Why buy MP3 player when you can have MD?
Pros:
long battery life, sound quality, cost of media, never skips
Cons:
no belt clip, slightly small screen
The Bottom Line:
Sony's MD player easily outpreforms MP3 players. The media is cheap, the batteries are cheap, and it won't skip. It is a smart choice for anyone who needs portable music.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
If you are deciding whether to get an MP3 player or a minidisc player, looking at the Sony MiniDisc players should make it easy to make your decision. This MD player outpreforms most equally or greater priced MP3 players in 3 areas. Sound quality, cost of storage, and battery life.
First of all the sound quality is very good. When you import music either from a CD, your hard drive, or wherever, the program it comes with (SonicStage) makes it ATRAC3 format which will play in the MD player. There are 3 different recording modes: SP, LP2 (132kbps), and LP4(66kbps). I use the middle one LP2, it provides good quality and you can get about 2 1/2 hours of music on each disc. If you want to get lots of music on a disc you can use LP2 and get 5 hours of music. If you record your music in standard mode, it will keep the song in its original format (it supports MP3, WMA, CD audio, etc.). The headphones that are included with the MD player aren't that bad, but I bought some better ones to further improve the sound quality. Overall the sound is very good.
A huge advantage is the fact that the MD player stores music on inexpensive minidiscs rather than expensive memory cards like MP3 players do. The discs are just over a dollar as compared to memory cards which can be $50 or more. They are just as reliable as memory cards and so much cheaper. A thing that people may worry about is skipping but don't worry, the minidiscs are enclosed in a shock resistant case. I haven't been able to make it skip yet, I've ran with it, shook it like a bottle of chocolate milk, and even accidentally dropped it several times and it never skipped. However if you want to use it for jogging, you are going to have to put it in your pocket or get one of those cool looking fanny packs to put it in because it doesn't include a belt clip.
The battery is extremely good. One AA alkaline battery will keep it spouting out tunes for almost 50 hours. That's right it uses a single, inexpensive AA battery to power it for 50 hours. Recording songs on your MD player will burn your battery faster than playing, but it still doesn't use it up that fast.
The program that comes with it is Sony's SonicStage. I really like this program and it works and looks very good. It is as easy to use as dragging and dropping and you can use it to play music on your hard drive. You can also use it to rename, reorder, or group the tracks on your MD player.
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