Nifty (mini) discy (Sharp MD SR60)

Member Name: hugon

Product:	Sharp MD SR60
Date:	20/06/01 (264 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use, Good battery life, able to use lithium and standard AA batteries, Great sound quality

Disadvantages: Difficult to tell how much battery life is left, Poor headphones supplied with unit

I got my first Minidisc about three years ago when they where still quite a new product, and this minidisc player is my second player after dropping my first unit one too many times. Both my players to date have been Sharp, and I have been impressed with both the quality of the build, sound quality and ease of use.

What do you use it for?

It’s great for music on the move – at roughly the same size of your average personal cassette player, it’s smaller than a personal CD player and easily slips into your back pocket. It has the advantage of delivering near CD quality sound (only the purist will hear the difference), as well as all the functions of a CD players – fast forward, skip, etc. You can also name each track as well; this is displayed on the unit.

What is a minidisc?

A minidisc is a disc of CD like material encased in a small piece of plastic that looks roughly the same as a computer disc, but is about 2/3 the size. They are recordable an infinite number of times, and generally last for 74 or 80 minutes, or double that if you use mono playback. Compression is used to give near-CD quality sound on a disc about three centimetres in radius. Minidiscs cost between £1 and £2 for a single blank one, and are available from most high street stores that sell music. There is a limited range of pre-recorded discs available in some shops, but the pre-recorded ones never really caught on.

What do you get in the box?

As well as the actual unit, you get the Ni-MH battery, a charger, a set of earphones, a remote control, a lead to connect you minidisc to the line in/line out socket of your stereo and a carrying case for the minidisc to prevent the surface from being scratched. The remote control is plugged into the earphone socket and the earphones are plugged into the remote control. This allows for skipping of tracks without using the unit. I don’t like the supplied earphones – persona
lly I prefer the in-ear type, and these are a collapsible set that goes over the top of your head. While they stay in your ear reasonably well, the sound quality is quite poor – a little tinny with very poor bass reproduction, and it’s worth splashing out an extra £10 for a decent set of earphones. The unit itself is a top opening model, which I prefer as discs tended to get caught in the mechanism of my last player, which was more like the disc drive of a computer. The buttons are well laid out of the front of the unit, and the display is about 4 cm x 2cm and allows you to see the track details such as the number of the track you are on, the track name and suchlike.

What’s the battery life like?

It’s actually quite good – the supplied NiMH battery gives around five hours playback when fully charged, and charging takes around the same time. There are a few little picky points about charging – you have to have the unit connected to the charger and then press the “stop” button to begin charging, it doesn’t pick the charger up for itself, so if you forget you’ll come back to find your battery still dead. I’m also a little annoyed by the battery display – it seems very inaccurate, it almost immediately switches to two of the three bars as soon as it’s switched on, then down to one quickly, while the one bar stays on for a long time. It makes guessing how long you have in your battery left very difficult. The NiMH battery is shaped the same as a standard AA battery, which you can also use to power the unit. This is very handy as with previous units you had to buy a battery pack to connect to the unit to provide this function. Battery life for a standard AA battery is roughly the same as that of the supplied battery, and I usually carry a few spares around with me just in case, but it’s great for taking away to somewhere where you might not be able to charge it for a whi
le.

Disc playback

Disc playback is very simple – put in the disc, press play and off you go. Pressing play again will pause the disc, and you can use the forward and back buttons to skip between tracks (if you hold the button down it will fast forward/ reverse through the tracks). Volume is graded between 0 and 30, and as you go above 27 (which is quite loud indeed), up to thirty, it automatically reduces the bass level to prevent distortion. The bass can be manually adjusted, from 0 to 3, mine is always on 3, as I like plenty of bass in my music.

Recording to a disc

Again, this is a very simple procedure. First of all you have to select how you’re recording to the disc – either digitally, through the line in or from a microphone. The digital and line in socket is the same, and there is a separate one for the microphone. There is no digital lead provided with the unit, this will set you back about £10. To begin recording, press the red record button on the top of the machine, and begin playback of your source. This allows you to adjust the recording level, to prevent you recording either too loudly or too quietly – look at the volume level at the top of the display, and get it up to the top as far as you can without it going over the end, then press the play button to begin recording. With the digital input you won’t need to adjust the level. You can also set it up in sync, so that whenever the input begins the unit starts to record – very useful if you want to set it to record a concert on radio, you set the stereo to come on at the correct time, and it will automatically start recording when the radio turns on. If you record to the unit digitally, all the tracks are marked for you (if recording from a CD). If you record from the line in or a microphone, each time there is four seconds of silence, it will mark a track. Recording digitally provides excellent sound, and the sound from the line in
or microphone will only be as good as your source, but given a god source, it is excellent reproduction.

Disc editing

You can divide a disc up into tracks, join tracks together, move tracks, name tracks, delete single tracks or the whole disc, and it’s all done via the edit button on this minidisc player. To edit, move the disc to the track you wish to perform the function on, use it and cycle through the edit functions until you find the one you need, and press the enter button. If you want to join tracks together, it automatically adds it to the beginning of the next track, and if you want to move the track, you can choose where it’s going on the disc. The naming function is divided intro three screens – one for capital letters, one for small letters and one for numbers and symbols. You cycle through to find the right letter, once you find it press enter and move onto the next one, and you can chose between different alphabets by pressing the display button. It’s a bit awkward, but it’s awkward on all machines unless you get some kind of keyboard device. When deleting a track, it isn’t gone until you write the table of contents, done by turning the unit off, so if you accidentally delete a track, you can remove the battery and when you turn the unit back on, the track will still be there. That has saved me many a disaster!

Anti shock
The unit has ten seconds of anti shock, which is very effective. Though I don’t run very often, any time I have done so, the unit has kept up, and it’s only by a prolonged period of heavy shaking that I’ve got the disc to stop playing.

Remote control

The remote control isn’t as good as the one on my previous unit – there is no display on this unit, so you can only see information by looking at the main unit. It does have the standard forward/backward skip, play, stop and bass settings. If you have the remote control plug
ged in while recording, you can mark a track as it records by pressing the bass button on the remote control. The remote also has a hold button to stop you pressing buttons accidentally.

I’m very pleased with my unit. It’s a lot more slim line than the last model, and it has the advantage of being able to play standard batteries. It has a very nice wine colour, looks very modern and everyone who sees it is quite impressed by it, so it’s good if you fancy a bit of a pose.

£150 is what I paid for it, but you should be able to get it for slightly less than that these days. I think it’s good value for that, minidiscs are all quite expensive, and I’ve certainly got value out of it for the amount I use it. I transfer Mp3s off the computer, I’m in the process of recording some of my old concert tapes onto minidisc to preserve them, and I listen to it constantly on the move. If you are into music a lot, and you want to record music and listen to it on the move, then I think you couldn’t go much further wrong than get this. The unit has great sound reproduction, especially if you replace the headphones that come in the box.

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