René Rebe

A few days ago the Sun T1000 machine arrived that we ordered for a 60 day trial’n buy run. Historically we already worked with and supplied Sun UltraSPARC machines and even are one of the few that support this platform in our own Linux distribution (T2 SDE).

Of course, this massively parallel machines are just impressive. With its 6 or 8 cores, each with 4 threads of execution you get 24 or 32 processes or threads running in parallel on your machine. Though only when they do integer computations, since all those threads share the same and only FPU (Floating Point Unit). Though usually this is not too much of an issue in classic thruput computing such as Web, File or Database serving or custom scientific applications where you have the choise how to implement computations. The only thing that needs to make sure is to have enough processes or threads running to saturate the machine. Just one big binary without any thread will only give you 1/24 to 1/32 of the machines power, but saturated the machine performs like 24 to 32 GHz machine that you would need from competors to do the job!

And now the suprise for people that do not yet have read the T1 CPU (codenamed Niagara) SPECs: The CPU just consumes less than 80W and the whole machine is said to require less than 100W.

So it is nice to see that Sun is again ahead of companies like AMD or Intel that just ship 2 core CPUs today, plan for just 4 cores the next year and we have bare computational power to choose from.

My first contact with the Sony Mini-Disc format was in the mid 90th. At that time I have been a bit more active palying guitar and bass and the Mini-Disc was a perfect medium to not only record some jam sessions or concerts but also carry the tiny player with other pre-recorded music around when others either had big, skipping CD-players or grinding and noisy analog tape walkmans. Despite a Yamaha MD HIFI deck I have the portable Sharp MD recorder. The later, now nearly 10 years old, is still in perfectly function after it was in use for 3 years when I was an trainee, for music yam sessions, I even borrowed it to a friend who studied composing and it made it to Ireland on a three week bicycle tour.

I never brought one of those MP3 player, whether iPod or other low-quality incarnations, because the ability to record is too handy and those mp3 player can not form the base for a music collection. At some time the hard-disc, or even sooner the flash, is filled up. MDs can be collected nicely among the CDs - and hundreds of them.

Now that Sony released a High density, Hi-MD format, including the possiblity to store arbitrary data as well as inject MP3 tracks cought my attention. With the announcement of the MZ-RH 1 MD-Walkman it was the time to give that promissing product a try:

The MZ-RH1 comes with quite a lot of paper work, the left side bunch are manuals in several languages, the cable remote, usb cable, and since the device has only a USB connector - not a dedicated power-supply plug, a power supply with a usb connector to charge the battery independant of a computer.

Overall the device looks very stylish and professional, especially the jog-wheel with play and record button and the OLED display. Compared with my former Sharp recorder it is much thiner and way lighter.

Usability wise it is as intuitive as usual, the jog wheel is used for navigation and fast forward / rewind in tracks, and as usual for MD recorders you can move, split, combine tracks on the fly, edit titles and so on.

The cable remote is a bit disappointing, it looks a bit cheap, plastic-wise, and lacks viewing angle. Also just because of this limitation I had to notice the device display does not allow to show the track names - maybe because the device has two seperate displays and some Sony engineer decided the gab inbetween would be too big for scrolling text …

With a Hi-MD formated disc the recorder appears as normal USB storage device and thus is accessable from any OS: Linux, Mac OS, Windows to name a few. However the old, classic MDs are only accessable from within the Sony SonicStage software - not even from the Mac software shipped with the package. Also SonicStage is not able to play the old MD tracks in real-time, instead the recorder will play the track out of the headphone / line-out if requested to play in the software, however it is still possible to copy those tracks back to the PC.

To upload audio tracks, be that MP3 or ATRAC files, the device should be able to play, meta data updates in special files of the Hi-MD medium are required, just drag’n droping the files is not enough. SonicStage is required to register the files properly - not even the Hi-MD Transfer for Mac allows this, however it is just a matter of time until some open source developer will figure out how to update the meta data accordingly - as it was case for the Apple iPod as well …

All in all it is a awesome portable recorder that should be quite a pleasure to use for the next years, the musc can be collected on a shelf while the 1GB media is still large enough to allow a current “personal best of” to be carried around as one would do with other MP3 players.

The quality of the headphone / line-out is expectional perfect, and a menu option allows raising the level to the standard line level. I still wonder why in contrast the Sony walkman “cell phones” produce clicks and clacks between some mp3 files that make your ear wanna die with a far from linear output frequency spectrum.

The use as ordinary data storage is a much welcomed extra that might, or should suspend my 250MB Zip - random access CD / DVD media is still not widespread either. However the Sony DRM is really a drawback, especially with not even Mac software to transfer music onto the player. (I need to figure out the meta-data to up and download the tracks under Linux, however a first glimpse idicate that will not be that easy …)

Update:
The self discharge is quite high. When it is on stand-by for about a week the Li-Ion battery is about empty.