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

I have had my MZ-N1 for about 3 years now and love it.

- Full of features, still learning things about it that i never knew.
- The build quality and looks are superb.
- Sound qaulity is excellent. The supplied earphones are not the best. I would advise investing in some good earphones like the fontopia ones.
- Supplied software (OpenMG) is absolutely rubbish, However, if you get the latest version of Sonic Stage from the Sony website, that is much much better.
- The remote is excellent.
- The only minor gripe i would have is that if you use the cradle to recharge the battery (you can plug directly into the mains), it sometimes doesn't charge fully, I have to take it off and on again to get it to charge again...

In conclusion, an excellent piece of kit.

The best MD unit I have owned (I have had 6), brilliant build quality, excellent laser pick up. Forget the software, it is totally rubbish, NET MD is rubbish, record your tunes using optical, okay so it takes longer but what the hell, its a good investment of your time. BUY THIS ONE (or a MZ-N10) if you are considering buying a MD unit.

I bought this jewel a week ago being computer illiterate the soft ware took some working out including having 2 reload windows 2000 cause i erased the wrong files whoops all in all instructions are at leased helpful n informative buttons on the main unit are a little small but feel reasuringly tough recordings are good the sound differing only minutely from my £4000 home setup recording off the net is easy (apart from annoying pop ups)and am discovering new music all the time (got through 15 minidiscs already) just seems tranfers (checkouts)can take a while anyone got any suggestions a to speed things up and bsome decent web sites for music

This is the best Minidisc player around. It is very, very simple to use, the sound quality is brilliant, (noticeably better than cheaper models) and the software, I find, runs very well. Transferring music from your computer to your Minidisc player takes very little time, which gives this Net-MD range a massive advantage over the other models; you can record an entire album in a case of minutes, not hours.

It has all the other advantages you would expect from a sony product; it looks good, it feels solid, the battery lasts almost forever, it is completely jog-proof (an excellent bit of kit if you like music while you are running) and the little handheld control is fantastic.

Quite simply, you get what you pay for; it is expensive, but it will be money well spent.

Having bought this when my old Aiwa finally went to the hi-fi shop in the sky, I was curious as to how the NetMD side of the system would work. And I have to say that I've been highly impressed.

Hardware-wise the unit is sleek, small, and (almost) perfectly formed. Almost? Well, the headphones are the usual guff that Sony seems to think compliments their high end portable hi-fi (hint - get some better ones pretty sharpish after buying the unit), and I'm not wholly convinced by the eject mechanism. And the case is a joke - I'm glad I kept the Aiwa velvety bag thing.

The cradle, however, rocks. Installation of the software was a doddle, and loading songs from CDs and making compilations is a piece of cake, especially for the none-MP3 literate like me. LP2 mode is a little dynamically flat, but the flipside of having 2 hours 40 mins of play time is more than adequate compensation. And listening on the move is hardly the best situation to appreciate the sonic nuances that you lose with LP2 playing mode.

All in all - a purchase I'm very happy with. Indeed.