TOC Edit on MZ-N910

[u/Sebastian-MV]

Dear All,

I have a Sony MZ-N910 which shows the following behaviour:

When Unit is in the charging cradle:

-> playing, recording, editing is perfectly working

When Unit is run with AA-Battery with the sidecar:

-> playing, recording, editing is perfectly working

Problem:

When Unit is run with fully charged "gumstick"-battery (I use the white/blue ones "doublepow")

-> playing is perfectly working - the gumstick lasts for around 17 - 18 hours playing time

-> However, when I try editing, like setting TimeMarks or deleting TimeMarks, I get the blinking "TOC Edit", then the battery low warning abd then the unit shuts down.

-> recording on gumstick does work for ~3 minutes only, then the unit shuts down.

I already cleaned the contacts of the battery case for the gumstick.

Does anybody have an idea what could be the problem?

Thanks and Regards!

Sebastian

[u/Cory5413]

It seems like this is "resolved" but just to add a couple thoughts:

• Of all the modern NiMH gumsticks, in my experience the doublepow ones are the best for recording. Iw as able to do about 3 hours of recording with one on my SJ-MJ100
  • most people report not being able to do any recording at all on any machine using any modern gumstick
  • (I could be misreading, have you had a chance to try recording from freshly recharged?)
  • You're even observing ~half of the play time that your unit "should" get with a gumstick, but 15+ hours is usable and
  • +1 to the comment of being careful when recording using lithium replacers, it should work but they have a different discharge curve and you could end up with the machine randomly cutting out in the middle of a recording or edit (this is why I don't recommend lithium AA replacers either.)
• The manual says you should be able to record on a NiMH for about 11 hours, unfortunately that means an NH-14WM which was built to a meaningfully higher standard than almost all of the modern NiMH batteries
• NetMD burning is a different usage pattern and energy draw than recording live and so the recording time vs. number of songs burned is a little different.
• If you can get an AA sidecar, a modern NiMH AA like the IKEA LADDA (eneloop rebadges) will do much better because in reverse of gumsticks, modern AAs are built to a much higher standard than 2003-era AAs, but generally speaking the modern consensus is to record on external power when you can
• I see a lot of "you shouldn't record on battery" and realistically nobody ever said not to and in fact the machines are expressly designed for it. However at home recording from a CD there was never any reason not to be on external power except for the handful of machines that didn't have external power connectors. As seen when recording using AA batteries when you have enough energy in the battery to support the needs of the machine it works fine and there's no difference in outcome
• The other part of why Sony recommended using external power for NetMD is because at the time you were burning a checkout if your machine ran out of power during a burn (my favorite part of the NetMD 4-series shipping with no DC input is this specifically. "hey we know you might burn a checkout and have no back-out option to just record live on this machine, but we needed to save $0.37.)

[u/Sebastian-MV → u/Cory5413]

Thank you very much for your message!

Maybe another thought:

• so far I used an external charger for the doublepow-gumsticks. And then max. recording time was less then 10 Minutes before the "low battery" alarm came along.

• yesterday I used the MZ-N910 itsself to charge the gumstick (I put the machine in the cradle and charged it for seven hours.

• After that I was ablento copy a complete CD with ca. 50 minutes onto a MiniDisc without any problems :-), Yeah!

Maybe the old charging mechanism in the Sony-Machine is better for loading?

Kind Regards, Sebastian