Pros: lightweight, small, and comes equipped with little extras.
Cons: can be on expensive side of portable electronics.
The Bottom Line: This is a perfect portable audio unit that can record unlimited music. It's worth the money and works out cheaper than the average expenses of owning a portable CD Walkman.
star2002's Full Review: Sony Walkman MZ-R70 Personal MiniDisc Player
After careful research during my endeavor to buy portable audio equipment I stumbled upon the SONY MZ-R700 mini-disc recorder and player. It is very small (3”x 3”x 1”) and easily transportable. When you buy the player you receive lots of little extra products. You receive a remote control without a light up display, a DC plug which doubles as a re-charger, a re-chargeable battery, and earphones. The earphones, however, are not very good quality. Lastly, after a mail-in offer you get sent a free carry-case, which is of good quality. This mini-player is perfect for anyone who likes a variety of music. The MZ-R700 enables you to download up to five hours of music on one disc and additional discs cost only $2. This disc can be recorded via the Internet, from CDs, or from the radio but additional cables must be purchased separately and can be a little expensive. The player itself will be more expensive than your normal MP3 or portable CD Walkman, starting at around $220. Another thing to consider when deciding between all three portable audio players is the fact that when recording onto a mini-disc player it takes the actual amount of time a track plays for you to record the track. For example, a three-minute song takes three minutes to download and record.
When deciding which electronic audio player to purchase you must look at all of them and compare. Though an MP3 player has a quicker recording time and also tends to be cheaper, starting at $90, they also tend to have a much smaller recording space. MP3’s usually can only record 90 minutes of music before you need to begin recording over tracks again. Also, MP3s are only really good for people who are interested in singles of artists instead of the whole CD as the player only has a small memory and couldn’t record more than one whole CD.
CD players are another portable audio player in the mix today. An obvious advantage to buying a portable CD player is that it has no recording time. Also, because they are an “old” item in the electronic world they tend to be much cheaper than MP3s and Mini-discs, starting at only $40. However, there are indeed disadvantages to this relatively old form of audio player. Firstly, you cannot pick and choose what you listen too. With either of the other two options you can select one song from an artist and download and record. With a CD player however, in order to get that song you must purchase the whole CD. Secondly although a CD player seems like the cheaper option it really isn’t. If you think about the number of CDs you buy in a year, for around $14 each, and then add that together with the price of the actual CD player in most cases it actually turns out to be more than the price of the mini-disc player and the mini-discs, taking into consideration that you only really need one mini-disc as they are multi-time recordable.
After taking all of this into consideration, when you buy a mini-disc player you’re really getting the best of both worlds. You receive unlimited recording time and a variety of music options as well as the ability to record single tracks or whole CDs. Lastly, with a mini-disc player you lug around less stuff as they are only small and light and you need not carry around a case full of CDs for a variety of on-the-go tunes.
40-second shock resistant memory and high quality recording with digital automatic gain control Dual headphone jack allows use of remote control while...More at Amazon Marketplace
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