Minidisc Players

The Sony Minidisc NF810CK looks incredibly nice, as you can see from the pictures. Holding it in your hand it's even better, with a silvery gloss on the main casing and reflective buttons. It feels solid in your hand, and it's heavy for its size when the battery and minidisc are in. I've dropped it about a foot onto my desk already, it interrupted the song transfer that was happening but I was able to start again with no problems.

The remote appears to be of slightly less quality build, being mostly plastic and light, but it works and looks good.

Functionality

The small LCD screen on the front shows many things, most commonly a scrolling text display, a rotating disc to show that it is playing\recording, a one line bar that expands with the beat of your songs, and rotates to show progress in song transfer, song time remaining, LP2 or LP4, and many other smaller displays. The menu system is simple, but it works. Play is enter, and around the play button is a circular button for volume up\down, and next\previous song. On the remote is a slider for next\previous song, and to play\pause a song you push the slider in. The LCD on the remote shows most things that the LCD on the player show, except the beat visualization.

Changing songs, fast forwarding, and pausing\playing is really, really easy on with the remote, and instantly the name of the currently playing song is displayed on the remote. The search times on this minidisc player are short and I am impressed.

Sound Quality

Good and bad. First the good, the equalizer provided ACTUALLY WORKS. I love it. I can fine tune the sound output with the 2 custom equalizer settings. It is only 6 band but it works very well and makes a huge difference. The sound quality with $[...]sony headphones is what you would expect, and the provided earbuds are not great. You'd be better off using a good pair of headphones to take advantage of the sound quality offered by the player.

The bad. The maximum volume is just barely acceptable so that I do not need to take it back. For most of my songs it is good, but for some of my favorite tracks I like to have them ear-bleedingly loud. With the volume cranked, it's just barely loud enough. My hearing is slightly shot because of playing music too loud, so I doubt anyone else would have a real problem. The bass is good, but not great. If you fiddle with the equalizer enough you should be able to get the bass\treble exactly where you want it.

Accessories

This is what made me choose over the 10gb iPod. It come with 2 (yes, two) carrying cases, one with a belt clip, one with velcro. Both are very good quality. Decent earbud headphones. Average quality. As I said earlier, you would be better off plunking down and additional $[...] for some denon headphones to take advantage. Car tape kid, complete with car remote that you stick to your dash. This is an awesome accessory, it works well. The battery provided is very small, a few millimeters thick and a couple inches long. It has a long life, and it's made by sony. Good call with this one sony. The cradle is simple looking, translucent black, with a plug-in at the bottom for the ac adapter. As long as there's no tension on the USB cable or AC adapter it stays put, and looks pretty cool too. I've already talked about the remote so I won't here. I am very impressed with the accessories provdided, except IT COMES WITH NO MINIDISCS!! NOT ONE! I had to go buy a few. It's not a huge deal but come on, I expected at least one to get going with.

Software

I really don't understand why everyone is griping about the software. You import your songs into it so they are in the database, and then you check in \ check out to the player. CLARIFICATION ON THE CHECK IN\OUT PROCEDURE!!! All this means is that, when you check out a song onto a minidisc, it's been checked out once. You can check out a song on up to 3 different discs. If you want to put a song on another disc, you'll have to check in the song from a previous disc. Is this a big deal? NO! It is simply to prevent piracy, and I don't think this is unreasonable at all of sony to ask of us. Why would you need the same song on more than 3 discs? I wouldn't. Back to the software. When the player is connected, you can create groups (these are very hand) on the fly. Checking in (taking a song off a disc) takes about 1-3 seconds, and checking out (putting a song onto a disc) takes about 5-10, in LP2 (high quality) mode. I put an entire CD onto one disc, it only took a few minutes. To sum things up, transferring music is easy, fast, and stable. The software has not crashed on me yet, and it looks pretty cool too.

Final Conclusion

It was either this player or an iPod. Both have pros and cons... I couldn't really understand needing such a large volume of songs with the iPod. It's a bit larger, doesn't come with a cool LCD remote, no cradle, no case... Both products are very good quality made by quality companies. If you need a MASSIVE amount of songs on the go, then the iPod is the way to go. But when you can fit 2 or 3 (at least) CD's in high quality mode on one minidisc, what is the need... I understand the iPod can also function as a pseudo-PDA, which I do not need whatsoever.