has the price of MD players started to increase in value? Up until recently you could not give these little gems away but now they are starting to command a few quid. Even the discs (pre recorded) are going for "nuts money".....
Maybe its the Techmoan effect. He does a review of Tech he likes then everyone start to moan that the prices are going up. Meanwhile expect to see piles of unsold Rokblok vinyl killers in a 99c / p store soon.
You have obviously never heard a decent minidisc player as my experience is quite the opposite, I think the quality is fantastic. A home recorded me from a good source is lovely.
The Rokbloc was a scam that wasn't hard to see if anybody owns one of the old school versions (I posted mine on one of these threads). I've been watching the MD prices go up and why not? They're pretty cool and fun to play with. I used to see them for $25.00 USD with around 12 discs but now it's much more. I always thought MD kicked CD's butt both visually and portability-wise but in the US it was too expensive, the little guy was like $300-400 USD and the proprietary software was a bummer when Napster was taking over with MP3s. I say bring it on, I was grabbing a ton of NOS discs years ago for a buck or two, they're somewhere and I have a player or two but here in the US they are kind of odd and it's really fun to play when your drunk friends are over and have no idea what that little disc is when you pop it into your system....
im on about the portable ones lad and i heard all the sony ones back in the day the amps were weak and unable to drive a decent pair of decent headphones
I have some minidisc players and all of them sound great. This is the first time that i hear sound quality of minidisc is not good. regarding the amp used in portable minidisc this problem can be seen with excellent quality of cassette walkmans as well.
still have a denon 995r. never use it. ach, doesn't use much space tascam 801r mk2 is the one you need.
What model portables are you referring to specifically, and what headphones are you using? I have used Sony's Type R portable recorders for my portable needs since they came out many years ago. Recording using Optical or Line inputs, with careful setting of levels, the sound when playing back, using suitable earphones, is just superb!!
i honestly can't remember the players i was using, it was back in the 90's but they were about £500 each as i went through the whole sony range at that time... the headphones were technics though, eah 250 if im correct, i ended up buying a phillips discman at that time that blew away all the sony portable md range
Oh, I see. I prefer Type-R models from 2001-2002 - some of the last regular Sony portables before mp3 came along and quickly took over. I found the Technics eah 250 with google, and guess the problems you had was due to poor impedance compatibility with your players. If the headset needs extra amounts of juice to reach useable loudness, chances are the MD amp will distort - like digital audio equipment in general if run wide open with not enough headroom. Using compatible low impedance phones is crucial to getting the best sound out of these small wonders.
I think Sony would have still had a chance if the discs would play MP3 but I think I needed to convert mine to the ATRAC Format which seemed like a pain...
Interesting thread re: Sound Quality. Here's my 2c worth. I recorded my first sample CD as a working muso on two MD players. The beauty of these gems is you can layer or bounce tracks from one MD to the other without loss and of course hiss. It's a lengthy process but you end up with a nice feel multi track final master which can be encoded using something like a classic iRiver multi codec player which will take a line in from other devices and encode to MP3 or loss less formats ready to be distributed to your audience. The MZR50 MD Walkman replaced the legendary WM-D6C for broadcast quality field recordings around 1995 and there was no problem with its quality. I have a stack of MD's but I'd be keen to swap them for any TDK Metal cassettes
Funny you should mention that, Silverera, I bought my first MD portable, the Sony R909, for a similar purpose - to get rid of the tape noise on my multitrack Tascam cassette recorder. I mixed acoustic guitar and vocal mikes, with a touch of Alesis digital reverb, on the Tascam, and fed that out to the line in on the MD recorder and got a clean and full sounding recording of the performance, with no hiss. At that time I was satisfied with my Sony D6C and DC2 for recording and listening on the go to 'best of' programs of favourite music and artists - but it soon dawned on me that the small MD portables had some useful tricks up the sleeve: You can erase and/or substitute songs in such programs, change the sequence of songs, listen in shuffle play, jump from e.g. track 6 to track 15 instantly, using the editing wheel on the side of the player and a bunch of other neat features you don't have with cassettes. These days I use both formats, choosing which way to go depending on the kind of program I'm about to record - and enjoy both very much.
