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Sony Hard Drive Recorder for Cars
blues5150 writes "Sony has introduced the Sony MEX-1HD. This is an in-dash CD/Receiver with a 10 giagbyte hardrive built in to rip CD's at 8X speed. It also has an auxilliary input that allows connection of an MP3 player, tape, MD player, and/or an optional Sony plug-and-play XM Satellite Radio tuner. The price is a little steep at $1,499.99, but it's still nice to see a major car audio manufacturer delivering what the public wants."
Kenwood has a similar product, the Music Keg. Their version works like a CD changer with a removable hard drive cartridge.
My other first post is car post.
- Proprietary compression
The unit uses Sony's ATRAC compression which is proprietary and heavy on DRM. Even MP3's which you copy from a memory stick to the unit are converted to ATRAC, resulting in loss.
- No direct PC connectivity
You can't wire up, say, an ethernet jack to this unit as you could with the Empeg, etc... and copy files to it from your computer. No way. You must either sit in your car and rip (at a paltry 8x) every friggin CD you want into the unit, or use a Memory Stick back and forth from your PC to this unit. An utter waste of time, IMHO.
Pioneer Electronics came out with a unit that is extraordinarly similar yet has a larger, easier to navigate menu system... it still, however, suffers from the same shortcomings as the Sony unit. I am not sure what type of compression Pioneer uses, though.
Anyway, my two cents...
i saw this (and the pioneer one) at CES. 10 gigs (unupgradeable) of music that rips from your cd player. unuseable (atrac3) format that you can't take out of the car. the only way to get music on it is by inserting a cd and waiting for it to rip or by magicgate (drm'd) memory sticks (which means my music collection is useless with it). and how do you manage, navigate, control all that music through the stupid headunit interface?
these guys had it right. create playlists on your desktop (mp3's), transfer them to a removeable hard drive via usb, plug that drive into a device that emulates a cd changer in your car. don't even have to change out your headunit. sounds like it does just the opposite of what the sony unit does, and is much more practical. they also make a model specifically for kenwood, so it does look like they're gaining headway in the market.
These are becoming more mainstream.
For instance, Pioneer has one too.
However, I think cd players that play MP3's off CD-R/CD-RW's are a much better deal
They cost LOTS less, they hold "enough" music, and if the media dies, it costs 20 cents to replace it.
Sony doesn't make regionless DVD players. Some of their players can just be hacked quite easily with the right cable and some floating around firmware. Most Pioneer players can be made regionfree in the same way.
The MP3 player here also contains DRM and you can only play MP3s from CD-R(W)s. You can't transfer MP3s to the HDD, you can just rip normal audio CDs to ATRAC3 and keep them on the HDD. If you want you can transfer tracks to a MagicGate Memory stick but after you have transfered a track to the memory stick you can't play it from the HDD. Very likely you can't rip copy-protected CDs.
In the end: nice idea, but it sucks because of the price and DRM.
Jan
>Not unless they have a mobile link to a freeCDDB-type database for the titles -
Who wants 2000 songs all unlabled?
The Pioneer PEH-P900HDD car unit mentioned in other comments has a built-in CDDB (I wonder how they plan to keep it up-to-date, though - does anyone know?). Sony probably has a similar scheme.
>Plus, once you rip them in the car, I doubt it would ever be possible to move them indoors.
The Pioneer "features" a memory stick slot for this purpose. Unfortunately you can only use DRM-crippled "MagicGate" memory sticks for the transfer - gaaaack.
I'd like to replace the MD unit in my car with a HD-based player, but neither the Sony nor the Pioneer unit fits the bill. What I want is to rip at home (including correct song info, not the typo-infested stuff that comes from Gracenote) and transfer the songs to a 10 or 20 gig HD-based unit in the car via CD-RW or a portable USB2/1394 HD. And I won't buy anything featuring DRM, ever.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
People, let's not forget: Sony *IS* the RIAA.
You might find this hard to believe but using this machine in New Zealand would be considered a breach of our copyright laws.
That's because under NZ law, the purchasers of copyrighted music have *no* right whatsoever to copy that music.
That's right -- you can't tape your CDs or vinyl, you can't tape music from the radio and you certainly can't rip CDs to MP3.
The head of Sony Music NZ is also at the front of a local campaign titled "Burn and get Burnt" which is trying to convince consumers not to burn CDs.
So on the one hand we have Sony selling its MD players/recorders that claim to be able to rip CDs to MD, and on the other hand you've got the head of Sony standing firm behind a law that says consumers are not allowed to rip CDs to MD or any other format.
Talk about two-faced!