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Hello, I'm looking for a relatively cheap device to play music on. Are there any good minidisc players I could find used and relatively cheap to normal DAPs?
I'm not sure if Minidisc is the way to go when you want a cheap DAP alternative.You can probably find cheap MD portables, sure, but think of the hassle and the followup costs. I assume you do not already have a big collection of recorded Minidiscs - because if you did, you likely would not have to ask about this.
So your MD player would have to be a recorder, and you need blank disks. If you go for an older recorder (from before the HI-MD age) you will need the regular MDs which hold 80 minutes, about 170MB. These are fairly cheap, but you will need many, and recording is done in real-time from another audio source - hours and hours.
The later HI-MD recorders (there are only a handful, MZ-NH1, MZ-RH10, MZ-RH1, probably a few more) can use the regular MDs and the expensive HI-MDs, the latter holding 1GB of data. They also work better with computers, allowing music transfer via USB. They are not cheap, though.
Many MD devices also require special batteries, which you can still get, but some of these are expensive, so that is another thing to watch out for. Also, most portables you can find will be used, and with their many miniaturized moving parts, MD recorders tend to break down after a few years.
When used purely as a player I think MD is not that great compared to DAPs nowadays, a cheap DAP like the ubiquitous Clip+ with SD cards will be more comfortable to use and probably cheaper.The remaining strength of MD is the recording capability, and even there you have the ever growing number of decent flash-based digital recorders.