Well, I’ve owned my little mini-disc recorder for about 6 weeks and I still haven’t figured out why I brought the little beastie! I know that I’ve always wanted one and finally took the plunge a few weeks ago, but when I try and pin down WHY I wanted one or why I finally bought it, I’m a bit stumped. Maybe I’ll be able to tell you when I’ve finished writing this!

Well, Minidisc is a fairly new format for storing and recording and storing music. It was invented by Sony and released onto the market back in 1993. If you’ve never seen a minidisc, they are like little CD’s, about 7cms in diameter and encased in a plastic cover to protect them from dust and the possibility of being scratched. The whole thing looks a bit like like a small 3 1/2” diskette, but infinitely cuter and much trendier, especially if you get the coloured ones that are available!

I know you can also do this onto a CD with the aid of a CD-Writer, but Minidiscs are smaller and less prone to damage, and as mentioned before you can record over anything at anytime without damaging the discs or any of the other content on the disc. Basically they are the ultimate in flexible digital recording.

So with all those different minidisc players and recorders out there, why did I plump for this particular model, the Sony MZ-R500? Well, not already owning a minidisc system I needed on that will record, there’s not much point owning a minidisc player if you’ve got nothing to play on it, and while you can get hold of pre-recorded minidiscs, they are not very widely available and cost a lot of money, so the major use I will get out of the format is from recording my existing music collection (CD’s, MP3’s, cassettes and vinyl) onto blank minidiscs. I plumped for a portable recorder so I could listen to these minidiscs on the move.

First and foremost it had a feature known as MDLP, standing for MiniDisc Long Play. Basically this is a way of digitally compressing your recordings so you can get up to 4 times as much music on a single minidisc. So, on a single 80 minute minidisc you can record up to 320 minutes of music. That’s over 5 hours of tunes on a single disc, pretty impressive don’t you think. With this much storage I’ve managed to get my entire Bluetones collection on one disc. Admittedly they’ve only released 3 albums and around 14 singles, but you’d struggle to get all that on a single cassette! The only problem with MDLP is, like a long-play video, you can’t play a minidisc recorded using MDLP back on a normal minidisc player, you have to use a player capable of reading MDLP discs. For me that’s not much of a problem, as I’ve only got this one minidisc recorder that has MDLP capability, but if you already have a minidisc player and record using this MDLP facility, you’re not going to be able to play it back on your existing system, a minor annoyance but something to consider. The MZ-R500 has four different recording modes
1. Stereo - Normal i.e. 80 minutes recording time
2. LP2 - Double compression i.e 160 minutes recording time
3. LP4 - You guessed it, quadruple compression, 320 minutes recording time
4. Mono - A mono rather than stereo recording, gives 160 minutes recording on each disc.
All these assume you’re using an 80 minutes minidisc (they come in two versions, 74 or 80 minute)

Now this is going to sound a bit shallow, but it also looks pretty cool. I know looks shouldn’t be important, but if I’m spending £150 on a machine I don’t want it looking like a brick. the MZ-R500 comes in three colours, silver, black or blue and I went for the silver model, which looks pretty stylish. The machine is only slightly larger than the size of a blank minidisc, and only weighs 113g (without a battery) so sits quite snugly in a shirt top pocket. The look is slightly spoiled by a bulge to the rear of the machine where the cover for the single AA battery is, but it still looks like a pretty funky little beast.

Oh, and it also comes with an optical cable, pretty useful if you want to do digital recordings, and having one in the box will probably save you around £10. This is another thing to consider when buying a minidisc. To make digital recordings from your hi-fi you need it to have an optical digital out socket, and not all hi-fis have this. I’ve been after a minidisc recorder for some time so ensured my hi-fi had one of these when I bought it. All is not lost if your system doesn’t have one as you can still record from CD’s using a line cable, although it will be an analogue recording and you may lose some sound quality.

So, that’s why I bought this particular model. but I’ve also found out it has loads of other nifty features.

There are a whole heap of things you can do with your recordings. As mentioned before you can erase individual tracks without leaving great gaps in your music, you can even erase the whole disc at the touch of a button, although this can be a very annoying feature if you don’t mean to delete everything, as I found out after three hours of putting together a really great mix tape. Back to the drawing board for that one! You can add and erase track marks at will (and I don’t mean the track marks associated with drug abuse!!!) saving the best for last, you can change the order of tracks so if something was third in the track listing and you wanted to move it to the front, no problem, easily done at the touch of a button. Pretty nifty eh!

Well, that’s pretty comprehensive don’t you think? But after all this description, what do I actually think of the damned thing? Well, I’m very impressed and I don't know why I left it so long to buy a minidisc recorder. The format itself is so flexible, being able to record from so many different sources and also allowing you to edit these recording to your hearts content. The sound quality is excellent and the media (i.e. blank minidiscs) are very reasonably priced.

Specs:-