Sony MZM200 Professional Portable Hi MD Recorder

Good Recorder & Player, with excellent sound quality though quality hardware and PCM support. Unrestricted upload & download of track. Mac compatible. Standard Mini-USB for data transfer & Li-Ion battery charging, battery which is also easily removable and replaceable.

Wired remote control support, up till the RM-MC40ELK & 55ELK, the 40ELK providing the best UI. The 35ELK is already a worthwhile upgrade over the provided 38EL, which has poorer resolution and no Kanji support.

Line output through UI menu selection.

Easy Rec button; also neat integration with Simple Burner in Windows, with a CD in an optical drive, or a CD image mounted, hitting the Rec button on the main unit will trigger the dubbing of the CD to MD, in faster than real-time speed.

Very good audio quality performance with recordings done via a good microphone -better than the one provided with the M200 bundle, like at least the ECM-MS957-, since the Mic Pre-Amp is very clean. Analogue -use OFC shielded- & optical line in recs fare well too.

Software with Mac -Hi-MDTransferForMac- works well, very stable, & in Windows too, especially with Avrin's Ultimate SonicStage version, an improved version of Sony's audio manager. The Linux community has nearly completed full support for this recorder, with all features one could wish. Hi-MD upload in Linux is already possible with QHi-MDTransfer.

No track title display on the main unit, build construction not as good as with the Japanese-made Hi-MD Walkans that first came out, like the NH1.

Data transfers speeds from & to a computer aren't as fast as with a HDD of course & far from the speeds that SSD provide, so one has to be patient in that respect. The RH1 is however the MD Walkman with the fastest transfer rates of all NetMD capable MD Walkmans, period, since the only one that adopted the USB 2.0 standard.

1GB per Hi-MD MiniDisc is a bit limiting & pretty anachronistic in this second decade of the 21st century, but since the Hi-MD Walkmans are of the few devices that playback lossless audio with gap-less support and outstanding sound quality, it is worth the inconveniences.