Price Paid:  $270.00 from Finnish home electro

Summary:
I had previously a Sony NetMD MZ-N510 and I liked it very much but I missed some features it lacked, such as mic input, LCD remote and gumstick battery (which means sleaker body). So when I found a buyer for my NetMD, I headed to buy one of these. I considered between Apple iPod and this Sony Hi-Md, but a comparison between these models showed me that Hi-Md has a lot more features and a slightly better value. It's also more user friendly when it comes to battery change and accesory compatibility.

The Hi-Md uses 1Gb Minidiscs and it's capable of 34 hours of good quality sound and when compressed a little more, 45 hours. It's also possible to get even better quality or just direct 1,4 Mbps CD quality but of course by the cost of disc space. In my opinion the 64kbps Atrac3plus Hi-LP (sound quality similar to 128kbps MP3 or Atrac3 LP2) is very good for a portable player like this.
Of course this is compatible with all previous MiniDiscs too and it's possible to format old 80 minute discs to Hi-Md.

The SonicStage software that comes in package has its own flaws but it works well enough and this Hi-Md has also a MD simple burner software for direct transfer of Audio CDs to Hi-Md. The transfer is quite quick and the program finds the artist, song names and album names very well. With SonicStage, it's possible to bring songs from your PC to the Hi-Md or transfer Mic line recordings to computer. It's also possible to record from a stereo system and an optic cable comes in the package.

One of the reasons I decided to switch my portable player was that it's possible to store data files on the Hi-MD such as word-documents or pictures etc. That is very handy.

The player itself is very sleek and small, maybe not as hot as iPod, but very functional indeed. The aluminum/plastic construction seems to be well made and the metal in the cover gives you a slightly more "high-end product" feel than a full plastic. The jog wheel works well since the song collection gets much bigger now than with the old Minidiscs. The 5-way switch in the middle of the jog wheel seems first very hard to use but it's actually quite easy to use when you get familiar with it. MZ-NH 900 has a digital amplifier and a 6-band equalizer which quite usable to fit the sound settings for different headphones.

The MZ-NH900 comes with a LCD remote that is very functional but when you use with some other headphones than the shortened Sonys, the cord gets quite long. But that's definitely not a major problem. The standard headphones are ok but I recommend some better ones to get the most out of it. I have Sennheiser PX100's and they work very well.

The accessories with the MZ-NH900 are a charging stand, AC adaptor,optic cable, USB cable, dry battery case and a AA battery case in case the original rechargeable battery
runs out. Unlike the NetMD, when you connect Hi-MD to computer via USB, the songs on the disc can be played through PC speakers.

At least the previous MiniDisc worked very well and I hope this provides even more value since I can record our band rehearsals and use that data file storage and of course, play more and better quality music.

Strengths:
Good construction
Very good quality compression
Big storage space
Data file storage possibility

Weaknesses:
-Of course the storage space is smaller than in hard disk players.

- Some people could prefer a larger LCD disply

Similar Products Used:
MZ-N510 Net Md