Having been using my new HI-MD for about 20 shows now I can honestly say its the best piece of electronics equipment ive ever purchased. I have both a Sharp MT90 regular minidisc that i picked up for $100 bux off ebay a few years ago and was always pleased with the recordings I would get.
Pros:
Its super tiny
Records for about 4 hours on a good NiMH rechargable.
Discs are easily found at Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Target, etc etc.
The thing is hella durable. Ive droped it several times and it just keeps on kickin.
Cons:
Compression
Realtime transfers (you have to get a deck w/o optical out for digital transfers)
No backlit display (some of the newer NetMDs have a backlit LCD)
But now Ive upgraded to a HIMD and man i wish I would have bought one last year. I bought the MZ-RH10 $279.00 from
www.minidisco.com and Ive loved it from the second I took it out of the box.
Pros for HIMD:
With sonicstage you can upload your recording directly to the computer via USB. I get about a 2x transfer speed when transfering a PCM recording. Its about a 30x transfer speed if the recording was done on HI-SP
New HIMD offers several choices of recording modes. PCM, HI-SP, and Lo-SP. Ive used both PCM for main acts and usually HI-SP for openers.
With the new recorder comes new 1 GB discs. Standard 80min discs are +/- 275mb. Recording time on a 1GB with PCM mode is 95 min. If you switch to HI-SP w/ the 1GB disc it increases to 7 1/2 hours! Great for Ozzfest or any other big all-day-long festivals. Recording in PCM with an 80 min disc will get you about 24 min which is pretty useless but recording on HISP with the same disc yeilds 2h20m. I personally dont hear much of a difference between PCM and HI-SP but since I have the technology I might as well use it.
Cons:
You can only upload the recording once to the computer. Why? I have no idea but if you attempt to upload it a 2nd time sonic stage will just erase the track. But once you have it on the computer you can convert it to wav and then you can do what ever you want with it.
Discs are hard to find at a B&M store..only store ive seen them sitting on the shelf is Fry's. I special order mine from best buy cause I used to work there and got a pretty sweet deal on them.
Discs are also pretty expensive...~$7 per 1GB disc. Ive seen some online that if you order packs of 5 or 10 they are cheaper but still not $2 a disc like the 74/80 min discs are.
Sony and their infinate wisdom has put the AGC as default and no way to change it. Its kinda a pain but its easy enough to change..especially if you get the NZ-RH10 with the OLED.
If you do decide to get one Id strongly suggest the NZ-RH10 cause of the OLED which means that its got a nice bright blue screen so no more fumbling with a flashlight or cellphone to see the screen.
It also doubles as a pretty sweet mp3 player or you can hook it up via usb and transfer files so its like having a jumpdrive with 1GB removeable media.
So theres my take on it. Id be happy to send you some Mp3s of some shows Ive done with DPA4060 > HIMD or CSB > HIMD. If you've got other questions Ill see what I can do to help you out.
Topic: MD vs. Hi-MD, Sharp vs. Sony? (Read 3750 times)