Purchased refurbished component MD player/recorder from Sony

Danny Tse

I suppose it's a bargain if you're looking for such a machine....

Refurbished Sony MDS-JE480 component player/recorder

I have a number of pre-recorded MiniDisc and I currently play them on my portable Sony MD player. Since I cleaned-up the stock of blank MD discs at my local Target store when they were being cleared out, getting a recorder has always been on my mind.

Yashu

I used to be big into MD, before they made the data MD, so they would record like tapes, adjusting the levels and such. I had bad luck with Sony machines (channel distortion and strange artifacting), but I had good luck with a Pioneer machine.

Remember, the age of the machine will dictate the version of ATRAC that is used. The newer the machine, the later version of the ATRAC encoder, so be aware, if it is not a newer machine, it isn't going to sound as good.

I used them mostly for portability, I would carry my MDs in a little booklet and I had a portable player from Sony that ran on one AA battery for quite a while. It was the best way to listen to portable music before mp3 players became popular. I had my MD gear when the best mp3 player only had 64mb of memory, so you can see that, at the time, MD was superior, and the portable player was the same size, batteries lasted just as long, and I could swap discs out very easily. I made countless mixes and would carry them around in my backpack when I was in college. I was known as the guy that always had a pair of headphones around his neck.

I grew out of needing portable music when I got into my career and my marriage, and my car is my portable music device now, and instead of making MD mixes, I use 320k or V0 mp3s on CD, which sound probably just as good as the best ATRAC.

Anyway, if you are looking for an interesting alternative to the iPod, I think MD is a good choice, but just make sure you get a machine with the latest ATRAC version, because it *does* make a big difference in the MDs that you record. I still have all my MD gear, and if I ever needed portable music, I would probably just use that stuff. I even have 80 minute discs, so I can dub entire CDs and not worry about the length.

It is not a high fidelity format, I would compare it to a LAME V0 mp3, but not as good as a LAME 320k or a high bitrate AAC. AAC was superior to ATRAC, and so I would be interested if DRM free iTunes tracks would sound better on an iPod than a good MD recording, but you can overcome some of the problems by tweaking the recording levels and settings.

Some of the later MD recorders and players allowed transfer of data directly at more than 1X, but those are more about convenience, not quality, because of the transcoding and other issues. The best way to do it is to treat the MD recorder like a tape deck, and record something, and if it has 'tape monitoring', use that to tweak it until it sounds the best. The lastest ATRAC isn't that bad, but I wouldn't use it as a serious listening source, but it makes a great portable set that will make the iPod guys do a double take. Plus it's kindof fun, like back when we used to use our tape decks to make mixes, tweaking bias, levels, and all that stuff.

If you can find it, Stereo Review, from a long time ago, did a spectrograph comparison of MD vs. CD vs. Tape (Dolby S), and there is a good explanation of the ATRAC version issues there... the fact that this is in Stereo Review lets you know how long this tech has been around, and if it weren't for mp3, it would have taken off here like it did in Japan where they are still popular (discs used as data storage for other formats, like mp3, with fast burning of files, and portable players with 20 hour battery lives that can play all the various MD versions, the original ATRAC, the extended time versions [I *think* using a DVD like layer instead of CD], and also as a data storage media for other formats like mp3, as the DVD-like layer could hold a lot more data)

EDIT: I looked at the player, I see it is a S/MDLP/MP3 recorder, do check your portable player and make sure it can play the MDLP, because that is the format that really makes MD worth it. I got out of MD right when the dvd-like MD came out, and so I don't have a lot of experience with it, but the ATRAC issues were certainly fixed by then, so as long as your portable player can support it, that would be the discs to use.

mightymouse

I think I paid something like $300 for a portable Sony MD player/recorder several years ago, right before mp3 became popular. Didn't really use it all that much. I still have about 20 or 30 MD discs lying around here somewhere. Haven't really used it for a long time now, just all being gathering dust.

There was even used to be a site that's dedicated to portable MD players/recorders. I don't know if it's still there anymore.