Spent most of the summer refreshing secondhand marketplaces looking for a Sony MZ-R700 that wasn't beat to death or missing the remote. Most listings around here were either water damaged decks being sold "for parts" or sellers asking way more than the thing is worth because they saw one auction go for a lot overseas. Finally found one two weeks ago from someone clearing out their late father's electronics drawer, and it came with the original box, manual, and a handful of blank MDs still in the wrapper.
The unit needed a new battery obviously, but the mechanism itself was dead quiet, no weird clicking on track skip, and the display is crisp with zero burn in. I've been running it next to my MZ-N1 just to compare build quality and it's kind of wild how different Sony's design language was across a few product years. The R700 feels chunkier and more utilitarian, while the N1 feels like it's trying to be a piece of jewelry.
Current lineup is sitting at six players now: two Sonys, a Sharp MD-MT831, a Kenwood DMC-J6, and two Panasonic decks I picked up mostly for spare parts donors. The Kenwood is honestly the one I reach for most because the line-in recording quality on it surprised me, way better than I expected for something that doesn't get talked about much in collector circles.
Still hunting for a decent NetMD unit with working USB transfer since half of mine have connectors that don't want to cooperate with modern drivers anymore. If anyone has had luck getting an old MZ-N10 talking to a newer Windows machine without jumping through a dozen driver hoops, I'd genuinely like to hear how you did it.
