted gaps during playback of your favourite music.

Interesting! I haven't had a single skip and that with a low end head unit that i got for all of $50 second hand. I would actually expect a REAL CD to skip more, not less, than Atrac of whatever data rate. Also you don't have to go with 256kbps (eg a talking book type of deal you could put about 25 hours on the same disk at 64kbps), all data rates known to SonicStage are simply copied onto the Atrac disc without conversion (so you can have a mixture of LP2, LP4, Hi-SP and Hi-LP at the very least).

I think the failure to play gapless is because it has to read so much of the real data on the disk at once that it only actually activates the head quite rarely. Consequently there is a spin up at the end of every track or chunk.

Of course there's no point in PCM HiMD on the road:

a. the result would use the same number of disks as conventional CD's

b. the frequency response would be totally concealed by road noise.