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Review: This Sony MZ-NH700 minidisc Walkman is a great piece of kit,and imho all things considered Hi MD devices are about the most flexible portable audio player/recorders on the market. The battery life is perfect...well the battery doesnt quite last "FOREVER"....but it comes pretty close. I could go on and on about all the good stuff...but I will just point out the annoying things..which may or may not put you off, depending on what you want to do with it. Firstly, copying direct from CD using the supplied simple burner software is great and just as quick as copying to an MP3 player...ie it takes about the same amount of time to encode from CD to MP3 as it does to go from CD to minidiscs ATRAC....so if you have the CDs...its just great, also the actual write time of the encoded ATRAC files to the player is indeed as Sony say...very swift BUT and heres the rub, if you need to go from MP3 to minidisc, the software has to turn it into ATRAC first...and it can take ages....that said, I have just put a 15 hour audiobook onto a disc, which was previously stored on my PC in MP3....I didnt time it but I reckon it took about 30 mins to convert and write it...now thats still only 1/30 of the time it takes to listen to it, and the software seems to do its job unattended just fine....so is that a problem?...you decide. That is the only problem I can come up with, if you plan to record from anologue sources in realtime...brilliant, from CD....brilliant, from microphone....brilliant, from Sonys connect online service (like apples itunes but for minidisc)...great... see what I mean....now if Sony would ONLY give us NATIVE MP3 support as well...the HI MD would be the king. |
Audio HiFi
