Sony Net MD MZ-NE410 Personal MiniDisc Player
- Backlit Display: No
- Recordable: Recordable
- Built-in Equalizer: No
- Headphones: Yes
- Remote Control: No
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A good idea botched by horrible design
Pros
Great sound quality; solid construction.
Cons
Atrocious software; long song transfer times; poor ergonomics.
Recommended it?
No
The Bottom Line:
The good sound this thing produces can't make up for the atrocious software and slow transfer times. Stay away.
I was a complete newcomer to minidisks when I bought Sony's MZ-NE410 minidisk player. I was looking for an MP3 player or an MP3 player replacement, and the minidisk player attracted me because it seemed to have all the features I was looking for:
- Light and portable
- Inexpensive
- Long battery life
- Hooks up to the computer through USB
- Comes from a reputable company
In a word, it had a lot going for it, and I was surprised by just how I disliked it in the end. Nevertheless, I'll give you the good news first.
Good news
This player has two strong points: excellent sound quality, and good build quality. Sony has been in the music business for many years, and it clearly shows when you listen to the music. Every note, every nuance of every song seems to be audible, even though the sound on the minidisk is compressed , and is thus below CD quality. Even when coming through the tiny earbud phones, the sound is mighty impressive.
The build quality of the player is good. It opens and closes with a reassuring click, and although the plastic seems a bit cheap, it gives the impression of being solidly built. It can survive being dropped on the floor without so much as a scratch (trust me, because I know...)
The battery life during playback is also good; I did not time how long it takes before the battery runs out, but you can play many minidisks on a single battery. Recording new songs onto minidisks is what kills batteries with this device. I have seen the battery indicator go from "full" to "half empty" while recording. With this minidisk recorder, your battery life will be determined not by how much you play songs but by how often you record them.
Owning a set of rechargeable batteries makes this issue, a non-issue.
Bad news
Unfortunately, this minidisk recorder has a lot going against it:
Bad software. I read several Epinions reviews of this minidisk recorder before I bought it, and they all mentioned this point. I've seen bad software before, so I thought I'd deal with it; maybe the reviews weren't explicit enough to scare me away...
The software is bloated with flashy animations and all sorts of gimmicks, so using it on an older computer is an exercise in frustration. Most animations can be turned off, but doing this doesn't fully cure the problem.
Coming from Sony, the software is full of DRM (Digital Rights Management) features. Basically, it wants to control how you listen to your music, and wants to make sure you don't copy the songs from your player to a different computer. This makes you jump through all sorts of hoops to transfer your files from your hard drive to your minidisk recorder.
The user interface is very, very, very confusing. It offers you many views of your media library, it will play your MP3 files and your CDs for you, and it can probably do many other wondrous things... but it all these features just serve to obscure and hide the one thing you really need it for--transferring files to/from your minidisk player.
All these failings are magnified by the fact that you absolutely need this software. There is absolutely no other way to transfer your MP3 files to the minidisk recorder; without the software, the recorder is essentially useless. This means that the more you use your recorder, the more you must use this horrible torture rack of an application.
Slow transfer times. Transferring a play list (10-15 songs) from your computer to your minidisk player takes ages. Think fifteen minutes. Or more. There are two causes for this.
First of all, the recorder can't play MP3s directly. They first need to be converted to Sony's proprietary format; this conversion is very processor-intensive, and on slow computers (like mine) takes forever. This can be indirectly remedied by hard drive space and processing power. If you have the hard drive space, you can store the converted songs as well as the original MP3s, so you will at most have to convert a song once. And, of course, the faster your processor, the faster the conversion goes.
Second cause of slow transfers is the recorder itself--it just can't write the data to the minidisk very fast. This flaw is impossible to work around - using USB 2.0 and Cray supercomputer won't help - the bottleneck is the recorder itself.
Poor recorder ergonomics. The recorder is outfitted with tiny buttons as menu and volume controls. Using these buttons is difficult when you're actually doing something (e.g. exercising). To add insult to injury, the settings you set in the menus are not stored across power cycles. If you want to see song title as it is playing, you'll have to tell the recorder about it every time you turn it on. Sillyness!
Summary
Sony knows how to make good sound, and it shows in this minidisk recorder--if considered as a sound playback device only it is an excellent device. It really does produce very good sound.
However, the aural performance is overshadowed by horrible software, intrusive DRM features and long file transfer waits. All of these you have to endure on a daily basis if you use the minidisk recorder as intended - as a mobile entertainment unit where you can re-record your playlists often.
I can not recommend this recorder to anyone; after suffering all its features for about three weeks, I took advantage of the generous exchange policy of the store I bought it at, and exchanged it for a "real" MP3 player.
- Light and portable
- Inexpensive
- Long battery life
- Hooks up to the computer through USB
- Comes from a reputable company
In a word, it had a lot going for it, and I was surprised by just how I disliked it in the end. Nevertheless, I'll give you the good news first.
Good news
This player has two strong points: excellent sound quality, and good build quality. Sony has been in the music business for many years, and it clearly shows when you listen to the music. Every note, every nuance of every song seems to be audible, even though the sound on the minidisk is compressed , and is thus below CD quality. Even when coming through the tiny earbud phones, the sound is mighty impressive.
The build quality of the player is good. It opens and closes with a reassuring click, and although the plastic seems a bit cheap, it gives the impression of being solidly built. It can survive being dropped on the floor without so much as a scratch (trust me, because I know...)
The battery life during playback is also good; I did not time how long it takes before the battery runs out, but you can play many minidisks on a single battery. Recording new songs onto minidisks is what kills batteries with this device. I have seen the battery indicator go from "full" to "half empty" while recording. With this minidisk recorder, your battery life will be determined not by how much you play songs but by how often you record them.
Owning a set of rechargeable batteries makes this issue, a non-issue.
Bad news
Unfortunately, this minidisk recorder has a lot going against it:
Bad software. I read several Epinions reviews of this minidisk recorder before I bought it, and they all mentioned this point. I've seen bad software before, so I thought I'd deal with it; maybe the reviews weren't explicit enough to scare me away...
The software is bloated with flashy animations and all sorts of gimmicks, so using it on an older computer is an exercise in frustration. Most animations can be turned off, but doing this doesn't fully cure the problem.
Coming from Sony, the software is full of DRM (Digital Rights Management) features. Basically, it wants to control how you listen to your music, and wants to make sure you don't copy the songs from your player to a different computer. This makes you jump through all sorts of hoops to transfer your files from your hard drive to your minidisk recorder.
The user interface is very, very, very confusing. It offers you many views of your media library, it will play your MP3 files and your CDs for you, and it can probably do many other wondrous things... but it all these features just serve to obscure and hide the one thing you really need it for--transferring files to/from your minidisk player.
All these failings are magnified by the fact that you absolutely need this software. There is absolutely no other way to transfer your MP3 files to the minidisk recorder; without the software, the recorder is essentially useless. This means that the more you use your recorder, the more you must use this horrible torture rack of an application.
Slow transfer times. Transferring a play list (10-15 songs) from your computer to your minidisk player takes ages. Think fifteen minutes. Or more. There are two causes for this.
First of all, the recorder can't play MP3s directly. They first need to be converted to Sony's proprietary format; this conversion is very processor-intensive, and on slow computers (like mine) takes forever. This can be indirectly remedied by hard drive space and processing power. If you have the hard drive space, you can store the converted songs as well as the original MP3s, so you will at most have to convert a song once. And, of course, the faster your processor, the faster the conversion goes.
Second cause of slow transfers is the recorder itself--it just can't write the data to the minidisk very fast. This flaw is impossible to work around - using USB 2.0 and Cray supercomputer won't help - the bottleneck is the recorder itself.
Poor recorder ergonomics. The recorder is outfitted with tiny buttons as menu and volume controls. Using these buttons is difficult when you're actually doing something (e.g. exercising). To add insult to injury, the settings you set in the menus are not stored across power cycles. If you want to see song title as it is playing, you'll have to tell the recorder about it every time you turn it on. Sillyness!
Summary
Sony knows how to make good sound, and it shows in this minidisk recorder--if considered as a sound playback device only it is an excellent device. It really does produce very good sound.
However, the aural performance is overshadowed by horrible software, intrusive DRM features and long file transfer waits. All of these you have to endure on a daily basis if you use the minidisk recorder as intended - as a mobile entertainment unit where you can re-record your playlists often.
I can not recommend this recorder to anyone; after suffering all its features for about three weeks, I took advantage of the generous exchange policy of the store I bought it at, and exchanged it for a "real" MP3 player.
