Sony Net MD MZ-N710 Personal MiniDisc Player

I'd never really bothered about MiniDisc players until a few months ago, when a friend of mine bought one on something of a whim. Suddenly I became very interested in the format - it seemed to offer a great deal of potential: nigh-on-CD quality sound, compact size and great portability, and the ability to fit a lot of data on a single disc being among the many good points. When I heard about Sony's NetMD format, i.e. the ability to download files from a computer onto a MiniDisc, I became even more excited - here at last was something that compared to an MP3 player without the worries of sound quality (apart from those in the files, of course), and gave the option of high-quality removeable media.

At the time I couldn't afford the pricetag these units tend to carry - I was working a volunteer placement, and when you're on #40 allowance a week, #160 is quite hard to come by. I've since found myself earning a bit more, however, so I decided to treat myself to one of these rather sexy-looking bits of blue high-tech. After shopping around, I found the MZN710L going for cheap on http://www.amazon.co.uk, and ordered it more-or-less on the spot. After only a two-working-day wait (kudos to Amazon for excellent service, btw), the package turned up at my door, and I eagerly peeled off the shrink-wrap, popped a new MD in, and jumped on my housemate's computer to get some tunes flowing.

Well. To say that I was bitterly, bitterly disappointed would be a massive understatement. This unit is, on the surface, an excellent buy - but peel that lovely blue skin back and you'll find some seriously maggot-like issues that are too serious to be ignored.


Still, I'll start with the good points.

First off, and I know I've said this before, this unit does look very, very nice. I bought the 710L model, which means it came in a very fetching electric blue, and the other models (gold and silver, I believe) would look lovely too, I'm sure. Crisp, clean lines add to the spacey feel, and the usage of a small NIMH battery means that the unit is without the ugly AA-sized carbuncle many older MD players carry on their backsides.
(That said, the additional AA battery pack, while an excellent idea, just doesn't seem to flow. It looks slightly out of place, and more importantly doesn't seem too solidly built or fastened to the unit - I got the distinct impression it wouldn't take much to snap it off. It could easily have been attached with much larger screws with no loss of good looks on the player's part... Also, and this is one of the many small issues that lame this player, Sony don't seem to have designed their cases with this pack in mind - it fits insecurely in both the included case, and the extra one I bought.)
The buttons and controls are well-designed, with just the right amount of give - some older Sony models I've seen were quite hard to use, but these buttons never gave me an issue. Ditto the renaming functions - while writing a 26-letters-plus-change alphabet using five or six buttons is never going to be easy, I think Sony have brought it about as close as it's possible to get.
Also of a high standard is the wired remote. If you've ever used one of these before then you'll know how addictive they are, and the attraction of one that can tell you the name of the track you're listening to is high. The LCD screen on it, while small, is crisp, clear and easy to read. The lack of a backlight is a small issue, but one that shouldn't affect anyone much unless they spend their lives in the bush (although admittedly, that does kinda describe me).

Alright, now we get on to the unpleasant part of the review - discussing what exactly is wrong with the MZN710.

First off, the NetMD function. This was THE main reason, bar none, that I bought this player. I don't find CD Walkmen awkward and inconvenient enough that I would be willing to pay a lot of money and spend a lot of time recording them to different media, even if that media lets me cut the size of the player down considerably. What Sony were advertising was a way of putting my MP3 files onto MDs, easily, without fuss, speedily, and conveniently. Let's look at those in sequence:
Easily: The software that Sony bundled with the unit, the proprietary SonicStage, is worse than useless. No, I'm not being strong enough in my wording here - it's quite possibly the worst piece of software I have ever had the misfortune to use. (And I've worked with some pretty dodgy software in my time.) It takes up huge amounts of hard drive space, takes about 45 minutes to install (why? I don't know), doesn't run well on anything less than a 1.2ghz machine, and crashes for inexplicable reasons on WinXP. I've used it on both WinXP and Win2000, and both have had serious individual errors.
When I finally got the software running, actually copying files was rendered almost impossible by the horribly-designed interface. To go from CD to MD via SonicStage, I had to copy first to the hard drive, then to the "Music Drive" (some magical fairy-land location on the HD that I've yet to track down, and which is using up several hundred megabytes, I fear), then convert to ATRAC3 (the MD lossy-compression format, fundamentally quite similar to MP3), then finally download to MD. To do the same with MP3s, I had to create playlists (by sheer fluke, since the process made absolutely no coherent sense), convert, load, change group names, copy to the "Music Drive", convert to ATRAC, and then download. If that's supposed to be easy, then I think Sony's software engineers should never be let near any more complex than a pocket calculator again. No, better: they should be taken out and shot.
To make matters even worse, no other software is capable of performing this procedure, bar RealPlayer One and other Sony variants. (And I'm not going near that particular abomination without a firearm and a crucifix.)
Without Fuss: Sony's rather half-assed attempt at safeguarding the music industry from piracy issues, while good-hearted, is perhaps the biggest downfall. While there are too many issues involved in this policy to go into here, suffice it to say that Sony have made it ridiculously inconvenient and restricting having digital music. Some of the restrictions they impose (no deleting of tracks - why?) are just foolish. To top it off, there's an overwhelming feeling of guilt involved with the whole process. (Maybe this was intended all along - I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that SonicStage happily reports back details of one's MP3 library to a Sony server somewhere.)
Speedily: "Download music at up to 5 minutes of music in 10 seconds!" squawks the box. Well, maybe - at the lowest possible fidelity rate, and assuming you're copying pre-encoded ATRAC files, and even then probably not. Realistically, it takes a LONG time to copy music down, especially given the files size. (An MD equates to about 160 megabytes, I believe.) The whole process, from go-to-woah on a machine which already has SonicStage installed, takes about forty minutes - far more if you want to do anything interesting, like say adding the artist's names to the titles of the tracks. Admittedly, this is still faster than real-time recording, but it's sure not any easier.
Conveniently: I think the above goes to show that this process is anything but convenient. Enough said.

My other major issue with the MZN710 is sound quality and volume.Basic sound quality on the unit is quite decent, to be honest with you - it's as good as you'd expect unequalised MiniDisc sound to be, perhaps a bit better. The VBT Acoustic Engine surround settings, while fun for a while, aren't particularly worth it - but what the hell, they're nice to have, and they certainly don't hurt any (except in terms of volume, but I'll get to that one later).
The six-band graphic equaliser shines - it does everything it's supposed to do, and it does it fairly easily and well. This is one of the feautres that Sony has always done well, and the MZN710 is no exception to the rule.
The bundled headphones are, quite frankly, crap. They're tinny, uncomfortable both in your ear and around your neck, and the sound quality, while being quite clear, just doesn't have any resonance behind it. Once again, this has always been a standard with Sony, and it lets them down. I bought a Panasonic discman several months ago, and the bundled speakers on that were excellent by comparison. (Although still not the best.)
And now we get to one of my two main gripes. (The other being the NetMD function.) The volume level on the MZN710 is utterly, utterly pants. It's fine for a quiet room on a still night, but challenge it a little and it capitulates completely. Under what I would consider normal operating conditions for a personal stereo, such as a crowded city centre or a noisy train ride, the unit can be almost inaudible, even at the pathetically-low max-volume setting. This is a serious, serious issue - I might have been prepared to put up with the NetMD problem, but this is too much.


So, in conclusion, the Sony MZN710 is a perfect example of how a well-established company with a good reputation can take an extremely promising format and idea and completely balls it up. What annoys me most about this is that it had so much promise - if the NetMD software was usable, or even (*gasp*) good, this format would kick the living spit out of anything CDs could offer. Unfortunately, Sony's complete lack of interest in anything except making money lieing to consumers (because I now consider the entire NetMD advertising campaign to be a total lie) has binned what could have been one of the Next Big Things in portable music.
So what am I going to do with my MZN710L, fancy-pants case, and new still-wrapped MDs? I'm going to send them back to Amazon for a full refund, and then I'm going to take a little bit more of my hard earned cash and invest in an Apple iPod. And I'm never, ever, going to buy a piece of Sony technology again.



Author's note: If you weren't planning on using the NetMD function, for example if you already have a large MD collection, then this unit's quality goes up quite significantly. It's still a well-build little gadget, and apart from the volume issue, it's mostly plusses. Add two stars.