Sony NetMD MZ-N10
Sony's flagship Minidisc-based player brings a hefty feature set and hefty price tag with it.The MZ-N10 is Sony's flagship MP3-capable Minidisc player, and it brings an impressive set of specifications to the table, along with a fairly scary RRP.
The first thing we noticed about the MZ-N10 was the price. At AU$899, it's as near as makes no difference to twice the price of the MZ-N510 model, and with that kind of price difference we were expecting there to be more than a few differences.
One of the bigger arguments in the MZ-N10's favour is that it's much smaller and easier on the eye than the rather mundane MZ-N510. It measures in at a slimline 78.5 x 13.8 x 73.3mm and 84g bare weight, making it one of the lightest and smallest players in our roundup. It's not actually that much larger or heavier than the media it uses, an impressive engineering feat in and of itself.
The MZ-N10 comes with a cabled LCD remote that's actually quite handy; it'll scroll track names and playing times and had little effect on the battery life of the unit in our testing. It's not quite as funky as the remote on Creative's CD Slim 600, but it's very easy to use. Sony lists the internal battery of the MZ-N10 as lasting between 17-24 hours, depending on the quality of the material you're playing back; we found a fully charged battery lasted around 20 hours with LP4 material. If you need the additional power, adding the AA battery can boost playback times up to 52 hours; there's simply nothing that can touch the MZ-N10 in this regard in our testing, so if you're a constant international traveller with musical leanings, it's a good buy.
The transfer speed of the MZ-N10 is helped along by USB2.0 support -- previous NetMD players were USB1.1, but hindered to a great extent by the actual playback format that all the NetMD devices use. You can't simply transfer over raw WMA, MP3 or WAV files over to a Minidisc; they must be converted to Sony's ATRAC format. ATRAC has several flavours that correspond to compression rates, so at LP-4, you'll get 320 minutes of playback on an 80 minute Minidisc, while standard play will, to no surprise, give you 80 minutes of mostly uncompressed music. Our gripe with ATRAC is twofold; firstly, it generally takes longer to convert a file to ATRAC than it does to shuffle it onto the player; if you're moving up to 80 files in LP4 format you'll have to wait a while. The MZ-N10 boasts a transfer speed that Sony refers to as 64x (compared to the N510's 32x), although this has to be checked against the need to do ATRAC conversions for each and every file.
The other gripe that ATRAC introduces is some rudimentary DRM; files must be checked in and out of Sony's SonicStage application, but it's nowhere near foolproof. We were able to shuffle some files between some machines, while others resolutely refused to budge. We deliberately deleted some files without checking them out, and were able to re-transfer them at will. The only thing more irritating than DRM, in our opinion, is DRM that doesn't work very well.
The MZ-N10 is an attractive player with some nice bundled extras, but at its list price of AU$899 we can't help but feel that other options offer better value. If you're Minidisc-inclined we'd opt for the MZ-N510, and for those with more cash to hand we'd suggest the equally slim (and slightly cheaper) Apple 15GB iPod.
Sony NetMD MZ-N510
Company: Sony Australia
Price: AU$499
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 137 669
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Hi! I recently put a Sony MZ-N510 on layby of $350. It's my first update sine a discman. Should I keep it or find another one? Any comments are more than welcome! Thanks!