Question about the 1 rack unit Sony Minidisc

hokypokynose

hokypokynose

New member
I have the opportunity to purchase one of them 1U minidisc recorders sony makes. It is their top of the line recorder. Normally 700$ or so, I can get it for 300. I've been getting very much into sampling and I have a portable Sony N707 already. I thought this might complement it well as it has digital i/o unlike my portable, and it has much more powerful editing capabilities. Should I act? Or is it crap?

I want to use it to mixdown stuff as well. I've heard recordings made on these in SP(not the MDLP crap) that sound great, but that was coming through a house system and I was in the controll room at a live venue, not the best place for critical listening.
 
Pick it up! I for one like the sound of the sony minidisc format. I would consider something a bit better (cdrw or 1/4"tape) for the mastering house, but as a notepad or sample archiving unit it should do nicely. Many brodcast engineers still use minidisc as the commercial sample transfer standard.
 
Yo Hokypoky: {Is it, "You put your left foot in...?"}

You will probably have fun with the Sony unit but it won't give you what 16 bit units will give you.

I still have my MD8 hooked up in the studio -- too lazy to take it down -- it still may have uses. But, when I want to do some work, it's almost always CDR and in 16 bit of course.

But, if you like it, buy it.

Green Hornet :D :cool: :p
 
Which unit exactly is it? I have a pair of the MDS-E10s (the cheaper brother of the MDS-E12, with single-ended instead of balanced I/O). I have one in my live rack, and one in the studio. I use them to print sound effects that I can play back through the mains for some of the live work I do (musical theater type stuff), and also for a little live-to-2-track recording (about which more below).

These things work very well for the SFX use. I especially make a lot of use of the hot-start, auto-cue and auto-pause modes, where the machine automatically stops for me at the end of each track and cues up the start of the next track. That way, I can stack up all the SFX cues as individual tracks, and just punch play at each cue- the machine does the rest, which is important if you are singlehanding the sound at this kind of a show. The wired-wireless remote is also nice, so that I can put that all-important "play" button right at my right hand at the board, instead of having to fumble around down in the rack. Two enthusiastic thumbs up for live SFX work.

The unit sounds quite good for compressed audio- Sony really does do a good job with the compression algorithms for these machines (ATRAC V3). However, it is still a lossy compression scheme, so you will hear some artifacting. If it doesn't bother you, more power to it: use it in good health! I personally wouldn't use these as my primary recorder for mastering- but I use them all the time as a safety recorder to print a backup copy of whatever I'm recording live, just in case my main recorder (usually an Alesis Masterlink) fails. I definitely would be willing to fall back to material recorded on it in a pinch, so take that for what you will....

These are very useful and somewhat underrated machines, IMNSHO.
 
It is an E12. I'm still waiting on word about it. So if you have an E10 and love it, I'm quite sure I will be quite happy with the E12. I don't want to rely on it forever as a mastering media, but bands of the level I record don't care too much(they couldn't hear the difference I'm sure), and right now, recording back to the computer heavily restricts the pluggins I can use, so this would take load off the computer. Plus, the converters on the computer aren't all that spectacular either, so this might be a small(probably tiny) step up in recording quality.
 
Sure. The converters are surprisingly good. Another nice hack is that you can put the machine into record-pause mode, and the live analog input is then made available post-converter (but pre-compression!) on the SPDIF outputs. It's not a bad way to get two bangs for one buck: it's both an MD recorder and a standalone A/D converter (if your soundcard has SPDIF inputs, anyway).

If you have noisy converters (most internal converters have a lot of digital noises induced by the EMI environmnt inside the computer case), this could end up being a major net win for you.
 
It is the E10 after all. I was slightly misled. But from what I hear it is still a great deal so I e-mailed off to the guy telling him to grab it for me. All I'm losing is stuff I would never use.
 
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