Product Review

Sony MDS-JE440 MiniDisc Deck

Reviewed by Gary Galo

Sony MDS-JE440 MiniDisc Deck. Sony Electronics, Inc., Consumer Audio Divi- sion, 1 Sony Drive, Park Ridge, NJ 07656. 1-800-222-7669 or (941) 768-7669, FAX (941) 768-7790, www.sel.sony.com. Suggested retail price: $250.

The MDS-JE440 is Sony’s bottom-of-the- line MiniDisc deck (Photo 1). It is intended to be used as a component within a complete home audio system, and not for portable use (for portable field recording, Sony manufactures a complete line of portable MiniDisc recorders with microphone inputs). The MDS-JE440 is styled to match Sony’s CDP-XE400 and XE500 Compact Disc players (reviewed in audioXpress August 2001).

MINIDISC BASICS

PHOTO 1: The Sony MDS-JE440 MiniDisc Deck and supplied remote control. This entry- level component MiniDisc recorder is intended for use with a complete audio system, and matches the styling of Sony’s CDP-XE400 and XE500 CD players.

The MiniDisc has been around for nearly ten years. Sony introduced it in 1992 as a means of making digital recording affordable to the consumer. The MiniDisc has the same sampling rate and bit rate as the Compact Disc. But, the MiniDisc is only 2½″ in diame- ter. In order to achieve the same recording and playing time as the CD, a severe amount of data compression— about 5:1—is used during the recording process.

Sony’s compression system is known as ATRAC, for Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding. In developing the ATRAC system, Sony employed psy- choacoustic principles to determine what types of information loss are the least readily discernible to the human ear. In the early years of the MiniDisc, the format’s sound quality left a great deal to be desired. The MiniDisc seemed like a giant step backwards—at a time when the CD was beginning to sound like music, the MiniDisc was a return to the harsh, edgy, dry sound of early digital audio.

Much has changed since the intro-

duction of the format. Sony has continued to improve the ATRAC sys- tem, and their compression algorithms have evolved to the point where the MiniDisc is now gaining some re- spect, especially among those who need a portable recording system of reasonably high quality. The MDS-JE440 uses Sony’s DSP Type R algorithms, which Sony calls ATRAC 3.

RECORDING

The MiniDisc is a magne-

PHOTO 2: Sony Premium Gold MiniDisc. The media is

to-optical recording for-

only 2½″ in diameter, and the case measures only 2 ¹³₁₆ ⋅

mat using the Sony Mag-

2 ¹¹₁₆″ .

netic Field Modulation

 

system, which uses both heat and mag-

nent impression in the particles in the

netism. During recording, the laser

disc’s recording layer. This system is a

beam heats the recording medium,

significant departure from convention-

while a magnetic field applied to the

al magneto-optical (MO) recorders, as

other side of the disc leaves a perma-

explained in a link on Sony’s website:

74 audioXpress 10/01

www.audioXpress.com