Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony MZ-N1 Blue Net MiniDisc Walkman

To be quite frank, I was a little dubious about this little machine. Sony jumping on the MP3 bandwagon? No! Sony producing practically the best personal minidisc player I have ever used. Definitely!
Right from the moment you open the box you can feel the quality of the Magnesium casing. The buttons are solid, the layout well designed and the cradle looks fantastic on even the most cluttered desk.
The sound quality goes without saying, and the added functionality and speed provided through USB link-up and the OPEN MG software make no end of difference.
If you're after a reliable, good looking and great sounding machine go for this... Hands down, the best audio purchase I've made since I invested in a Mini disc system 5 years ago.
The price isn't too bad either, considering there are other, non NetMD machines out for a similar cost.
You wont be dissapointed. Oh no.

If you want style, comfort, ease, and a top of the line MiniDisk Player, then this one is for you! Let's take a look at the features.

It's a small and compact, hi-tech piece of magic in your pocket. The smooth finish surrounds a screen where you can name tracks and albums with no trouble, the songs can also keep information you give them in Media Player, which ROCKS. It has a long life of about 100 hours or more, which can last me at least a month. I manage to fit about 5 CDs onto one MiniDisk with the high compression, with the minimal of sound quality loss.

I bought mine from a high street store at a much higher price (no shaming the vendor). It came with the software I needed to safe track lists to send to MiniDisk, so I don't need to search for my music. It's computer support is great for recorded my MP3s and Audio tracks from my PC using the USB port.

I found the earphones couldn't handle the bass on some songs, but what do you expect when they come bundled. I kept my old pair that cost about £10, and they are fine. The best feature is you can record from almost anything with the USB cable, and the earphone socket.

I am glad I bought it, but I would have prefered the Silver finish. Every cloud has a silver lining, apart from my MiniDisk Player. Worth the money.

ROCK ON. Ian.

I logged onto amazon with the plan of searching for an MP3 player because my MP3 collection was growing and having to burn the files to a CD-R then to minidisc was taking ages, and costing me loads in buying CDRs. I really thought minidisc was coming to an end and MP3 was taking over! But then I found this little beauty.

I used to have a MZE-90 (smallest MD player in the world 2000) and the MZ-N1 is pretty much the same size, and weight with better battery life, but it also records and even transfers MP3, WMA, and WAV from the PC.

It looks very sexy on my desk next to the cable modem, with it's docking station, and the main power light on, and the recording light blinking like a CD-R drive. It takes minutes to transfer 5 hours of MP3 to the Net MD, along with all the names. But I was very surprised when I pressed the menu button and was given a long list of menus and options, including sound settings where you can change the bass and treble settings and then save them to one of the two presets. It also has pointless features like speed control, although when you're bored it's quite amusing to listen to Eminem at 3 times the normal speed.

One of my concerns about the ability to store 5 hours of music was that I thought I wouldn't be able to find tracks easily and that if I recorded 5 albums on the one disc they would all be mixed with each other . But the N1 has a group function where you can put a group of tracks into a group folder and then you can change tracks within that folder, but to listen to a different album you have to open one of the other folders.

The only thing I don't like about the N1 is the remote! It is big, ugly, and not user friendly in my opinion. Sony have really taken a step backwards with this one, my old remote was slim line with a clicking head rather than a jog dial, and had separate volume controls. On the N1 you have to pull the jog dial out to adjust the volume. I suppose I might get used to it but I prefer the old one!

The Sony MZ-N1 is probably the best portable MD player out there!!

Apart from being able to record music from CDs, radio, etc you can now download your music from your PC which is an excellent feature. The software that came with the MD player is actually quite good, you can now name the music tracks with ease as the software allows you to type the names in directly from a PC. Also downloading music onto the MZ-N1 is really fast so it saves you from waiting, in fact it downloads at speed up to 32x speed so downloading an album only takes a matter of minutes which is an impressive feature. Other features that the MZ-N1 has that it has a backlit screen and the remote that comes with it is also backlit. The MZ-N1 also is very small and light weight plus it has an amazing 110 hour battery time and come with a charging cradle making charging very simple.

The MZ-N1 is a must for all those people looking for a good MD player!!

I've now had the MZ-N1 for a couple of months, the player is great (get some decent headphones though), the copy protection system is a nuisance but nothing that can't be bypassed reasonably easily. The software is user friendly but it does crash about 1 in 20 times I use it (not really a problem, since you just reboot and start again). With hindsight I realise how stupid it would have been to buy a 128MB MP3 player, with the mindisc player you can fit about 5 CD's on a minidisc, so if you carry 10 minidiscs with you then you've got plenty of music to listen to (or so you would think). However my next purchase will definately be a hard disk based player.