Pioneer MJ-D707 Personal MiniDisc Player

I didn't get my DJ707 because anyone said nice things about it. No-one said anything nice about mini-discs at all. Compressed music, flat, lacking in life, dead, worse than granny's old tubes. A few observations.

Trouble was I was looking for a way to get a hundred or so old vinyl records into a form I could hand carry to the USA. Cassettes might have worked, but my Denon tape deck was tired and I couldn't really face another ear-bending, listening to machines that may or may not sound good over a longer term than the specifications could quote.

And of course tapes degrade. Badly. So I went looking for alternatives. I looked at CD-R and didn't find anything I liked at a price I could afford.

Then I looked at, listened to, and was impressed by mini-discs. Gone was the compressed and bacon-frying characteristics that made the medium a joke in the early years after Sony invented it. Instead there was a sound that was almost enjoyable. Not perfect, but my vinyl could be carried in a large-size pocket on this scale so I bought a Pioneer DJ-M707 because it sounded fair, looked neat and didn't tax my brain with a remote containing more keys than my computer.

I took it home. I plugged it in. I recorded a couple of records and sat back to listen. I like dynamics and I like clear and effortless power. The 707 did both. There was something maybe missing I couldn't quite put my finger on, but nothing that got in the way of the music. So I recorded all my records, packed the lot up in my bag, and headed west.

With a Radio Shack transformer, I plugged it in to my hi-fi in the USA, and pushed a disc inside. The sound came alive. Bright and hard, but with tremendous power and dynamics. Mini-discs are really not that bad after all.

Treated like a hi-tech cassette where the tapes won't wear out or fade, mini-disc is really a step in the long-awaited right direction. The discs are small, easilly and reliably handled and allow CD-length recording, re-recording and editing. All well known of course. But the Pioneer unit takes this one stage on. Mini-discs strip lots of 'unwanted' sound from the original to allow so much to be saved onto a small magneto-optical disc, but the DJ-M707 is so good it's hard to tell.

Sure it had the mini-disc characteristic brightness, which is rather like an old tape deck under-biasing a tape. But it also has detail and power. It has an ease of use that belies it's quality of music. And I like listening to it. Of course the technology is so neat it borders on the cute, but more than you could know if you haven't heard one of these machines, the Pioneer DJ-M707 makes music sound like music and does not take anything away from hearing what you need.

I'd recommend it. Sadly discontinued now, I'd say that if you want a way to tape your music and enjoy it, the 707 is just damned good. It isn't perfect, but then so what. I put in Dylan and out comes Dylan. What more could I ask... what more could you want.