Panasonic SJ-MR230 Personal MiniDisc Player

I purchased this product when I was in Akihabara, a district in Tokyo, Japan, because I was in need of a portable Walkman that offered long battery life, mobility, and crisp clear sound quality. The product itself was a little expensive, a little over thirty three thousand yen, which is a little over three hundred dollars in the US. Once I started using it, I immediately noticed the crisp clear sound quality and an appreciation for the 40-second anti-shock. In addition, the NetMD system allowed me to encode my music files into their OpenMG ("OMG") format at variable bit-rates: 1x compression (stereo), 2x compression (stereo compressed), and 4x compression (mono compressed). Though subjective, I noticed very little quality of sound difference between the 1x and 2x compression mediums. In addition, I liked how I could type in all the track-specific information into the computer and then download the information onto the MiniDisc. What I did not particularly like about NetMD was that I had to encode each music file I possessed into their unique OMG format. In addition, their NetMD software only came in Japanese language, while my system was entirely in American English; hence my system was unable to display all characters and I had to maneuver through the interface through guessing. Lastly, at times the transfer process between the MiniDisc recorder itself and the PC would stall and I would have to restart the program. However, I did appreciate the battery life, which was over a hundred hours (a rarity, back in 2001).