Home > Consumer Reviews > Sharp MDMT15 VQ MiniDisc Player/Recorder with Voquette Web Audio Manager

I bought the Voquette adapter separately after I had purchased the Sharp MD-MS722. I'm happy with the player and the whole MiniDisc technology in general. However, I do take issue with the Voquette adapter. I had expected it to actually communicate with the player as far as when to start and stop recording, and with titling tracks. It does neither.

I had become somewhat tired of titling songs by scrolling through the alphabet one letter at a time and was looking forward to being able to simply type the title on my keyboard and have the adapter transfer it to my disc as part of the recording process. It doesn't do this.

The adapter is basically a fancy cable that connects your computer's sound card to the line-in jack on your player. You still have to use the synchro record feature of your player to record songs, and this, while fine for a lot of recording, doesn't work in all cases. The first few seconds of a song can be cut off, or pauses in a track can be misinterpreted as the end of the song. I thought the adapter would solve this problem by communicating with the player and telling it when to start and stop recording. Not true.

Just to make sure I'm getting my point across, the actual hardware piece that Voquette supplies does nothing aside from connect your sound card to your player. There IS a fancy little box with two lights on it (one red, one green) that the cord passes through on its way from your PC to your MD, but I'm pretty sure its only purpose is to look pretty.

My recommendation, just buy a 3.5mm plug to 3.5mm plug cable to connect your sound card to your player, and then use a program like Winamp or Windows Media Player to play whatever you want to record. You'll basically have the same setup at a much lower cost.

Yes, it plays minidiscs, you can record to it and its cheap, but Sharp left out one little feature that every minidisc player should have. The ability to divide one track into two. If your like me and have a lot of music with no silent spots to mark the seperation of tracks, you wont like this product. The only way it knows a new track is comming is by a three second lapse in sound. The only way one could manualy mark tracks is to hit the record button at the EXACT TIME THE NEXT TRACK STARTS. I'm quite sure no one here has that kind of time and patience. Every other Sharp MD player/recorder has the ability to divide tracks, so if you dont want to live with annoying skips in your music, pay the extra 20 bucks and get the Sharp MDMS702 or MDMS772. You can divide tracks, and you have the nice remote that every other MD player has. ITS WORTH IT!

Note to those who bought this player with the Voquette media manager, DONT BOTHER. The hardware for the thing is just a fancy power adapter and standard audio cable. Their software is just a glorified MP3 player, that you can download for FREE! So save yourself the extra $ and get a audio cable and use the adapter supplied.

I bought my player about two months ago, after having done a fair amount of research on mini disc players. What I didn't realize, however, was that they simply record MP3 files just like they would record from any sound source - there is no downloading of files involved, which I had thought was something "magical" that the Voquette add on would do for me. Yea, the Voquette power/sound cord thingie is convenient because the cords are all combined into one, but it is no way worth the extra money that I paid for it. The disc player has played well, I've found good battery life (I use Ni-MH batteries that I bought separately). Sound quality is good, the bass boost makes a big difference. The headphones that came with it completely suck - you'll need to buy some other ones to really appreciate the sound quality. You can also plug in your PC speakers and play through them.

I think the guy that talked about not being able to split tracks didn't read the manual that came with the MD player. You can split tracks, combine tracks, re-arrange the order of the tracks. I bought one and loved it. I have British Airways to thank for destroying it while it was in my luggage while I was flying (I hope you can sense the sarcasm). The only thing that was annoying was that it skipped sometimes. Other than that it's a great recorder. I did not have a chance to test the MP3 recording capability because I only had it for a week before British Airways destroyed it. In the future I may buy one that does not skip so easily.

I have had TWO of these MDMT15 players fail on me. One did not work out of the box. I returned it and the new one failed one month out of warranty. Sharp would not repair it. I am an audiophile and keep my electronics in pristene condition. This player is of horrible quality and I would encourage anyone to buy a sony over sharp's bad quality.