Sony MZ-NF810CK Net MD MiniDisc Recorder with Car Kit
See it at Amazon.com for $329.99Average Customer Rating
(3.5 out of 5)
Amazon Customer Reviews
Most Helpful First | Newest First
(5 out of 5)Great quality product
Build Quality
The Sony Minidisc NF810CK looks incredibly nice, as you can see from the pictures. Holding it in your hand it's even better, with a silvery gloss on the main casing and reflective buttons. It feels solid in your hand, and it's heavy for its size when the battery and minidisc are in. I've dropped it about a foot onto my desk already, it interrupted the song transfer that was happening but I was able to start again with no problems.
The remote appears to be of slightly less quality build, being mostly plastic and light, but it works and looks good.
Functionality
The small LCD screen on the front shows many things, most commonly a scrolling text display, a rotating disc to show that it is playing\recording, a one line bar that expands with the beat of your songs, and rotates to show progress in song transfer, song time remaining, LP2 or LP4, and many other smaller displays. The menu system is simple, but it works. Play is enter, and around the play button is a circular button for volume up\down, and next\previous song. On the remote is a slider for next\previous song, and to play\pause a song you push the slider in. The LCD on the remote shows most things that the LCD on the player show, except the beat visualization.
Changing songs, fast forwarding, and pausing\playing is really, really easy on with the remote, and instantly the name of the currently playing song is displayed on the remote. The search times on this minidisc player are short and I am impressed.
Sound Quality
Good and bad. First the good, the equalizer provided ACTUALLY WORKS. I love it. I can fine tune the sound output with the 2 custom equalizer settings. It is only 6 band but it works very well and makes a huge difference. The sound quality with $[...]sony headphones is what you would expect, and the provided earbuds are not great. You'd be better off using a good pair of headphones to take advantage of the sound quality offered by the player.
The bad. The maximum volume is just barely acceptable so that I do not need to take it back. For most of my songs it is good, but for some of my favorite tracks I like to have them ear-bleedingly loud. With the volume cranked, it's just barely loud enough. My hearing is slightly shot because of playing music too loud, so I doubt anyone else would have a real problem. The bass is good, but not great. If you fiddle with the equalizer enough you should be able to get the bass\treble exactly where you want it.
Accessories
This is what made me choose over the 10gb iPod. It come with 2 (yes, two) carrying cases, one with a belt clip, one with velcro. Both are very good quality. Decent earbud headphones. Average quality. As I said earlier, you would be better off plunking down and additional $[...] for some denon headphones to take advantage. Car tape kid, complete with car remote that you stick to your dash. This is an awesome accessory, it works well. The battery provided is very small, a few millimeters thick and a couple inches long. It has a long life, and it's made by sony. Good call with this one sony. The cradle is simple looking, translucent black, with a plug-in at the bottom for the ac adapter. As long as there's no tension on the USB cable or AC adapter it stays put, and looks pretty cool too. I've already talked about the remote so I won't here. I am very impressed with the accessories provdided, except IT COMES WITH NO MINIDISCS!! NOT ONE! I had to go buy a few. It's not a huge deal but come on, I expected at least one to get going with.
Software
I really don't understand why everyone is griping about the software. You import your songs into it so they are in the database, and then you check in \ check out to the player. CLARIFICATION ON THE CHECK IN\OUT PROCEDURE!!! All this means is that, when you check out a song onto a minidisc, it's been checked out once. You can check out a song on up to 3 different discs. If you want to put a song on another disc, you'll have to check in the song from a previous disc. Is this a big deal? NO! It is simply to prevent piracy, and I don't think this is unreasonable at all of sony to ask of us. Why would you need the same song on more than 3 discs? I wouldn't. Back to the software. When the player is connected, you can create groups (these are very hand) on the fly. Checking in (taking a song off a disc) takes about 1-3 seconds, and checking out (putting a song onto a disc) takes about 5-10, in LP2 (high quality) mode. I put an entire CD onto one disc, it only took a few minutes. To sum things up, transferring music is easy, fast, and stable. The software has not crashed on me yet, and it looks pretty cool too.
Final Conclusion
It was either this player or an iPod. Both have pros and cons... I couldn't really understand needing such a large volume of songs with the iPod. It's a bit larger, doesn't come with a cool LCD remote, no cradle, no case... Both products are very good quality made by quality companies. If you need a MASSIVE amount of songs on the go, then the iPod is the way to go. But when you can fit 2 or 3 (at least) CD's in high quality mode on one minidisc, what is the need... I understand the iPod can also function as a pseudo-PDA, which I do not need whatsoever.
(1 out of 5)Don't buy if you need to record
This player has no way of transferring things you record onto another Computer or even other media. It has, as my reviewer colleague explains, no line out.
I bought this as I am a professional musician, and I want to record and archive rehearsals, etc. It was sold with a microphone(which I didn't buy) for that purpose.
The manual says this, but it is on page 72 in 8 point font in a footnote. The advertizing is misleading, as it says you can "check in" tracks.
The whole promise of MD devices was that you could do everything on them a CD couldn't do--like record. This lack of feature effectivly prevents you from recording, because you can never get the recording off the Mini Disc. In fact, for all the great editing tools that are advertised with this device, you cannot even edit the recording live.
The only solution is to plug it into a ripper. This converts the digital signal to analog, effectivly wasting the whole point of using digital media in the first place.
(5 out of 5)Very good.
I've had this for 3 weeks now and I'm quite pleased with it. As of now, this is the only Net MD portable from Sony that has an AM/FM/TV and Weather band tuner, Car Kit, AND mic input jack with plug in power feature that uses the MD deck to power up the mic(The MZ-NF610 does not. You have to use the line in jack with a mic that has it's own power supply).
It also comes with a charging stand to charge the rechargeable battery. I tested the radio and MD playback for 8 hours straight each and the battery held it's charge. Very good.
A dry battery case is also provided so you can use an alkaline battery along with the rechargeable one to double the playback/recording time of your player. A nice plus. The only gripe I have about this is that the remote control is not backlit (Don't let the picture of the illuminated remote mislead you. It is not)
Great for recording digital/analog(music) sources as well as live sounds (concerts, lectures, meetings).
So if you're looking for a great all in one MD portable at a reasonal price I highly recommend the MZ-NF810CK.
(4 out of 5)overall, a good portable minidisc recorder but...
I've had this minidisc recorder for about 1.5 months. I wanted to review features/shortcomings that I didn't notice other reviewers comment on for those that want to get a MD for live recording, not for recording gobs and gobs of material onto one disc. (For recording from the computer to the mini disc, I already have a digital out on my computer so I have never tried using the Net MD software.)
First of all, my experience with the mini discs in general has been very positive. I have been a huge supporter of mini disc ever since I got my first player in Japan in 1997. Due to their ability to easily re-record, edit, move around tracks, title tracks, on the spot excellent sounding recordings (no tape hiss), etc. I have gone through two portable recorders and two deck units. These are the older mini disc systems, before Net MD. My portable died so I wanted to get a replacement. I did not want Net MD as high-speed or long play discs are not compatible with the old system. There are work arounds of course or I could buy a new Net MD compatible deck, but I would rather not at this time. (I found this out first-hand about 1 year ago when I tried to play on my deck a music class lecture/jam session disc my friend recorded using a portable Net MD recorder.)
I like to create my own 'best of' mixes on mini disc to hear on the go, however, the main reason behind my love of mini disc is the excellent quality of live recordings (versus analogue tape) for the cheap price. I want to use the portable to record live musicians and then listen to the disc on the deck unit. I searched and searched to find new portable recorders with a mic input and without Net MD technology but could not find one. Another requirement of mine was that the player come with a rechargable slim battery and a casing for AA batteries. (Duel battery power sources is a must for portable devices used in live situations.) I also didn't want to spend too much money. I carefully read as much as I could find on the Sony MZ-NF810CK before I bought it. This is my first Sony mini disc player.
My big complaint about this recorder is that you cannot adjust the recording level while it is recording. (This was possible on my previous portable recorders.) The recording level can only be adjusted while it is in record/pause mode. This is a hindrance during live recordings. Distortion is very unkind to digital recordings and if you have to pause your recording in order to fix the level, you will have a mini disc with gaps in the performance. Due to moving around to find a sweet spot, the fluctuation in sound levels, and the poor lighting in some recording situtations, it can take a few minutes to adjust the levels properly.
Another complaint of mine is that it is too easy to create new tracks by accidentally pressing on the "track mark" button. There should be some sort of lock for it. This wouldn't be so bad if the player had the "combine" function but it does not, in other words, you cannot undo a split track. Once you split a track, you have to put the disc in another mini disc with the "combine" function in order to put the tracks back together. (I use my deck for this.)
Other than the above gripes, the player is great. It does have features that I have not had in previous portables. It has EQ functions, long-play stereo and mono modes, and a radio. It also lets you group music into "groups", much like how a folder/directory functions in computer terms. The player itself is extremely small and light. These portables just get smaller and lighter each year. My friend has a complaint about the ever decreasing size of the players as she finds the buttons harder and harder to press separately, without pressing more than 1 button at a time (they are squished together too tightly). Future functionality of portables is a concern of mine if features are being deleted such as the "combine" function.
As another reviewer pointed out, it would be nice to have a backlight on the display but that is not critical for me. I am also one of those people who likes to play music very loud and agree with another reviewer who thinks this portable does not play loud enough. I have found that in order to get the loudest sound possible, you have to turn off any sort of EQ setting. Those settings severly dampen the sound. I connected the portable to my car stereo with the EQ on and had to turn on the car stereo volume all the way in order to hear the music at what I call a normal person's level, (a level that doesn't interfere with conversation). Not being one for conversation, I wanted the music even louder. I do not recommend turning on the EQ setting while connected to a car stereo because you may forget how loud your stereo is and blow out your speakers once you change to the radio or disconnect the mini disc player.
(4 out of 5)Good sound quality, software not intuitive
I bought this recorder originally to make sound recordings, and it worked well for that, but unfortunately because of some copy-right protection issues, it is very difficult to remove sounds from the minidisc recorder to my computer. So I gave up and have recently been putting CDs onto the MDs and using the system in my car. The sound is much better than on my portable CD player and it comes with a little remote that's pretty handy. I don't particularly like the software that comes with the MD recorder.