The first thing we noticed about the MZ-N10 was the price. At AU$699, it's at the top end of prices for portable music players -- that kind of money can buy you a 20GB portable hard drive player, for example.
DesignOne of the bigger arguments in the MZ-N10's favour is that it's much smaller and easier on the eye than many of Sony's other MiniDisc players. It measures in at a slimline 78.5 x 13.8 x 73.3mm and 84g bare weight. It's not actually that much larger or heavier than the media it uses, an impressive engineering feat in and of itself.
The NetMD MZ-N10 runs off a rechargeable Lithium Ion battery, but boasts one feature we'd love to see in all MP3 players; the ability to attach an AA battery compartment. This attaches to the base of the unit, and while it looks rather ugly, it's just the thing for when you're left powerless and in need of some musical soothing -- or, in the case of MiniDisc recorders, some recording capabilities.
FeaturesThe MZ-N10 comes with a cabled LCD remote that's actually quite handy; it'll scroll track names and playing times and had little effect on the battery life of the unit in our testing. Sony lists the internal battery of the MZ-N10 as lasting between 17-24 hours, depending on the quality of the material you're playing back; we found a fully charged battery lasted around 20 hours with LP4 material. If you need the additional power, adding the AA battery can boost playback times up to 52 hours; there are few players that can touch the MZ-N10 in this regard, so if you're a constant international traveller with musical leanings, it's a solid option. Performance
The transfer speed of the MZ-N10 is helped along by USB2.0 support -- previous NetMD players were USB1.1, but it's still hindered to a great extent by the actual playback format that Sony's MiniDisc devices use. You can't simply transfer over raw WMA, MP3 or WAV files over to a Minidisc; they must be converted to Sony's ATRAC format. ATRAC has several flavours that correspond to compression rates, so at LP-4, you'll get 320 minutes of playback on an 80 minute Minidisc, while standard play will, to no surprise, give you 80 minutes of mostly uncompressed music. Our gripe with ATRAC is twofold; firstly, it generally takes longer to convert a file to ATRAC than it does to shuffle it onto the player; if you're moving up to 80 files in LP4 format you'll have to wait a while. The MZ-N10 boasts a transfer speed that Sony refers to as 64x, although this has to be checked against the need to do ATRAC conversions for each and every file.
The other gripe that ATRAC introduces is some rudimentary DRM; files must be checked in and out of Sony's SonicStage application, but it's nowhere near foolproof. We were able to shuffle some files between some machines, while others resolutely refused to budge. We deliberately deleted some files without checking them out, and were able to re-transfer them at will. The only thing more irritating than DRM, in our opinion, is DRM that doesn't work very well.
The MZ-N10 is an attractive player with some nice bundled extras, but at its current list price of AU$699 we can't help but feel that other options offer better value.
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hoangsonbs
19/09/2007, 08:53 PM
rating
9/10
Great Sound, cool.
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