Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony MZ-N1 Blue Net MiniDisc Walkman with 5 Free Blank MiniDiscs

Bought one of these when they first arrived - spent ages waiting for the MZ1N to be released, but it seems the wait was worth it!
Great little player - the usb connection is what really makes this stand out.USB is not new to MD's, but is far simpler to use on the MZ1N than any other that I have seen - just plug into the cradle and go. It burns tracks really quickly (340min of audio in about 10 mins), the only draw back I can find about using this is the audio-protection that is then assigned to tracks. For example, track marks can not be put on downloaded audio,which is a nuisance for those 2 hour sets you would love to burn. Battery life, esp. in LP4 mode, is impressive, but even better is the fact that the player automatically charges when you put it into the cradle, and so far I have never run out of power.
Grouping of tracks seems to be a new and very handy feature, esp when dealing with 60 odd different tracks,although it does take a bit of getting used to. And finally, labelling every track on your disk no longer is a daunting task, as this can easily be completed from the pc! Software included does not seem too bad - I have not really made much use of it really execpt for burning tracks - it can be a bit funny at times, one of the draw backs being that music can not be uploaded from the player, which to me is stupid as you might use a mic for recording and then like to convert that into mp3 - copyright protection I guess?
Basically, this is just one very fine, top of the range, strong performing little MD player, and seems very able to the task. It's really small and light, which means mine is premantely attached to me, and is full of great features which makes it outshine MP3 player or anything else out there! Also seems like a durable little bugger.. Magnesium case is very solid.
Go on and spoil yourself.. esp at this good price!!

Firstly if you want a mp3 player dont bother, Get this. However if u have no patience then dont get a Net Md. Quite simply because the software takes for ever to get right.

Well personally i love the look of this MD. So simplistic and very few buttons to fiddle with. Its not as quite as light as everyone says it is but that is a matter of opinion. The jog dial on the side is extremely usfull combined with the 3 line lcd screen it is very easy to navigate the units menu, also a usefull feature is that you can just scroll the jog dial down and it will display all of the songs in a list showing 3 at a time. So if you want to see what songs are coming up and you dont want to skip the song that is playing it is very usefull.
The Jog bar on the front is dificult to get used to but after a few hours youl have the jist of it. Yet you cant manage to shift the feeling of it being flimsey and easily broken.

It has a Mic in jack, line/ Headphones out jack and a analog/optical line in. So basically you can pretty much do anything with it. One downfall to it is that the lcd on the main unit is not backlit however this would drain on the batery powere and in this Md sony tried to make it last for as long as posible. Contrary to many people's views it doesnt work for 110 hours with just the internal batery you have to affix a bulky black batery case onto the bottom which takes AA baterys. But for me i prefer just using the internal batery which lasts for 40 hours which is fine.

The remote is very good with a large display and the backlit screen is great for the dark. The headphones give good sound quality but i couldent keep them in my ears. However instead of investing on a new pair i just found an old set whihc had the foam around the ear piece and put that on the sony one's. So now i can fit them in my ear perfectley.

Build quality wise it is excelant, all made out of magnesium and very solid. The disc ejection seems a bit flimsy but i think it is stronger than it feels. Just today i droped the whole unit from 5 ft! onto a tiled surface. It made a terrible bang and my heart stopped, But incredably it didnt skip!!!!!! I evan looked for scratches/ Dent's None of which i found.

Charge time is very quick and i dont evan bother thinking aboiut how long i put it on for. Just chuck it into the usb cradle, the little light comes on and come back in a couple of hours and its fully charged.

Its a perfect Md player alone but it has one more trick up its sleeve, Which youve guessed it is its Net capabilities. The software isnt as bad as people say and if you do it corectley it works fine. You have to first find the songs in you computer and import them this takes about 30 seconds per song then you have to check them out to the MD whihc takes about 30 secs but the data save and toc edit take about 20 seconds so the time builds up. However as i said earlier if you have patience its fine. A great feature though is that it names the tracks for you whihc is a greta time saver.

Sound quality is great Evan on lp4 mode i use lp 2 mode though just to be sure. Which is fine as you can get 40 songs per disk which is great.

Overall its a great Md for beginers and experianced Md users. Nothing better on the market well thats my opinion anyway!

I listen to classical music and opera very often and I already own a CD-walkman, but I got tired of carrying around the original CDs around. I thought about buying an MP3 player, but was concerned about the storage space on the small MP3 players around and the size of the large Jukebox from Creative that was available. A colleague then told me about the new Minidisc players around that I could connect to the PC, that could be used to copy CDs. He also told me that the music could be compressed to have either two or four times the original playing time on a single minidisc. I was then determined to get a NetMD and I thought that I might as well buy the best one. That was a decicion I haven't regreted on a second.

Many of the operas that I listen to are in mono and lasts around four hours, and then to have a complete opera on a single MD is very delightful. The sound on LP4 in stereo wasn't too good, though. Much of the dynamic of the sound was lost from the compression. But two times the time of a CD is still very good for the recordings in stereo.

Another thing that was a very pleasant surprise was the battery life of the rechargeable battery that included. It seems like that the batteries just won't die sometimes, even when the indicator is blinking indicating that it is very low on juice.

The software, though, is not too good. I never use the OpenMG program anymore. My colleague, who also has the exact same player, downloaded a software named 'Simple burner' that is a very simply software to use to copy a CD directly to the player without having to sample the CD to the harddrive first. The only drawback on that software is that I can't copy a CD using the absolute best quality using ATRAC Type-R. The only way to get that quality is to copy music the traditional way directly from the CD player on your stereo system. The OpenMG program can transfer music to the best quality, but the files that it copies from is already compressed in ATRAC3 LP2, so the increased quality is decreased then. Another program you can use to copy music files or CDs is the RealOne Player. Just install the OpenMG program and then just install the Sony Portable Device plug-in in RealOne player and then you can copy your MP3 files directly instead of having to duplicate them using the OpenMG program. I also discovered that MP3 files with low bit rates cannot be imported using the OpenMG program, but can be transferred using RealOne Player.

So even though the software included isn't too good, there are software on the Net that can be used instead that are easier and better to use. With that in mind, it may be that you think that you don't get what you paid for, but I'd say I got what I paid for...

Ok - so you want a portable music player.

You can toy with MP3 in it's various guises - music sticks, memory cards, hard disks to name a few incarnations. So complicated, with high ongoing costs (memory sticks are upwards of £50 typically for 4 hours worth of music storage). So what do you do??!

Hmm let me think - NET MD - that's what and mini disc..

here's the deal - you get a mini disc player that has been fine tuned over previous generations - a mature product, along with a handful of cheap discs (£1 a throw) and each disc can store more that 5 hours of music!!!

The quality is top notch, the player small, but feels well made with a whole host of editing options. The battery lasts an eternity (upto 110 hours)...

I wanted a music player for running - did a 10km run the night I got it and not a skip!

Highly recommended - especially over the lower spec models - this model oozes class and build quality.

I bought the MZ-N1 for almost £260 a year and a half ago expecting the great performance and reliability I have always come to expect from Sony. Little was I to know that this purchase would turn me off Sony for ever. My MZ-N1 worked great until it was about 14 months old and the recording laser decided to stop working even after taking great care of thi MZ-N1. Luckily being in the EU I am entitled to a 2 Year Warranty, "whatever they say in the manual" I was able to "force" Sony to repair it free of charge.
If this was an isolated incident I would put it down to bad luck but its not isolated as it seems to be a common fault with the MZ-N1, usually occuring just after the warranty runs out.
This incident with sony and their insistence on destroying the entertainment world(in a microsoft fasion) with their highly restrictive copyright protection has put me off sony for good.