Latest, Greatest Minidisc Recorder Now Available and In Demand

Sony MZ-RH1Without fanfare or any real announcement from Sony, the MZ-RH1 minidisc recorder is now shipping from a variety of sources in North America. This recorder, which may be the last new model ever produced, finally fulfills most of the promise of the minidisc format… a mere fourteen years after MD was first introduced.

Already it looks like most retailers’ initial stocks of the recorder sold out in about a day. Yesterday I watched Minidisco’s online store go from “in stock” to “out of stock,” to “accepting pre-orders for June 29 shipping,” all in about an hour. I grabbed one late in the afternoon from OneCall, whose free 3-day shipping offset the slightly higher price. Just a few hours later they were out of stock, too.

They’ve started showing up on Ebay, too, with plenty of price gouging on the silver colored model, since only the black one is available in the Americas right now.

I sprung for an MZ-RH1 primarily because it has the killer feature of letting you upload audio from all minidiscs directly to you PC, regardless of how they were recorded. Up to now, the Hi-MD standard only allows you to upload any audio recorded using Hi-MD mode, which is now just a couple of years old. But I still have hundreds of hours of audio I’ve produced and recorded in regular (SP) and MDLP modes on older recorders that up to now I’ve had to transfer in real-time.

Now I look forward to more speedily transferring my minidisc archives to my PC so I can then archive the raw audio onto CDs and DVDs. I also plan to make available a lot of the mediageekish audio from the pre-mediageek days.

My new recorder is due to arrive on Thursday, and I will post a review as soon as I’ve had a chance to put it through its paces.

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  1. mediageek » Minidisc Arrival - June 28, 2006

    […] My new Sony MZ-RH1 (oh, how I wish electronics could have actual names, rather than arcane model numbers) arrived this afternoon, one day early. I went home to make sure it didn’t sit out on the front step unattended for half the day. […]

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