Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony MZ-NH1 Silver Hi-MiniDisc Walkman

I got my MZ-NH1 about 2 months ago, and so far have had no problems. There's no way I could talk about everything in one review, but here's the main bits.

Most reviews I've read talk about their absolute hate for the software, but what's so wrong with it? It's quite slow, but then I do have a slow computer. It looks very swish, is easy to use and basically it does what it's ment to do, very well.

It looks great, the magnessium casing on the player is smart and it doesn't scratch. The remote is a piece of genius. There's alot of people who say that the one line display on the player isn't enough, but every single feature you could ever ask for is on the remote, which I prefer - and it's easy to use. You also don't have to keep getting it out of your pocket to change stuff.

Now for the not so good features... the claim that you can get 45 hours onto one disc, is all very well if you don't mind listening to the worst quality of music, ever. For 45 hours you have to compress at 48kbps, but a listenable quality at 112kbps will fit around 17 hours - which is still loads!

The headphones provided are terrible. If you're going to buy this then just buy some decent headphones with it, believe me the ones provided aren't even worth trying.

Overall though, the MZ-NH1 is an excellent player. the two things I'm not happy with are only very minor compared with all the other impressive features. The only reason I'm not giving 5 stars, is the huge price. In the high street this player is being sold for £300, which is ridiculous.

I'm one of those that "dredge" the internet for all possible information on anything I'm looking at purchasing. After a decision to go HiMD - I've been playing around with MD's since they came out - I looked at the latest players from Sony and noticed this little "jewel" of an MD player sitting in the back shelves of most hifi stores. On futher investigation I fell in "lust" for this unit!

I've had the unit for about two weeks and have to say I am very happy with it. I won't go into the technical stuff as you have probably been through it all already. The feel and quality is top-notch, I have and still own quite a few pieces of Sony quipment from MDs, to digicams, to CD player, to micro systems, to camcorders - but the quality of this is absolutely FANTASTIC! It feels solid and everything works like you would expect. The remote is staggeringly simple to use and "hides" all the functionality for a powerful device in a friendly user way.

This unit is head and shoulders above anything else out there - ok, we have different opinions - even the latest HiMD units from Sony. You can record with it with an external mic - my second reason for going with a HiMD - and you have so many options on the quality of your recordings - upto CD quality recordings. The lithium ion battery lasts and lasts and if needed you can buy another one for long trips you can swap them out. With the HiMD, I have squeezed in about 40 CDs on the one disk and the sound quality is very good - even at the low bitrate.

All in all, if you need a very small unit that gives you almost limitless recording options, durable, excellent sound quality and simple to use I strongly recommend this little "jewel" and as some of the readers have already mentioned, at £110 this is a steal.

Happy listening...

This is an exceptional music player. It has style, reliability, and is a vast improvement in terms of the older "MiniDisc." The MZ-NH1 Hi-Md player (in my opinion) rivals even the "almighty" Ipod. But not in terms of space, as the Ipod has a huge capacity for music. However, although the Ipod is unique in this sense, it has a tendency to "crash" alot, the MZ-NH1 will never crash making it more reliable. Plus it lets people deal with a more realistic amount of music at one time as it provides 1 GB discs (Over 200 songs) not 20 GB. (Around 5000 songs)

The MZ-NH1 does have it's flaws though, as the "electronics & photo fan" points out (read his/her review). The transfer speed has also improved dramatically. It is incredibly fast for a mini disc player. However it has nothing on the ipod's speed. Both the MZ-NH1 hi-md player and the Ipod are a good buy. They both look good and and the cost roughly the same (20 Gb Ipod) But I think the MZ-NH1 player is the best bet. It has endless space as you can just keep buying more discs.

I got this a few days ago and I am now using it as my primary portable music player. I do have the SONY NW-HD1 player but after downloading some of the same tracks as on that player to this machine - it sounds far more superior. I don't know why - all the settings and bit rate were the same but this just sounds altogether better.

The menu system is abit confusing and why they could not have put the power supply and USB together on the dock like the HD-1 dock is strange. The dock for this is purely for charging.

If above all else sound quality is important then go for this (please note I am not using the supplied headphones). For just under £110 you can't go wrong. Infact for sound quality alone it's a bargain. But if ease of use is also a factor go for one of the hard drive players.

This is a great little gadget for the Minidisc enthusiast. I wanted another Sony Minidisc Walkman to replace
my ageing MZR-30 from 1997, and there's unsurprisingly a big difference between the two machines.

The NH1 is a beautifully-designed little machine, hardly any bigger than the discs it plays, with a sleek platinum finish.
Sound quality is excellent, and the device just drops right into your pocket. Perfect!

THere are snags, however. The supplied earphones are poor - you'll need to buy better ones. The plastic cradle is used just for charging, and for some reason a separate USB cable is supplied for connection to your computer. This looks to me like an afterthought. Why isn't this incorporated into the cradle? And the software that comes with this unit is just awful. Once again, a high-quality hardware product is let down by the bundled programs that are supposed to make it workable. This happens so often. It seems that when corporations have a whizzy new device to sell they spend all their R&D budget on the hardware, all too often viewing the software as an afterthought. No exception here. We get the usual badly designed, ugly interfaces and glitchy translations and one of the two supplied packages, Simple Burner, wouldn't work at all on my XP computer. The other package is Sonic Stage, and that worked, but just looks like a poor man's ITunes. Ugh. Lucky for me that most of my music is on vinyl, so I won't be using these applications much ... but I'm sure I'm the exception. The software really needs to be sorted.

One other thing. There is so much functionality built into this little machine as to be baffling. In fact it probably does too much. It's the well-known "most users will only use 10% of this software" syndrome. THe manual for the MZ-NH1 runs to over 100 pages, and you can spend a good few evenings scratching your head reading it and trying to get it all working. ANd unless you're a dedicated user, you'll likely not remember how to do what you want to do afterwards.

So, not for everyone, but for us geeks it's just great.