Sony Portable Mini-Disc Player/Recorder (MZ-G750DPC)
Versatile, compact, and a joy to use
Minidisc continues to be the Rodney Dangerfield of recording media, i.e., it &quot;don't get no respect.&quot;  This is too bad; after all, minidiscs are small, exhibit terrific sound fidelity (it's unlikely that the average person can distinguish an MD recording from one made on a CD), and now can be stretched to record as much as five hours of material on a single disc.  The newest recorder/players are so tiny they can fit easily into a shirt pocket.  Minidiscs can be used to record music from cd's or MP3's, or can be used with a microphone to record lectures and conversations.  <br />Incredible! Yet this amazing technology continues to languish as an afterthought within the U.S. electronics market as a whole, largely because of the domination of the commercial market by cd's and the existence of alternative types of players for MP3's (e.g., Cd/MP3 players and single-use MP3 players).  Because people (including me) generally buy their music in the form of commercial cd's, using minidiscs requires some additional laborious steps that apparently discourage most people.  You have to obtain a cd player with an &quot;optical out&quot;, you have to use an optical connector (one is included with this Sony unit, by the way) to deliver the music from the cd to the md player, and if you want to be able to keep track of what's what on your md's, you have to devise a system for labeling your md's (this is actually kind of a fun activity, but I can see how some people might consider it simply &quot;more work&quot;).  <br />This is all too bad, since minidisc units like the MZ-G750DPC are amazing little pieces of technology that are fun to use and amazingly versatile.  This is my second MD player, my first being a previous Sony model, the MZ-R55.  This older unit was fine in most ways, but had one annoying flaw in that its battery capacity was a mere three hours or so unless one attached an external AA battery holder. And besides, it required an expensive Ni-MH &quot;gumpack&quot; rechargable battery.  Newer units like the MZ-G750DPC, however, can play for six hours or more using a single rechargeable AA battery (these are cheap and easy to find), and will perform far longer using an ordinary AA alkaline battery.  <br />Other improvements include the advent of the new MDLP technology, whereby the recording time of a minidisc can be either doubled or quadrupled.  At 2x, there is virtually no discernable falloff in audio quality, but I would recommend the 4x setting only for the recording of voices and other non-music sources.  This unit also comes with a small device for downloading music in MP3 form from the Internet. In light of the struggles that Sony, Sharp, and other md manufacturers have experienced in promoting minidisc in this country (it is far more popular in Japan and Europe), the industry has been actively promoting the concept of md as a device for storing and playing MP3 files. <br />The reason I bought this particular unit is that it comes with a remote control unit that includes an am/fm tuner of reasonably high quality.  This renders the MZ-G750DPC even more versatile, a virtual all-in-one portable audio entertainment center.<br />The only reservation I would express about the unit is that because of its very versatility, it can be complicated to use.  There are a LOT of commands and options, and so a purchaser had better not lose the instruction manual!  Fortunately, the manual is decently written and illustrated.  <br />Let's see: it has &quot;G protection&quot; so that it will skip only if you are running really, really fast; it has the capacity to allow users to insert introductory scrolling text onto their recordings (this is indeed laborious, but it can be done); it allows the insertion of track marks onto recordings that arrive as one long track (useful for dj mix sets or many Internet concert broadcasts); it comes with an AC adapter both for plug-in play and for recharging the battery-- and it is very, very cool-looking, to boot.  <br />All in all, this is a unit that should appeal to all music lover/gadgeteers.  I think it's terrific.