MD systems from Japan : The good, the bad and the ugly?

you may have seen a video that i made recently about mini hi-fi's in that video i expressed the opinion that if you were on a budget you didn't mind buying from the used market and you wanted something compact neat simple to use that could play minidisc cassette cds as well as the radio then examples of these from around about the end of the 90s into the early 2000s were definitely worth considering now they were very popular in the uk but of course they were even more popular with a minidisc in them over in japan and just like in the uk a lot of the models from around about that time are ending up on the auction sites now and they can go for very low prices but in this video i want to explain why it might not be as good as it looks at first sight once you add everything up together and you look at some of the cons then you're perhaps better off still buying locally rather than importing at least as far as the uk goes and to prove this point i bought one so we could go through the whole process add it all up and see whether or not it was worth buying after all okay so this is the one that i picked up it cost 5000 yen which at the time converted to 36 pounds 50 there was next to no information on the auction page but all the components were shown powered up in the photo so i thought i'd give it a punt now while i unwrap it let me break down the cost because this is where things start to go downhill rapidly from that initial price of 36 pounds 50 by the time it had made its way to the japanese parcel forwarding service i used the total cost had increased to still very reasonable 56 pounds 28 but then here's where it starts to shoot up mostly with the cost of repackaging and air mailing it to the uk but then when it gets here there's a local tax and a handling fee which resulted in the total cost being 210 pounds 88 so it's no longer a bargain in fact it's the opposite it's more than you'd really want to pay for something like this but let's just put that price in the rear view because there's no going back now it's time to put it together see what i got for my money of course it runs off 100 volts but i'll be plugging it into a step down power transformer fortunately though the power leads on the components could all be daisy chained so i only need to use one power socket now everything powered on fine and as seems to be customary the mini recorder contained a disc i'll see what's on that in a minute the first thing i tried was the cd player and this is also where i hit my first problem well second after the money issue but it didn't recognize any cds so we'll just put that to one side as well i'm going to move on and try the mini disk now with this one i could see that it was playing although no track titles have been entered on this particular disk but i plugged the minidisc component into the receiver section and then plug the headphone output from that into my powered speakers and i was happy to hear that the audio was playing about fine and there were no breakups on it of course i can't play any of this to you because it's copyright and a quick shazam check revealed it to be a copy of an album by yumi nakashima moving on to the radio then and that seemed to be working although i'll need to plug a proper antenna into it if i'm going to pick up anything in here now let's get back to that cd player a bit of experimentation revealed that while it couldn't play any 12 centimeter discs it was able to read and play eight centimeter ones just fine now this is a very curious fault because the table of contents is in the same position on both the small and the large discs it's in the middle they're both read from the inside outwards so the lasers reading the same position on both discs but on one it's able to read it and the other it isn't i tried numerous different discs of course so i decided to take a look inside the drive and i went through all the usual processes cleaning the laser although of course that was irrelevant because it could read the small disc just fine so then i went through the process of cleaning off the grease and then re-greasing everything i knew this was futile though because the laser could access the center of the disc on a small one so it should be able to do the same on a large one so it doesn't seem to have any trouble moving about and as expected none of these things made any difference i then tried it upside down now owners of the original playstation may remember doing this maneuver back in the day when it failed to read discs but it didn't help this time and then i thought well maybe the motor spindle needs a drop of fine oil on it so i tried that i also had a look at the clamp to make sure that it was spinning freely and nothing appeared to be wrong other than it just wouldn't read those 12 centimeter discs and then after much playing around with it while it was spinning up to read the table of contents the part where it always fails i gave the disc a bit of manual help by spinning it faster with my finger and to my surprise that worked it enabled it to read the start of the disc and then from then on it would just play the rest of the disc just fine and then every disc that i put in after that for the next couple of hours or so all worked perfectly i still didn't know what had been going on but it seemed like it was working fine now i just couldn't get the problem to reoccur at all so i put the lid back on so with everything working i moved on to cleaning the components thoroughly there was a prominent scrape on the plastic face here on one side unfortunately it was something that couldn't be cleaned because the surface coating had been scratched off there was also a couple of scratches on the volume knob which couldn't be removed but did clean up a little bit so now it was time to wire it up properly i bought some extra short leads in an attempt to keep the back of the unit as neat and tide it as possible when you look at something like this you can see why those all-in-one systems appeal more to a lot of people if you're going to keep a system together in a neat stack like this all the time well there's very little need to have those individual sections removable i wired it up to some speakers i borrowed from a classic mini system that i'll show you at some point in the future and there you have it a mini system with a cd minidisc and radio [Music] but talking of that cd guess what it immediately went back to its old tricks now this was a few days after i'd got it working i'd been waiting for my cables to arrive and in that intervening time the fault had reappeared but now not only was it that original fault it also decided to develop a new fault it refused to open the disc tray anymore so needless to say i took it back apart and played around with it for a while the door wasn't sticking on anything physically it just seemed to be an electronic issue it was something inside telling it not to open as if i'd been pressing the button whilst the disc was spinning but then when the disc actually stopped it still didn't open i also have a good feeling that the reason the motor couldn't spin the larger discs is because of course they'll weigh a little bit more and therefore that means that it's perhaps not got enough torque for those discs which would suggest that the motor itself is somehow worn out in the end my technical diagnosis for the cd player was that it was just plain knackered so it was time to cut my losses with that we'll ditch the cd component and now it's just a system comprising of a minidisc and a radio okay well that'll do actually looks quite neat like that i was just starting to get used to it and then the mini disk gave out now i've seen them get dirty lasers before and i've cleaned those off but a mecca error i mean what what the heck does that mean but anyway all right who needs a minidisc player anyway let's just have a nice little radio set up there you go but you never guess what or perhaps you will the amp then gave out it started intermittently cutting out completely muting whatever i was listening to whether it was the radio or anything plugged in externally so that was the last component there was nothing left to break perhaps not the best purchase ever so there you go that was a failure from the beginning to the end and the top to the bottom as i was putting the footage together the other day and i hadn't seen it for many months the high five cost was getting smaller as each component failed and it made me think of the monty python black night tis but a scratch and in the end there was nothing left on it that worked properly and as you can imagine it's no longer in my possession so any suggestions as to oh you should try this or you should do that yeah it's gonna be lost i'm afraid because it's not here anymore now i set out to make a video deliberately that was a bit of a failure as far as a idea goes it's not often you'd say that but i had this impression from earlier things i bought from japan that it wouldn't work out favorably economically by the time you'd imported it i just wanted to prove that point so i set out i bought one that looked all right and by the time it got here it was over 200 pounds and in the end nothing on it worked so i kind of proved my point i didn't expect it to go that wrong really at the end and it just shows how good a value for money that uk hi-fi that i bought was that was like 65 pounds it did everything that one did and more besides because it had a cassette deck on it and everything on it worked so you'd think that would have put me off buying anything from japanese auctions like this but it didn't because there's things that you do see over there that you just don't see anywhere else so rather than buy something that you could buy in the uk thinking it'll be cheaper and it isn't get something that you can't get anywhere else and then of course it costs what it costs and that's exactly what i did with this this uh micro hi-fi system you might have seen this briefly in a recent video where i went through some formats i'd received in the post now this it's a plasticky kind of thing it's a little bit smaller than the other one easier to wrap up and i bought this along with a few other things got them all shipped over at the same time so i haven't broken down the price for this separately because it's impossible but one thing that did happen with all this brexit stuff and things i think the duties have changed from uh japan so by the time this was sent to me i didn't have to pay any import duty at all or parcel handling fee so it ended up working out a lot cheaper i'll still say it's probably over a hundred pounds though once i include you know the costs of postage and things like that but certainly nothing like that other one but the reason i got this is because it just looks so odd it was so eye-catching i had to get hold of one just to try it out so let's see how i get on with this one so this one in japan cost 4 44 yen which is just under 29 pounds nowadays and that was the buy now price i mean these things seem to be worth very little nowadays in japan but if you live there you'll be able to buy something that could play cds minidiscs and the radio for a very small amount of money you'll be spoilt for choice it's a very interesting looking object this one i could imagine it being used to form part of a spaceship's console in a low budget sci-fi movie and it's especially eye-catching with the room lights dim like this now there was originally a set of speakers that came with this with a similarly eye-catching design and in fact when i went looking the other day someone was selling one of these with matching speakers for 2000 yen that's 13 pounds or 18 us dollars the minidisc wasn't working though however you might think that it would be worth it for just the cd and the radio but i just want to mention something about that here there is an issue with shipping speakers from japan now it's something i've never tried myself but the intermediary company i use states that speakers are only sent via special parcel services and i've got no idea how much that costs but it sounds expensive now i see this warning at the top of the page for almost all speakers or devices that come with separate or detachable speakers and this website gives a good explanation as to what's going on japan post won't ship speakers internationally the reason is because of the magnets in them they say the speakers with unshielded magnets can affect airplanes electronic devices whilst they're be fine shipping shielded speakers the administration involved in proving that your specific speakers are shielded would make it too complicated it's easier just to assume you can't ship speakers full stop and it seems speakers are shipped mostly by sea as a result and that is why when i bought mine i went looking for one that was being sold without those nice speakers meanwhile over in japan when these came out it was possible to order a variety of different colors of speaker cover and i do think the brown ones do look pretty smart they give the whole thing a kind of 70s retro future aesthetic but anyway getting back to my speakerless system i've connected the 3.5 millimeter light out socket on the back up to my powered speakers you can also connect this up to standard speakers via the spring clip terminals at the bottom however i'm not too sure whether those original speakers would have been more suitable the specs are a little bit confusing in this regard but there is a subwoofer output socket on the back and there are controls for this and a faux surround effect on the front which of course would have no effect on my line level output i'll just quickly mention that on that back panel below the antenna connections is an auxiliary input as well as an optical in which you could use to send a digital source straight to the mini disk but of course that's enough of the usual stuff the reason i got this is because of the way it looked and it's certainly an unusual design the backlit buttons for me add a lot and they can be turned off but it just seems a waste to do this i do love a backlit button there are even some flashing lights that not only reflect the audio level but they also double up to indicate when you fast forward and rewinding the display is nice and clear as well there's lots of information contained on it at once and there are so many buttons on the device including some that are hidden behind a motorized panel that you can completely get by without having to resort to using the remote control panasonic have a habit of putting these motorized panels on their micro hi-fi's you can still get some that do similar things like this today and i very much appreciate it but whilst this thing looks like something from an alternate future as far as the tech goes it's very much from the last century the minidisc for example it's not compatible with mdlp and the cd player it doesn't read cd text and if you're doing a cd to a minidisc copy it could only take place in real time and since no text gets carried across to a recorded minidisc the process of titling up the disks is really quite awkward and takes a considerable amount of time and patience but if you're sitting there thinking well i don't care about that i'm not going to be recording onto minidisc anyway well that's fair enough but perhaps this is more relevant to more people it's the fact that the fm radio only picks up 76 to 90 megahertz now interestingly my radio still had the presets in it that the previous owner had stored and it showed the stations that they could pick up between those frequencies whereas here in the uk where i am the only station that i can pick up with the radio on this is radio 2 which is at 89.9 megahertz so this is definitely something to bear in mind with older japanese radio receivers see what frequency range they cover it's something i always try and check however in this case i wasn't planning on using the fm radio on this thing so it didn't really matter for me this was really all about the unusual eye-catching design and it's certainly got that so overall then more successful than that first system from japan but again it would be pretty hard to be a bigger failure that thing cost 210 pounds and none of it worked at least this is working i wouldn't recommend anyone go ahead and buy one of these when you just look at it for what it is it's quite a basic system i mean it was designed you can see to be quite cheap but of course by the time you've imported it from japan it's no longer a little cheaper system one thing to say about them with these vacuum fluorescent displays when they tend to be on all the time they fade reasonably quickly i had a nice little mini hi-fi system myself and had to get rid of it because the display just faded the rest of it was working but i couldn't see anything on the display after a while because it was always on 24 7 with a clock display on the front luckily this one seems to be okay for the moment but if we just move away from that now so that was system number two you might remember in the mini hi-fi or i should say micro um bookshelf hi-fi that i reviewed the sony one from the uk that still is cost much better value than this because it has a cassette on it but in that video i did mention that over in japan it wasn't uncommon to have a system that was like a boom box that you could have a cassette a cd and a mini disk in they tended to perhaps drop the cassette and just have the minidisc in a lot of them but it was possible to get all three in one device and i set my mind on getting hold of one of those because i thought it'd be a nice thing to have in the corner of the room here so i could play all the formats that i've got within arm's reach in here so let me show you the boom box that i then imported from japan and we'll have a look at that one and see if that offers a reasonable value for money over getting one of these mini systems okay now this one well it was a bit of a gamble because we've got that warning at the top there about the speakers again but i thought i'll just roll the dice and i'll see what happens at least if it all goes horribly wrong i can talk about the experience of trying to import something with speakers from japan so i managed to win the auction for 2400 yen which is just under 16 pounds or 22 us dollars now the reason i went for this specific one was because the listing here was really clear for a change with a good description and nice large photos and it seemed like everything was working unlike so many of these chances who say i don't have a tape for a minidisc or a cd to test this thing with and like they couldn't borrow one from someone for a minute this person showed all the formats being used and there was also a photo of the back of the unit which showed that this particular radio picked up the extended frequency range for fm we should expect for a device of this age it's from 2005 but it's nice to see this information confirmed they even pointed out that the only blemish was on the top of the case and also updated the listing to mention that it had a remote control so i had high confidence in this one now you may think that the parcel forwarding company that i use is expensive and that's most likely because it probably is however i've never had any problems with them they pack things really well and if i've ever had anything sent via them from japan i know that if it was good condition when it was put in the box it'll arrive in exactly the same condition at my house the total cost for this one came to 132 pounds 81 and again no duties to pay this time and whilst that is a significant increase on that original selling price it's still a really fair price for a boombox that's in good condition and can play cd md and cassette i think this must have been amongst the last minidisc capable boomboxes to be launched as it came out in april 2005. i'm happy to say it arrived in perfect condition everything on it works fine i'm glad they found the remote for it too because it's essential with this one for example it's the only way to activate the surround and sound enhancer modes or adjust the bass and the treble and i found that they really do need adjusting too on the default settings out of the box it was all a bit thin but after a bit of tweaking it sounded far better and that remote is also the only way that you could adjust the display and you can alternate between the usual track and title information or in this case a levels display and you can dim or turn off those orange lights you might be wondering what they're for the answer is not a lot or just aesthetics i suppose and you can also have them flash irritatingly to the music i much prefer just to have them lit permanently and it's worth noting that if you do decide to run this thing from the batteries those lights go off so i find that a very good way to know whether i've remembered to turn on my step down power transformer just so i'm not running the batteries down but i think i'm actually pulling it off mains the cd and the cassette located next to each other on the top and as expected that cassette deck is only geared up to record onto type 1 tapes but that's not much of a hardship nowadays when those are the only type of tapes you can buy new and the other stuff is very expensive the tape playback performance well it's adequate i wouldn't say outstanding it scores around 0.12 well and flutter and it runs at about 1.5 fast we're not talking closed loop dual capstan quartz lock performance here but it's just your typical boom box and again the frequency response test revealed uh acceptable if not mind-blowing performance but all in i've got to say i'm perfectly happy listening to my tapes being played back on this machine and whilst it doesn't have auto reverse or track skip functions it does have soft touch controls and i've got no issues with the sound quality and it also has a playback only setting for high position tapes according to the manual that's for both type 2 and type 4. of course as you'd expect by now it comes with another free minidisc and this one contains a copy of the second cd from a two-disc best of knocko compilation from 2006. the minidisc itself is mdlp compatible and a cd can be duplicated at 4 times speed and because the cd player is cd text compatible it transfers those track titles across to the mini disk if they're present but one interesting tidbit that i learned from the manual is that in a slight nod to copyright the ability to record at high speed like this onto a minidisc is limited you're only able to record one cd at high speed every 74 minutes so if for example you copied a whole cd album across to a minidisc at high speed and it took 10 minutes you'd have to wait another 64 minutes before you could go ahead and copy another one at high speed basically it slows down how many copies you can knock out the radio works well and it's got the capacity for storing presets but of course there's no rds or dab radio being this was made for the japanese market only and this device also has a clock in it that you can use for timed recordings as well as for waking you up or activating a sleep timer in places though i've got to say the design of this is a bit of a case of style over function because while the cd and cassette start stop pause buttons are on the top the rest of the controls for these are mingled in with a crescent of small buttons that adorn the front and the volumes hidden in with those as well so the radio tuning buttons for example double as cd track selectors but they're also the fast forward and rewind for the cassette but next to those are the minidisc play pause and stop buttons which are all too easy to press thinking that you're in the cd mode and you'll just press play and then you activate the mini disk player instead it takes a little bit of getting used to but these controls are more besides are also duplicated on the remote in fact the remote is definitely essential to access a number of features that display on the front though it's lovely and clear but it could do with being a few characters longer i feel so it doesn't do as much scrolling and due to the curved plastic panel it's not always possible to read it from an angle of course it runs off 100 volts but if you decide to run it from batteries it takes 10 c cells and apparently those are supposed to power it for about 6 hours if you're playing any of the physical media 7 hours for the radio to the left of here is a 3.5 millimeter mini jack socket for the auxiliary analog input and to bring it a bit more up today i'm plugging this rechargeable bluetooth receiver into this socket i've picked this one up as it's got a flexible plug so that means it can lie flush to the back of the unit it'll also run for 10 hours on a charge it charges via usbc it supports aptx and aptx low latency and hd i'll pop a link to it in the description if you're interested but for me so far it seems to be working just fine power on connected [Music] and whilst there's no optical input on this one around the front you'll find a couple more sockets we've got a headphone output here and a mic in of course for karaoke purposes there's a vocal muting feature to enable you to sing along with pre-recorded music but overall i'm very happy with this one it does exactly what i needed it to do so that's the boombox experience it seemed to work out all right although i've got to say devices like this they're really from the tail end of when i'd want to buy a boombox from by the time this had come out things were really starting to decline in quality especially around the area of the cassette and the cd player as far as the eject mechanisms go and things in the battery compartment a lot of plasticky parts to this but still we're dealing with something that's a heck of a lot better than the vast majority of boom boxes that you can buy nowadays so in summary what have we learnt well probably very little like most of my videos but personally i would suggest that i don't think it's worth getting hold of a mini micro or bookshelf hi-fi from japan it just doesn't work out financially in your favor at least here in the uk when there's already plenty of alternatives that you can get hold of at much better prices when it comes to boom boxes though if you want one that can play back your mini discs as well as your cds and cassettes maybe the japanese auctions are the best place for one of those but you've got to be very careful about getting one that has the right radio frequencies and i'm really not sure about this speaker business i mean these things have got speakers on them why this could be shipped to air freight when other things couldn't maybe they just assumed that well these will have shielded speakers in them being a boom box it would do but then again maybe it was just lucky that it got through and next time if i ordered another one it'd get sent via a ship and cost me an absolute fortune so the whole thing's a bit of a gamble but then again that's all part of the fun isn't it well sometimes it is unless you lose a lot of money in the process but there you go that's my summary of importing a few different audio devices from japan some that worked out some that didn't and it's entirely up to you whether or not you take away any of this advice or you just ignore it all entirely which is probably the better option but anyway that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 355,689

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, Mini HiFi, Hi-Fi, Micro HiFi, Bookshelf HiFi, Audio, Importing, Japan, Yen, Systems, Minidisc, MD, Recorders, Boombox, Bookshelf, Micro System

Id: WtoL2YOKsu0

Length: 27min 44sec (1664 seconds)

Published: Sat May 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/michaelwhyte]

I was thinking of getting a bunch of these Onkyo Mini components, but after seeing this video I am now a little hesitant...

I love Techmoan's channel...

[u/Suppin180]

I actually decided to import a Sony LAM-Z03. I wanted to find a one stop shop for MD recordings. I'm unsure if I've found it, but it works. All told the costs were something around

$28 US for the unit

$5 for the fees (Buyee Basic)

$15 for packaging (they recommended extra protection)

$60 shipping

so somewhere around $108 all in.

It does NetMD, and high speed cd dubbing so overall not too bad. Only really missing HiMD, and I can live without that for now.

[u/77slevin]

Saturday noon ritual: eating pastries and watching Techmoan trying to convince me I need even more Minidisc players.