The best affordable MiniDisc recorder.
Written: May 21 '01 (Updated Jun 30 '02)
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Pros: It's super stylish, sounds great, and will turn many heads.
Cons: Does not feature the amazing MDLP. It also makes an annoying processing noise.
The Bottom Line: Though not as powerful as the MZ-R500 or R900, the R91 still holds up on its own and is remarkable.
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| brianchen_2001's Full Review: Sony Walkman MZ-R91 Personal MiniDisc Player |
UPDATE! 6/30/02: The MZ-R91 has become very picky on when it wants to function. Many times it'll just go dead even though the batteries are brand new. This just leads me to the conclusion that after enough beating, the MZ-R91 won't perform as when it was brand new. My advice, just pretend that I rated the durability a 1 and be very careful.
I bought my MZ-R91 in the amazing blue color from the trusted MiniDisc site, MiniDisco.com. It's unbelievably small, sounds great, and has the useful jog dial.
However, no product can be without its flaws. The R91 gives out annoying noise when changing songs. Also, the battery life lasts about a short three hours. Fortunately, the battery is rechargeable without extra equipment.
The R91 is almost identical to the R90 in terms of features. It has a compact, lightweight body, name back, joint text, backlight LCD remote control, date and time place, sampling rate converter, 40-second skip protection, digital synchro recorder, digital recording level control, character input for tilting while recording, and a "one touch eject" mechanism which pops the unit's upper cabinet and ejects the disc, making disc changing simple and easy.
Obviously, the most important part of the R91 is its sound quality. For the most part, it's perfect. If you can get your hands on an audio player that has a digital output, then you can use an optical cable that transfers the audio through a red light (which is really cool!). If you have to use a regular link cable, you'll get good results that sound a lot better than a cassette but nothing close of what a CD is capable of.
The battery life using the NiMH battery lasts about three hours, which isn't too remarkable in comparison to some CD players that can last fifty hours. Using a normal AA battery with an attachable external battery case, the battery life extends to an extra two hours. (That's five hours, for you uneducated folk. :-)
Recording is easy, once you get used to it. If you have a CD player with a digital line out, you can use an optical cable to transfer the audio, and it automatically starts a new track when there is silence for three seconds and knows when to split tracks to the next song. It's actually really cool. If you're planning on doing more of MP3s, you'll need a MP3-to-MD device. I recommend the Xitel MD-Port DG2. It is fully digital with all sounds coming out of your computer and records excellently. It comes with a special type of optical cable to plug into the base. The DG2 uses a USB port.
Unlike MP3 players, MDs record in real-time. If a song is three minutes, it will take three minutes to record. If a song is two minutes and thirty-two seconds, it will take two minutes and thirty-two seconds to record. Many people think it is like CD burning, where the song is sent directly to the CD extremely fast. That's not the case. That's about the only advantage MP3 players have over MD players.
When the unit reads the MiniDisc, it will take several seconds to start a song, unlike a CD player's instant response. Most notably, after you record a song the data save will take at least ten seconds. This really isn't a big deal.
A cool, unique feature the R91 has is the "jog dial." This is a lever of sorts that can be moved up or down which can access a menu or quickly get you to the song of your choice. For example, if you want to go to the 17th song on a disc, you could just hold up on the jog dial, which will quickly scroll up until you get to seventeen. Once there, you can push the jog dial inward, which theoretically works as an "Enter" key.
The R91 also comes with a backlit LCD remote control. Normally, the screen is not lighted, but once you touch a button, a green light is turned on in the back, making it easy to see things in the dark.
A nice thing is the fact that the headphone jack and line out are in the same socket. To change the headphone to the line out, you must access the menu via the jog dial and switch the option. This can seem a bit tedious, but I have no idea why you would actually use the line out in the first place.
Now, don't let the picture of the R91 that Epinions.com has fool you. It really isn't the type of lavender-ish shade that is displayed... it's completely blue and looks incredible. The cosmetics of the R91 are magnesium. The lid is very smooth and feels nice in your hand. Unfortunately, it can scratch fairly easily if you drop it onto gravel. Fortunately, the R91 can take quite the beating, and will continue to live on even if you throw to the ground (though I recommend that you don't).
A giant nitpick I have is that the LCD screen lid doesn't completely cover the LCD area. What this means is that some dust may get through the cracks on the side, and you won't be able to get the dust out. This is nothing big, and you probably won't even notice it unless you specifically look for it, but still; it's irritating.
The headphones that come with the R91, well... they basically suck. They are one of those little bead ones that you stick into your ear. I hate them because they are uncomfortable and the left cord is, for some reason, longer than the right. I recommend you pick up the MDR-G63SL, which are a pair of street-style headphones that look incredible with the blue R91.
The skip protection doesn't seem to work at all. If I jump up and down, it will just stop playing all together. It's not like a CD player, where once it skips it will continue playing in a few seconds. It just turns off. I believe this to be a fault with the battery, but it still is "skip" and it is aggravating.
A lot of people talk of the "labeling of tracks" during recording and with the remote and whatnot. I really can't see why they even bother. First, since the R91 is a Japanese model, it will start with kanji and then go to English after holding down on the jog dial for a few seconds. Also, once it's labeled, the text is shown WAY too large and because of such a small screen size, these large letters have to blurily (is that a word?) scroll across the screen.
Unlike the new models, the R91 does not have MDLP (MiniDisc Long Play). MDLP allows recording 320 minutes on an eighty-minute disc. That's up to five hours on a single disc! Fortunately, a normal disc costs only two dollars, so you can afford a lot of them.
I can guarantee this; if you walk into your school or workplace with the R91, you will turn a lot of heads and get a lot of "What is that?"s. It's pretty cool getting extra attention, but sometimes you want to be alone. Don't worry; soon, MDs and MP3s will become mainstream.
I've owned the R91 for at least a year, and suddenly, it's started to malfunction. For one thing, the forward button acts as the backward button. Then, sometimes, the backward button starts to act as the volume button. Additionally, the jog dial scrolls up once you push in. This seems to happen under extreme heat or cold. But then again, I have dropped it on the ground several times, each one extremely hard and rough.
So why should you go with a MiniDisc and not with an MP3? Portability, ease of switching playlists, cheap price (of discs), and high quality sound. And at only $2 for 74 minutes of audio, it's a great deal. Let's compare that with an MP3's card price.
At Amazon.com, a Viking 128 MB CompactFlash Card costs $100. Let's assume that the music is at an average of three minutes per song. And let's assume that the person has MP3s at 128kbps, which is the standard quality and is about one MB for one minute. So, that means each song is three MBs. How many songs can fit in the Viking memory card? About 42 or 43. That translates to roughly 126 minutes of music. That's not bad. But, for the same $100 dollars, you could get 50 74-minute MiniDiscs. 74 minutes multiplied by 50 is 3,700. Oh, and I should mention, that MiniDiscs store memory in play time, not file size. So, still assuming that the songs are an average of three minutes each, you can hold about 1,233 songs for the same price of 42 or 42 songs. And that's without MDLP!
If you search around hard enough, you can probably find this baby for about $200. If you don't want to save up an extra $150 for the remarkable R900, I suggest you pick this one up. It's the best MD recorder without MDLP, with only some minor flaws.
Specifications
Read Method: Semiconductor Laser
Sampling Rate: 44.1kHz
Audio Compression: ATRAC*
Max Output Level: 5mW + 5mW
Freq. Response: 20-20,000Hz +/-3dB
NH-14WM NiMH Rechargeable Battery
AC Power Adapter/Charger
Headphones
External battery case
Carrying pouch
Dimensions: 78.9 x 18.0 x 72mm
Weight: 110g without batteries (153g with batteries)
*(Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding)
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 340
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Epinions.com ID:
brianchen_2001
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Reviews written: 17
Trusted by: 4 members
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