We take a peek at one of Sony's upcoming Hi-MD portable music players, supporting a gigabyte of removable storage thanks to the company's new higher-capacity MiniDisc.
Sony's upcoming range of digital music players revamps previous MiniDisc players by introducing Hi-MD media. Essentially, the new players will support up to 1 gigabyte (GB) of Hi-MD media -- that's up to up to 45 hours of compressed music - compared to 177MB/80 minutes available on Sony's original MiniDisc.
Upside: Hi-MD discs use the File Allocation Table (FAT) system to store files. This enables Hi-MD players to act as removable storage devices that can hold documents, photos, and other data files as well as music. Connecting the player via USB to a PC, Windows promptly recognises the player as an external storage device, allowing drag-and-drop file management.
Hi-MD players are backwards compatible so they will play older MiniDiscs. Furthermore, formatting existing MiniDiscs in the Hi-MD format increases the available storage space from 177MB to 305MB.
The MZNH700 has a microphone input and line input for recordings, which can then be uploaded to PCs through SonicStage. There is a range of ATRAC3plus bitrates available to encode music in -- from 48kbps to 256kbps. Uncompressed Linear PCM recording is also possible to achieve the high quality sounds at 1.4Mbps.
Downside: For MP3 hoarders, the MZNH700 only allows you to play songs stored on the Hi-MD disc in Sony's proprietary ATRAC3 format, so MP3 files will need to be converted to the format using SonicStage before they will play. Getting 45 hours out of a single Hi-MD disc involves converting files to ATRAC3plus at a very low 48kbps rate. As has always been the case with Sony's USB-connected players, copyright protection limits when and how you can shuffle files around.
Outlook: If you have a large amount of original Sony MiniDiscs lying around, at face value it may be worth your while to invest in a new Sony player supporting Hi-MD, for the increase in storage capacity.
Sony's mid-level player, the MZNH700 will be released in Australia in July at a recommended retail price of AU$499. Hi-MD 1GB discs should be available in June and will have an RRP of AU$9.95. When the Hi-MD discs are released in June the recommended retail price will be AU$9.95 per 1 gigabyte disc.
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in my oppinion an expensive piece of junk!
after purchasing what i expected to be a perfect solution to my mobile recording/ sampling requirements i found the file transfer
software supplied; to be not compatable with apple mac computers, something sony neglected to make obvious to any potential purchasers of the unit,also the lack of any backlighting on the lcd display make it impossible to read in low lighted areas