Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony MZ-NH600 Silver Hi-MiniDisc Walkman

Great battery life (I've had over 30 hours from a single rechargeable AA battery), good sound quality, lots of storage on replaceable disks, reasonable size, and a low price compared to HDD players. That's what makes it worth owning - I use mine every day.
The lack of a backlight on the display is a pain - if they'd included a backlit remote that would have resolved the problem, but they haven't so either you have to buy a remote or put up with this. There's no ability to set up proper playlists - they're played either randomly or in the order they're on the disk. That said, given the capacity of the disks, and the fact you can just swap them over, you can put together a playlist on a disk, and swap with another disk if you want to play something else, so it's not too major an issue.
Navigation is functional if not high-powered.
The big, big, big annoyance with the Hi-MD players as a whole is that they don't play MP3s. You either record from the Line In, or use the crappy SonicStage software to transfer music onto the player. You can't even transfer the tracks off again, and although it can act as a mass storage device for transfering data and other files, this doesn't help in putting music on, as that has to be done using SonicStage (it's put in a single, special file).

I think if they'd made it support MP3s or at least playing music back from the file system, rather than forcing you to use an under-developed proprietary transfer program, then it would have got 5 stars. That's what loses the 5th star for me. Once you've gone through the hassle of putting your music on there, though, it sounds good, and the positive aspects of the player shine through. I wonder how many iPod owners can even imagine a) playing music non-stop for 27+ hours, and b) just swapping for another rechargeable AA battery when it does run out of juice.

I love the amount of storage you can get on this little thing, especially as the sound quality is as good as CD.
I wish instruction books were clearer as I thought you had to press the rotating wheel to put up the volume thinking that was part of the five way switch I got a sore finger and found out much later that it's the button in the middle that is five way(you nudge it left,right up,down and press in).Apart from that it's a great machine, toally skip-free unless you lay it on a washing machine on full spin! I dropped it and it didn't skip.

Despite the current unavailability of 1 gb disks, the standard disks can be reformatted and this is where the hi-md really comes into its own. Even though there is no power unit, you can plug in the power unit from a standard unit. Then you can record 10 hours from the radio, {at 64 kps} which I do through the optical output of a Pure Tempus-1 evoke unit. So I plug it in on a Saturday night, and leave it on all night recording Bob Harris among others from Radio 2. After that I can listen to it while cycling or as I am doing now, I can play it through my computer through the usb port. Unlike the old minidisc models, it plays through the loudspeakers.

The other reviews cover most of the features and good/bad points already, but just to point out what struck me most about this player.

- The photo in the Sony/Amazon listings has been taken to make the unit appear slimmer than it actually is, though it is still a nice compact size.

- The LCD display is excellent - it is clear, big enough for the job and you can change the contrast. Only problem is that it isn't backlit, which is a shame. However, the unit is compatible with a Sony RM-MC40ELK backlit remote control.

- SonicStage software can now be updated online (SS 3.0) from the Sony website. This version is much better than 2.0, and with a little bit of practice you quickly get the hang of it, though it lacks some of the user-friendlyness of say, Musicmatch Jukebox as a PC music manager. It is also rather memory-hungry, so don't expect to run too many other programs while you convert files to ATRAC3plus, unless you have shed loads of the RAM (I've got 512 MB), and it does take a while to complete and then transfer onto the device.

- This little toy is going with me to South America for 3 months, and I chose it because of its price, compactness and inherent ability to expand it with more discs. Two or three 1 GB discs should be perfect (about 100+ CDs), which means that it will be extremely portable and not as much of a thief-magnet as an iPod.

I bought a Hi-MD unit because it's compatible with my existing MD collection, has long battery life which is also replacable and there appears to be doubts about the reliability of the hard drive devices around at the moment.

The unit has good sound with decent volume and the battery life lives up to expectations. You can also get over nine hours of good quality music at 64kbs on a conventional MD and 34 hours on a new 1GB disc. However, even my modest music collection will not fit onto 1GB, so disc swapping is inevitable. Depending on how much music you want to carry around with you, it may turn out cheaper and more convenient to go for a HDD player.

The controls are small and fiddley but after a bit of practice they are suprisingly easy to use. The display is barely adequate and a full width text display would have been beter plus there's no backlight.

As far as I can see, you have to use the supplied Sonicstage software which although does the job, it is very slow on my 550Mhz PC. The USB 1.1 inteface does not help either. There is also no convenient way of editing tracks (e.g. sound normalisation, fade-in and out etc). All tracks have to be converted to the ATRAC format so any MP3s you have are going to suffer an additional loss in quality. The software is cumbersome to use as a PC based music player. Windows Media Player will play single tracks on the PC but there appears to be no way of creating playlists.

The software imposes strict digital rights management which I still don't fully understand the scope of. It should not be too much of a problem with leagaly obtained music.

All said, it is a good unit has has some advantages over the latest crop of HDD and solid state units. However, I don't think it is the format for the 21st century unless the discs can be made with much bigger capacities and have a signicant price advantage over its rivals. It could also do with better software