Hey Sony!
Here are a few suggestions and ideas for Sony, and other MiniDisc
manufacturers:
- A MacNN's
follow-up setting the record straight that the Sony MZ-R70DPC is
indeed Mac compatible.
- How about offering extended warranties on MiniDisc gear? Since
extended warranty coverage is available for all sorts of other
equipment, its unavailability for MiniDisc does not speak well of
the manufacturers' own beliefs in MD reliability.
- How about making a MiniDisc (really ATRAC) demo CD that has
example tracks of original music followed by tracks of the same music
after processing with ATRAC, so that people could hear for themselves
how little ATRAC affects music quality?
- How about a service (or better yet a web site) where I can select
music from Sony's entire music inventory and have a custom MD (or even
CD) made for me and mailed to my house? Solved! Cductive.com offers this service (albeit
with lesser known bands).
- How about providing read and write access to the raw ATRAC data
on MiniDiscs (using MD Data drives for instance), and providing
software versions of the ATRAC encoder and decoder, as Philips
does for DCC? The artificially imposed firewall between MD data
and MD audio is a useless limitation of the format.
- On portable recorders with large capacity shock memory, how about
a mode where audio is recorded to RAM after the STOP button is
pressed to end a recording, and then dumped to disc when the new MD is
inserted. This way a concert could be recorded with no disc change
interruption! (Note that Sony's MZ-R50 does most of this, allowing
audio to be recorded to RAM while it prepares the freshly inserted
disc for writing). -Georg Holderied
- How about an MD clock radio? Suggested features:
5 preset radio stations,
large snooze bar,
choice of alarms (wake up to RADIO, or ALARM, or MD),
digital radio tuning,
red LED display (not the green backlit LCD display on most Sony & Sharp
models - too bright),
rear speaker jacks (separate speakers for left and right side of the bed -
similar to the Proton alarm clock). -Mike Logan
You can also give a piece of your mind with Sony's
feedback page. (Probably a little more direct than putting
suggestions here, eh?)
