A minidisc adventure (Sony MDS JE530)

Member Name: monkeyking

Product:	Sony MDS JE530
Date:	28/12/02 (1581 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good price, Many functions, Great for recording

Disadvantages: Big remote control

The Sony minidisc deck MDS-JE530S has all your minidisc needs for less than £130 and it doesn't look too bad either. The original came in black but now you can get it in silver as well. There are many functions on this deck; all the normal play, stop, record, etc that you would expect plus editing functions for cutting out bits (milliseconds) of tracks, joining tracks together and rearranging tracks on the minidisc. For even more advanced functions you can change the decibel levels when recording tracks, use fade in and out operations and even change the input sound level to different levels for different inputs.

Regarding inputs, this can be through coaxial, optical or analogue and recording can be done in both stereo and mono. This means great recording quality if your connecting player has coaxial or optical connections. I use my deck a lot for putting my music on my computer onto minidisc and so I require things like fast track naming, good sound syncronising and no noticable sound degrading; all of whihc this deck offers. The track naming can be done via the remote control like texting on a phone or using the dial on the player, either way it is easy to do.

Overall this deck is very easy to use. I have never needed to make use of the manual as all the functions are well named and easily understandable. The functions that are used most often have individual buttons on the face of the player and there is also a left and right speaker sound equalizer so that you can judge whether the sound is being recorded equally to the left and right side. A very useful function is the A-B repeat. This allows you to repeat any part of the minidisc over and over again; not only useful for listening to you favourite bits of songs but also for doing things like checking the track joins and even for working out notes if you like to do things like making guitar tabs.

The playback seems to be good quality for the price, although this obvious
ly depends on what amplifier and speakers you are playing through. The remote control, though rather long is very useful and it even has a decibel control on it. I think you can do just about everything using the remote control that you can on the deck itself. The deck has a headphone jack, which has an individual phone level and things like timers, sleep, repeat and skip are also there. So all in all, especially for such a good price, you couldn't really ask for much more and I've certainly been very pleased with mine.

Summary: