R55 needs more durability and battery life
Written: Apr 07 '00 (Updated Sep 23 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Small! Good quality input/output, full feature set
Cons: Poor battery life, even with external pack; not durable enough; stiff buttons
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| afeinman's Full Review: Sony Walkman MZ-R55 Personal MiniDisc Player |
About a year ago I decided I wanted a mobile recordable platform. As you
might know from my other reviews, I have RSI, and typing is often rather
painful, and I often want to jot down notes on the road. So I bought the
Sony MZ-R55 portable MD player. It was small, reasonably cheap, recorded
beautiful sound and allowed up to 144 minutes of mono audio -- more than
enough, I thought, for whatever notes I could dream up during the day. A
side benefit would be the availability of music from the MD player if it
looked like I was going to be bored for a while.
So I stuck it in a belt pouch, got a miniature microphone and plugged it
in, and started wearing it around. Everything was going fine until I was
actually going to start recording on it. Then I discovered that, even if
I gave it a pair of nice fresh alkaline AAs in addition to its internal,
the battery life just wasn't up to par. I got about 2 hours of recording
max, and of course any amount of playback lessened this. Now, this might
seem like enough, but if you plan on recording a meeting and then having
enough life to record some random notes during your walk home, it simply
isn't good enough. Yes, I carry around spare batteries, but it's *quite*
intrusive to have to whip out the MD, switch batteries, and restart when
you're in the middle of a meeting or something.
Another thing which I find annoying is the lack of a true 'fast-forward'
feature. Skipping through a long track is wearisome; the advance goes at
about 2-3 times speed, which means for a 50 minute track, it might take,
oh, say, 5 minutes of holding down the FF button to make it to something
in the middle of the track. It should accelerate, like VCRs: slow when I
first press the button, then more rapidly.
The more serious problems I had began when I started bumping into things
while wearing it. It happens. As any portable wearer knows, you will end
up banging the device into something hard eventually. Even protected, in
a metal-reinforced pouch in the belt pack, I've managed to cause damage.
Specifically, about 6 months ago, the unit started randomly, on its own,
going into Record mode. This is pretty annoying, as it drains batteries,
fills up discs you thought were empty, and might cause recording of some
conversation you'd rather *not* have recorded. Then, it stopped working.
At all. I took it back to be serviced, and they informed me that all the
sliders on the bottom of the case were misaligned, and fixed it. However
it has recently been back to similar tricks, turning itself on randomly,
and generally being a pest. The internal battery has ceased to work. The
upshot is, protect it REALLY well, or it seems to get unhappy.
For listening to MDs on the road, it's great. I plug it into my car with
a tape-deck adapter, and have high-quality audio of what I want, until I
run out of batteries. Did I mention the car adapter doesn't work either?
For recording, it's fine, with the above caveats. It's still drastically
more expensive than a tape recorder, but has a lot more features. My own
recommendation would be to buy one only if you need a new gadget, or the
features it offers (easy editing of audio, high quality).
UPDATE: The R55 has gotten on my nerves once too many times, and I'm now
looking to replace it. Its lack of durability makes it useless to me for
portability, and its tendency to drain its own battery ties it to the AC
adaptor. Add to this that when it does kick into Record on its own it'll
overwrite the music already on an unprotected MD, and I have to toss the
R55 in and use it as my home player.
Now I'm looking at the MZ-R900, which allows 320(!) minutes per MD. More
details to follow....
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
afeinman
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Member: Alex Feinman
Location: Boston, MA
Reviews written: 11
Trusted by: 19 members
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