Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony Bundle5 MiniDisc Home Recorder with Portable Player

With the advent of mp3 and cd-r technology, the poor minidisc is facing possible obscurity. Not because it is an inferior format (my fellow audiophiles will testify to that)but due to poor timing, perhaps. I have held off purchasing any new recordable formats besides cassette until last year, when I finally broke down and bought the above bundled minidisc recorder. I must admit, the price tag (around $300) was the main attraction- a deck recorder, and a pocket-sized player which is tiny in comparison to a discman (to which I refused to lug around from that point on). The recorder deck allows nearly omnipotent control over all concievable aspects of format: erasing single tracks, rearranging song order, combine/divide, and my personal favorite, entering the names of songs and album title. Remember pause tapes? Those painstaking cassette mix tapes that would take hours to get JUST RIGHT? Well the minidisc bundled deck with supplied fully featured editing remote control will save you the trouble of building up those pause button calluses on your finger. The deck plugs right into any up to date console cd changer/shelf system. 74 minutes later, you have a minidisc ready to pop into the supplied MD portable player. If you are like me, there is nothing better than having a pocket-sized digital player, with the capacity to play as much music as you can carry, all stored on thin 3 inch squares. I spend all day out and about, and I'm always equipped with at least two minidiscs and an extra AA battery (just in case). Perfect for those who already carry too much on their back. If you travel abroad and absolutely have to bring your music along, then the portable player is the perfect choice. I went to asia with mine, and took along almost thirty discs, and it didn't even make a dent in my carry on luggage. Try doing that with cds! When in my hometown, I take the term pocket disc player literally, as it never really leaves my pocket. Soon I will upgrade to a portable recorder, so I can catch impromptu recordings. Really, this bundle has kept a raging audiophile drooling for months, because of the sheer volume of music you can record yourself and take on the go. Mp3 and similar formats still cannot top minidisc on that. Newer versions of the player offer longer battery time, but can cost close to $200 dollars. Save yourself the cash and get this bundle, its a perfect package, in my opinion.

Having bought this bundle and played with it for a few days, I have absolutely no clue why these things aren't selling faster than they can make them. I have a CD-R drive on my PC which is great for making perfect masters, but it's cumbersome and unforgiving. With minidisc, you have so much flexibility and it's so easy to use, you'll be using all the available features in no time. The thing that blew me away was how easy it was to record analog cassettes, and how good they sound. I cranked the recording level on some old tapes I have that will NEVER be available on CD, and now they're preserved digitally with all same conveniences. I'd agree that the portable is nothing stellar, but it'll make a great beater for the car, etc. This technology is just underexposed in the US, otherwise people would be all over it.

I picked this bundle up and love it! The home deck is awesome, and even though it's a baseline model, I don't see what else you'd really want to do, you know? Sound is superb as you'd expect, and the little md's themselves are awesome. I tossed one about ten feet in the air and let it crash onto the pavement, then popped it into the player as a demonstration for a friend. I even put one through the washing machine by accident (it was in my pocket, and I forgot to check) and it played flawlessly. All in all, minidiscs are a very underrated technology waiting to bust on the scene once people discover how cool they are.

However, the same can not be said of the portable. The price is awesome for the deck alone, so look at the portable as a freebie, not really an incentive to buy. Sure, it's a really good product, but the headphones are the same crap ones they give with the ten dollar walkman, and no AC adapter or rechargeables. The worst part, though, is the sound quality. My ears were not decieved; it sounds dead. None of the bass settings satisfy, and headroom is very low, providing a muddy sound. On the home deck it sounds fine, but in the walkman,a mixed bag. Also, it skips for no apparent reason sometimes, the battery indicator cannot be trusted, and speaking of which, it chugs batteries like there's no tomorrow. Anyway, to make sure my ears weren't playing tricks on me, I plugged the same headphones into Old Faithful- a Sony D-11, either the first or second discman they ever made, serving me well for six or seven years now, at least, and the sound was better enough to warrant using it over its much more compact sibling (when you factor in that it chugs four AA faster than the MD does two and has no kind of ESP, you'll understand how drastic the difference is).

In conclusion, an awesome way to affordly adopt a new(ish) technology. However, although the home deck is more than satisfactory, the portable left me disapointed. However, a home CD-player and discman combo isn't much cheaper than this, and you can't record on one of them, so I say go for it.

So I paid $350 for the recorder( MDS-JE330) and theportable(MZ-E32IE33)and it's the best $$ I have spent on music inquite awhile. I have a portable CD player which I never use because it is too big to really carry around. I play the MiniDisc in my car through a casstette adapter and it sounds great. I started out to buy a CD-R recorder but balked when I found out my car CD player wasn't CD-r compatible. The recorder is easy to use and I have recorded from my CD player and from a digital source which plays through my TV. Both recordings sound great. This Sony Bundle package is the most value for the money I have seen yet. I looked at another portable player like the one I have with this package and just the portable is $199 retail ( not at Amazon of course!). Bottom line...great value and a great product.

MD (Mini Disk) is as handy as CD but recordable and erasable just like cassettee. Because it is a disk there is no tape jam. MD even allows users to put titles of the songs. It is five times as small as CD. ATRACK, a sound information compression technique, made it possible. Since MD is in a shell, it is more durable than CD against scraches and dusts. Because of 30 sec sound memory, there is no sound skip even with terrible vibrations. MD is becomming more and more popular. Finally its price becomes lower than one CD-ROM writer. Do not miss it!!