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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...
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
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!