Ease of use- editing minidiscs is much easier on a deck than on any portable. However MDS-JE530 is not the best example, but more about this later. Finally, even the most expensive portables don't have things usually found on most decks, like digital output, good sound level indicator and display, custom functions etc.

Now, about the unit. It feels well built and sturdy, weights 3.4 kg. All the knobs and controls on the front panel are logically positioned and operate smoothly. The MD insert slot is in the center, which I like more than the side slot design found on SHARP decks. The display is large and bright. The level control indicator has 19 cells, not as good as on some tape decks but good enough for me at least. It can even be customized to hold the peak levels. The only bad thing about the display is that you cannot set the deck to scroll continuously the song title during play. Instead, when you want to see the whole song title you should press the scroll button on the remote.

MDS JE-530 comes with all types connections one needs. Switching between them is done easily with the switch on the front panel. There is optical, digital IN and OUT coaxial digital IN and of course analog LINE IN and OUTas well as phones output with level control. No microphone input though, but if you have a portable this is not a big problem. However this may be important for some people.

Talking about features, MDS JE-530 has more than enough. All the usual ones (editing, play modes etc.) plus pitch control, timer, fading in and out, smart space and auto cut(useful when recording from analog sources), digital rec. level control and some customizing possibilities. Perhaps the most useful function is the one allowing you to set the sound level at which a track mark is added. When recording from a noisy analog source, the input level never goes down to - infinity and track marks are not added properly. With this function you can actually set the input level say to -40 dB and the deck will count everything below this level as silence- very useful if you plan to record a lot from LPs and tapes. When dividing and combining tracks, MDS JE-530 offers a very fine control over the position (1/83 of the second I think) which is not bad at all.

The sound quality is pretty good. I did some A-B listening tests against my Technics SL-PG 490 CD player both hooked to an old Kenwood KR 6030 amplifier and could not hear significant difference in quality, and if any I'm sure this is due to the different signal path trough the amp rather than ATRAC loss of quality. I'm planning on getting a digital amplifier and doing more careful tests. In any case, the sound quality is extremely close to the original. Concerning sound artifacts and coding problems (reported by some people) I have had no problems so far. I listen to a lot of electronic body music having complex synth sounds and various noise type effects, all handled perfectly by the DSP type R ATRAC.

Now, the remote control RM-D29M was my biggest disappointment. It is much smaller than on the other 5xx series SONY decks. Titling is much slower since one button holds 3 letters and the cursor has to be moved after each letter by pressing the search button. This makes up to 4 pressing per letter, pain and suffering. I thing (but not sure) that the bigger 520 remote will work on 530 and may search the secondhand market for one. Other than that the remote is OK. Most of the functions can be performed from the remote. If you own SONY CD player, you can control and synchronize the play and recordings from the remote.

Finally a word on the last track divide problem reported by several people (see user reported problems on minidisc.org). My deck (serial # starts with 55) does not have this problem. Either Sony has fixed the bug or I've been just lucky.

In one sentence, MDS-JE530 is feature packed MD deck with great sound and reasonably priced, shame about the remote though. I bought this deck summer 1999, and it was my first Minidisc deck ever. It is still being sold. It looks okay, especially the silver version. The rear however is not so nice finished, some plastic parts aren't even painted. But since you normally can't see this, it doesn't matter much. The deck comes with an optical cable supplied, so you can start right away making digital copies (that is, if you've got a disc). The new remote control feels good but doesn't allow you to title songs very fast (the old remotes did since they had a button for every character). The deck has, besides normal analogue in- and outputs, 1 optical input, 1 optical output and a coaxial input. This is more than sufficient for most people. In comparisation to the old 520 deck, this one uses 24 bit converters and ATRAC type "R". This seems to be ATRAC 4.5 with "intelligent bit recalibration", but it isn't explained in the manual. Speaking of the manual, I think this manual's quite good. Unlike some manuals, this one can really explain you something .

So how does it perform? Very good actually. Digital recordings sound nice (if not very, very good), although I'm not that positive about recordings made analogue (but they are still ok). But if you want to record analogue you should buy a tape deck. Don't think newer ATRAC versions can get you a better sound, it's likely you won't hear it. You should have an expensive cd-player and headphones to be able to hear the difference between the recordings made with this deck and your original recording.

The deck allows you to record from cd the easy way, using synchro recording and automatic indexing. You can use faders, adjust the recording level (lower it or boost it), use "Smart Space" and so on. When recording from cd, you should always lower the recording level to about -1.0 dB or so. That's because most Cd's nowadays are clipped and the ATRAC can slightly raise or lower the amplitudes of some frequencies, causing more clipping when you don't lower the level. It also has a lot of different features that you'll never use such as the "Pitch Control". It even has a sleep timer!

I can't think of many things this deck lacks, the sound quality is fine, it records excellent, it has a fine display (which can show 2 lines of text at a time), the buttons are all well placed (if you can handle a cd-player this deck shouldn't be a problem to you) and it's a great all-rounder. Well okay, there are some disavantages: you can easily get scratches in the painting of the casing, you can't easily hook up the deck to a PC to easily title tracks (well, you can but it'll cost you over $ 100) , it takes a little while getting used to all those functions listed in the menus, and the jog dial is not that precise (but it is speed-sensitive!), but these are all small disavantages. This is a great buy, not that expensive (I think about $ 280), and this product will give you years of pleasure. The 530's big brother (the 930) has been awarded multiple times in magazine's like What Hifi.

Nicy things about the 530 not mentioned in the manual: 1) Pull out plug, push AMS, put plug back in, release AMS. You are now in the hidden menu, enabling you to do things you normally can't do (like testing the settings of your deck, even checking the temperature!). 2) Pull out plug, push AMS & Record, put plug back in, release buttons. You are now in the full test mode.