Sony.....?!

Tahrey1043 · Post by **Tahrey1043** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 12:23 am

Begin friday night half concious rant, reviewing a device bought for what seemed like a total bargain at Â£179:

Are they just fick or wot...

Got me a Hi-MD player. Very slick very slinky, beautifully light (mainly cuz it doesnt have the hardcore magnesium case of my last one!), good sound quality, good remote (with radio), and offers expandable gigs of storage for about a fiver a throw (or, 300mb discs for about 99p each) - far better value than an iPod. Plus the battery is replacable for a couple quid (AA NiMH), it doesnt have a fragile hard disc, and its nowhere near such a chavmagnet.

BUT but but..... its just in the details.... its like they like looking good in the adverts, but dont WANT people to keep faith and continue buying their machines....

* The random mode still sucks. Out of 100 tracks you'll get the same 20 or so over and over in the same order.
* There's STILL no program mode ("bookmark" mode is a very poor alternative) -- why, when even a Â£9.97 Alba cd player from argos offers both of these, and when they've bothered to include a next-to-useless "A-B repeat" mode?
* Still no auto-pause voice activated recording mode thing or speed controls.
* Forward/reverse seek still sucks even though the memory required for a suitable sound buffer would cost less than the supplied headphones
* And still no backlight for the display - which is still only 8 letters wide, despite being expanded to 3 lines
* The AVLS has been somehow made even stupider than before.
* The choice of recording modes can now best be described as "bizarre", and or more truthfully, "crap", from a previous high of "limited but reasonable". Particularly in Hi-MD rather than regular minidisc mode, and especially if trying to record Hi-MD on the machine rather than the PC.
Considering how good 132k is, all it would need is a decent high-hundreds kbit mode (say the 176kbit atrac3 offered in realplayer) and it could rule over everything. But, WHAT you think they missed out inbetween PCM, 256k, 132k (still the best choice), 64k and (ugh) 48k? As well as removing the supreme regular SP mode? No extra low rate (~32k) mono dictaphone mode either. Jerkwads.

(dont get me wrong - the 48k mode is incredibly impressive for what it is, fetching out a pretty listenable result thats similar to a 96k mp3 in very little space... but, ysee, 96k mp3s are CRAP! They also lie - the puzzlingly lacklustre (next to 292k SP) "256k" mode is actually 275k!)

* It'll work as a pendrive-like device with extra big storage, but it's hella slow (think zipdisk), and of course... if you copy wma or mp3 to it, you can't play em natively, for no clearly defined good reason. Doesnt bode well for ideas of hi-md based digicams or mini camcorders.

And....the software is bloody awful! Slow to encode, hard to organise things easily or do batch operations, importing files is a total pain in the tush even if you make an m3u in winamp first.... and fragile as anything even though its been thru X number of revisions - right now i just made a 199 track list to cram all my CD singles into a 300mb disc in 48k as a test..... and its crawling like a mofo, barfing up graphics errors and bringing the whole PC with it, and thats just with "importing" them (not converting) and idling away. Damn. Good job i didn't attempt to test the "45 hours on a 1gb" claim.
Not to mention the difficulty of trying to upload self-recorded files (even from the microphone, ie lectures!) into the pc and turn them into some kind of usable format.

(ps... their online service... 99p a track? thats about as expensive as the average physical cd single, never mind album. seems they dont want you to use the online store, really.. make it 33p each and watch the money roll in thru the power of economics)

Despite the otherwise very good quality of the machine, and the shineyness of the underlying tech, do feel kind of let down by their inane use of it. Roll on truly affordable memory cards (ie under Â£10 for 512mb) so the solid state dream can become reality without having to mess about with easy-to-kill (...easy to nick in one go...) hard drives.

End rant......
Hope that review did ppl some good.

Post by **Josh_PoloGTi** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 7:18 am

One of the rare times I've read one of your posts from top to bottom without skimming...

Thanks for the review.

I used to be a HARDCORE advocate of the Minidisc format:

I went through 3 or 4 MD In Car Head Units with a 6 MD Changer in the boot

I've still got a decent Sony MD HiFi Seperate (the only bit of MD kit I have left)

I had MD Walkmans from 1994... Quite a few (can't remember them all so I'm not going to bother trying to list them all)... I ended up with one of the first (but mid/high range) Sony Net MD's which I thought would be fantastic. How wrong I was. MD LP sounded crap imho. It took AGES to copy stuff across to the unit. It took ages to convert MP3 to ATRAC3 and the software often crashed. The feature I most wanted: "Copy my Live recordings back to my PC via USB" was blocked by Sony in their infinite wisdom. They reconed it would cause all kinds of piracy. Grow Up Sony you C0cknoses. I wonder that's why so many people stopped buying your (ace) Minidisc products? It sure is the reason I swapped mine for a chav/scratch/drop magnate that is my iPod.

ATRAC is an amazing compression algorythm that Sony spent something daft like 10 years developing. It sounds awesome imho... However 192kbps MP3s are pretty much ALL I listen to nowadays. I never play my original CD's any more... They've all been converted to MP3 and get played through either my Car Stereo, iPod or PC (PC is connected to a badass HiFi btw). 192kbps is good enough for me. Sony just lost my custom when their "Security" came in the way of "Usability". Plus I don't have to carry around a caselogic with my iPod, it takes seconds to copy an album across and iTunes is a truely fantastic piece of software. I'd go so far as to say it's my PC's "Killer App".

I now have 64gb of MP3 (yes all legal and no, I don't fileshare) and iTunes, my iPod, my Pioneer HU and a cake of inexpensive CD-R's are now my life.

Thanks for the memories Sony... And your little indistructable discs that clutter up my window-sill.

Post by **Josh_PoloGTi** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 7:23 am

Oh, and:

Click Here

Model - APPLE 20GB IPOD

in-store price Â£219.00
web exclusive Â£211.99

bstardchild · Post by **bstardchild** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 9:37 am

Josh_PoloGTi wrote:One of the rare times I've read one of your posts from top to bottom without skimming... .

Snap

metz · Post by **metz** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 10:40 am

I can't believe i read it all too, i have a md headunit in my car..and the only reason why is cos it was Â£55

I think mp3 is the next upgrade in my stereo equipment though, and i would love an ipod (just have to get josh out of the house and my neice in through the window)

*Incase anyones thinking "OH MY GOD METZ IS A BURGALAR"..I'm not at all..don't have the time with all the murdering*

toXXin · Post by **toXXin** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 12:56 pm

I think my next stereo purchase will have to be a DVD MP3/WMA CD player, purely for reading MP3s/WMAs off a DVD-R rather than playing DVDs.

Sony? I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole!

metz · Post by **metz** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 1:14 pm

Yea thats what i wanna do too toxxin, less cds to clutter the car then

and sony..I agree.

bstardchild · Post by **bstardchild** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 1:24 pm

toXXin wrote:I think my next stereo purchase will have to be a DVD MP3/WMA CD player, purely for reading MP3s/WMAs off a DVD-R rather than playing DVDs.

Sony? I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole!

Bought a Kenwood MP3/wma/CDA/CD player for the Polo - first purchase I made when I got the Polo cos the std Rad/Cas was utter rubbish and I'm very pleased with it.

Get about 90 reasonable quality tracks in MP3 format shoehorned on a disc and better still it displays the trackname/artist (from the filename)

Very very pleased and at a smidge over a oner price was good too - One downside was illumination doesn't go with std Polo dash set up (it's red and blue) but hopefully one day I'll see a "how to" for conversion of a 6n dash to red and blue - I know it's already been done

Tahrey1043 · Post by **Tahrey1043** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 1:39 pm

My last experience with MD - my old MDLP player (one of the first, pre- Net MD!) that's slowly dying from one too many air/stone-tiled floor transitions - was the titties for the first 18 months and i was very happy with it. 160 minutes is a nice length of time - used to use 120 minute cassettes a lot - and the sound quality was fine, but for a bit of model-specific treble over boost. If my optical-out CD player hadnt bitten the dust a while back I might still be struggling on with it's intermittent refusal to play or record anything.

Was very fired up for the Hi-MD and feel a bit cheated. I was buying it with the intention of a walk-about tryout before buying a car head unit with the same capabilities (get back from trotting round somewhere with the walkman on, take disc out, slot into player - rather than current practice of hooking up the tape adaptor). But I think now, unless Sony pull their finger out and make some improvements, I'll be looking at something that can play MP3-DVDRW or something (its gotta be on the cards after all). If it's just a stack of say 10 8.5gb discs that are going to live in the glovebox, then i can encode them all at VBR with maximum quality settings and be done with it.

Might even write 'em a letter...

But for Â£211 i'm still not biting the iPod cherry yet - i've got more tunes than that for one thing, can probably end up with >20gb storage without spending the difference (hell i've got at least a full 10-pack of unopened 80 minute /300mb blanks here), dont have to p*** about with the battery issues etc........ plus does it have a radio?

PS from finally finishing that 48k-into-300mb experiment i've found out their estimations of the bitrate are a fair bit off.. as in the number they state is lower than the actual.. so i ended up having to lose a couple tracks

carmadaaron · Post by **carmadaaron** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 2:15 pm

Hard drives are good... but expensive......

dxg · Post by **dxg** » Sun Oct 24, 2004 3:44 pm

I *was* a Sony fan-boy for years.

About 4 or 5 years ago, I actually waited for the MZR-55 (Sony's first single-chip MD package) to come out before investing in the MD format. Of course, despite being a lovely (Raven?) blue colour, this broke within six months. Fair enough Sony, fixed it under warranty, but it took them ages.

The huge bind with MDs is the that you have to re-record interviews at 1x speed to convert them into MP3 for archiving.

So, I bought one of these NetMD things (with work's money, though), only to find that while it will copy (and convert) MP3s from the computer to the MD, it won't work in the other direction -- that was the whole reason I bought it!! Grr. Still, at least I didn't waste my own money.

Although, MDLP in mono on an 80 minute disc = over 5 hours recording. It's great for workshops - just set it going and forget about it.

Then...

My work laptop is a Sony. It's the only machine I have access to. It's now just over 3 years old. About 4 months ago it broke (sometimes it would boot, other times it would coose not to). I had an extended three-year warranty (again, work's money).

It took them six weeks, huge amounts of phone calls, (ignored) letters of complaint, just to come and collect the thing!!! Then two further weeks to repair and return it. I had no *work* computer to use for these two months!!!

I'll not buy another Sony.

Deek.

dxg · Post by **dxg** » Sun Oct 24, 2004 3:51 pm

Josh_PoloGTi wrote:Oh, and:

Click Here

Model - APPLE 20GB IPOD

in-store price Â£219.00
web exclusive Â£211.99

Or Â£200.93 if you're a student (from Apple's Education store)

Or (as it's the start of a year), buy a iBook or PowerBook and an iPod at the same time and get Â£130 cashback.

Deek.

Tahrey1043 · Post by **Tahrey1043** » Sun Oct 24, 2004 5:09 pm

got too much PC stuff to go jumping ship to apple i'm afraid, nice as that offer is!

however i have found something slinky on Comet's site (well actually it jumped out of the pages of a catalogue that dropped thru the letterbox but yknow)

http://www.comet.co.uk/comet/html/cache/506_206288.html
Portable DVD player for Â£90....
now ignoring the fact that its a pocket sized DVD player, and the naff screen ---- it is also something that plays MP3s and can (hopefully) read DVDROMs..... mmmm

Si_GTi · Post by **Si_GTi** » Sun Oct 24, 2004 7:06 pm

I bought a second-hand Panasonic MD player/recorder a couple of years back. Had a 3-month garauntee (sp?) from the place I got it, and broke a week outside of it. Still under my bed somewhere... but it was OK whilst it lasted. As regards Sony, the whole need to convert everything to ATRAC format is very offputting.

So, for the bus/train/coach journeys, I have a MuVo 256MB anda good pair of headphones (the one thing I do go to Sony for), which doubles up as a handy flash memory stick if I forgot my 512MB stick.

As for the car, I think mp3 is definitely the way forward, agreeing with the previous comments about taking up less clutter with CDs and stuff, and getting more choice without keeping on changing my CDs about. Last time I was in the VW dealer I saw a leaflet about some kind of mp3 stereo system for the Golf V, in the same lines as Kenwood's "music keg". Like the clever lad I am I forgot to pick up a leaflet to see if they could offer it for my Polo... next time I'm at that end of town though it'll warrant some investigation. See I'd like to keep the ICE stock if I can, or if that fails, at least looking stock - which means no fancy new headunits for me I'm afraid...

Post by **Josh_PoloGTi** » Sun Oct 24, 2004 8:03 pm

Blimey!

I'm going to sell my Pocket TV on eBay and I'll buy one of those portable DVD's!!!