I love minidisc - is that weird? - Page 7

Bummer, would have been nice to see an anniversary edition…
Sometimes I wonder if its worth selling the Mz-M200 and just get pratical with the X

I love the MD though.
I feel that I would just miss it if I did sell it.

I love my MD. I like it mostly for the sound signature - I can export my own preset analogue modelling from my player to my portable recorder, rather than ripping the original file. I get to choose how much bass and treble goes on to the rip. I am a bass addict and have yet to find an MP3 player that can match the sound of a Sony MD with my own bass presets burnt over the original file. It's also visceral, you have to insert a disc into a player and so on. And all that stuff about actually listening to the music I spend time recording to disc counts too. When using an MP3 player I might transfer 10 albums, listen to 5 songs, decide I am bored with that playlist and then wipe the drive clean. Waste of time and effort. With MD I actually listen to the music I transfer.

I too have to admit I love my MD players.  So much so that in the last 2 weeks I purchased 2 more,  the EH930 and the RH1/MZ 200.  Right now compared to my RH10 the EH 930 has a slight edge in SQ.  Still waiting on the RH1. Having a REALLY tough time determining if the EH sounds better than the RH10 when run through a RSA Hornet. 

 

Also agree with Zielwolf on the visceral quality of MD versus a MP3 player. I'm the same way, I listen more with MD than skipping through albums on my mp3 player.

I switched in 2006 and I miss MD sometimes, but not titling and not disk breakage, nor really the SQ. Nowadays, Sony's MD are considered 'good SQ', but back in the day, they were like Apple, the biggest and the one that cool non-conformists didn't buy. We, the non-Sony guys lamented on Sony's stringy sound and we bought Panasonic, Sharp, and Kenwood. Of course everyone used the same ATRAC decoders, but the signal processing in 20bit for the Sharp and the 24-bit for the Panasonic were what drove the SQ debate.

 

Today, MD would be even more eye-catching than it was in North America back in 2000 or 2001 because back then, the MD wasn't a far cry from a CD. But today, everyone is using flash-based players or HD players. If I had one, I'd change disks as blatantly as possible to 'show' that I'm part of another group. I do miss the fact that I knew more about my music back then. That is because I titled everything myself, but god, it took forever with the titler remote or the unit body.

 

I like the Styling of the MZR37 and the R1, but apart from that, Sony really missed the boat unless you look at their older stuff like 1996-1999 designs. I was using and loving for 7 years, but no more. SQ on some units is actually quite good, but the problem is the ATRAC encoder that gives preference to thick, bassy sound. Some say that it sounds better than CD - that is an obvious tip off that the encoder is doing something it shouldn't. Whether you like it or not, the truth is that versus modern MP3 or other encoders, it is less true to the original CD sound, but again, if you like that sound a lot, then so be it. I loved it at the time, but not after really comparing its sound to the source and then to modern MP3 encoders.

I love my Hi-MD MiniDisc devices! I feed them bit-perfect 1.4Mbps goodness from the original PCM on CD via my bookshelf systems / SimpleBurner or from FLAC via CD imaging + SB.

 

However, I am working on a DIYFlashMod 5.5G iPod and seriously hope it will sound tons better than the stock 5.5G, which has really mediocre SQ.