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.
