Time to come clean, I suffer from OCSPD. Obsessive Compulsive Sony Purchasing Disorder. I can’t believe it, I’ve just ordered another minidisc recorder. That will make five at the last count. I can’t help myself. I know it’s a rapidly aging technology but I have a fondness for the minidiscs. The quality is still fantastic and sliding a physical button to start recording rather than all the faffing you normally have to do to set modes, choose menus and start recording on MP3 recorders, I still like the minidiscs but post-production has been less than thrilling. Another impulse buy. This one (RH1) is supposed to at long, long, long, long, long, looooonnnnngggg, last have the capability that minidisc owners have been crying out for “Let me transfer my own recordings to my computer digitally!” but for legacy SP/LP microphone recordings. At last! I feel kind of sad for Sony they’re having a rough time of it recently, slipping on PS shipping dates and battery recalls. The software with the minidiscs is usually abysmal but they still make cracking hardware and although the initial purchase is usually more expensive than other options, the products are robust. I have a MZ-N710 that’s still shiny brushed silver and iPods be dammed packs a lot of functionality into a beautiful square device – I have Sony gizmos over a decade old and they’re still going strong, for whatever reason their designs don’t seem to have cheap cases that get scraped, thin connectors that snap or get worn out. I think they’re well worth the money.
To me it seems like there’s a bit of a gap in the market for the medium quality recording devices, players aplenty but recorders? There’s the high-end Marantz and any number of cheap ‘voice recorders’ but not a great deal of choice in between. I can’t figure out why iRiver dropped the ball after the great wee iFP800 series of flash recorders. They went all Windows and DRM on us dropped Macs and offered fewer models with decent recording rates. If they’d enhanced iFP800 they could have cleaned up in the low-end portable podcasting market. Folk still recommend them on the podcasting mailing lists but you have to go to ebay to find them these days.
