The most common fault I have found on a good number of MD portables from either Sony or Panasonic, is the tiny switches on the circuit board that detect when the door is closed and the one that detects if a battery is inserted. They usually either oxidize or get some of the leaked battery fluid in them, a blast with contact cleaner and a good manual workout usually gets them working again. The player/recorder will not respond or attempt to read the MD if it thinks the disc door is open. Also, I've actually managed to get a few players running off a gumstick by squeezing the positive battery contact's hinge with a pair of needle nose pliers. The brass bushing is typically connected to a post coming off the PCB and sometimes gets loose to the point where it isn't carrying enough current from the battery to allow the unit to function. Or, even if it does function, the battery level indicator will often indicate a low battery when it is in fact fully charged. Lastly, if you are having trouble with your gumstick battery always showing up at 3 or 2 bars out of the 4, despite having cleaned all the contacts and charging your battery multiple times on an external charger, or even charging it inside the unit, try sanding the negative and positive terminals on the battery itself. Nothing too crazy, a light sanding with 600 or 800 grit will do. After sanding, clean the terminals and you most likely will see the battery meter go to full, or at least remain at 3 bars for longer. Pardon the lengthy comment, hope this will help any MD lovers out there keep their machines going. Unless it's a laser or write head issue, most units aren't really so easy to kill with simply age and corroded battery terminals. A bit of work usually brings them back, which is why I adore them.

N505 and N707 are almost the same but the latter has a mic jack. I find that it's often internal corrosion that does the N series in. It's barely noticeable to the naked eye but if you give the lid switch a clean up, that usually helps a lot. Most of these lovely devices are victim to batteries being left in them the day the owner got an iPod for their birthday.

That was really good, I have a couple of MD players to film for my tech Wednesday series for January, thanks for these as they will help me a lot.

Gorgeous device, I hope you can repair the second one too.

Huge amount of corrosion on the battery contact!!! Never seen it shell off like that before.

Might be worth reflowing the battery connection to the pcb. That much corrosion might have made it intermittent. Some light sanding with fine sand paper on the battery spring and positive side could also help. I've had a couple of players behave similarly to your silver one. As I applied pressure to different parts of the body, it would sometimes cut out, or cut in. Pretty satisfying that a big chunk of corrosion just fell off in one piece. :)

If you read this.. a friend handed me a box of things to go thru and decide what to keep or trash, and one of the items is a MZ-N707. The issue is when a disk is inserted, there is a rattle as it is spinning. Sometimes goes away, sometimes is really loud. Could this be a disk issue, or the part that spins the disk? I hate to trash it if it is a simple fix. There are several cameras, unknown cables, chargers, parts for mounts for an action camera, game cables etc, so not sure if any fits the Sony, but if the issue is simple, I will go thru everything and see what fits.

Next time if you see corrosion on contacts, use citric acid or lemon juice to prevent damage from scratching contacts.

Waiting the part 2. I have one, shame blue model, same problem.

i have couple of MD, the most worse problem is they do not work with rechargeable 1.2 volt batteries. so i use ext source or orginal non rechargable AA 1.5 V batteries while testing

Mz n505 board is similar. I find Broked soldering of digital sound amplifier on my 505. Litle pressure upside chip turns normal operate audio.

I think it was the lid switch

Hello! I've got a MZ-NE410 with what looks to be a janked up USB jack. One of the pins looks misaligned. Do you know what kind of USB mini-B jack Sony uses in these players? There look to be several different types and I want to make sure I get the right one.

So do you repair MiniDisk players for customers? I have two, one looks like it is working but no sound, the other one doesn't even power up. 1. Gold MZ-N505 Type R doesn't power up 2. Blue MZ-R70 powers up, no sound. Please contact me for next steps to have them repaired or get you some more spare parts

Hey cbits tech. I have an Mz-n707 the blue one on your pic of the three or four of them. I just can't remember I spoke to you a couple years ago of the website that legitimately can help you plug your minidisc into your computer and acts as windows xp. Is it something I can talk about here? I thought I bookmarked it, guess get back to me thank you

I have the blue model, but it no longer records, what could I do to make it record again?

Hey cbits tech. I want to buy this mds-s38 deck recorder player. Except it doesn't have the remote. I wanna buy the remote separately off eBay: it's an it's an Rm-D7M. do you think those are compatible? They're both of eBay. I'm pretty sure the remote belongs to the next upgraded version of deck recorders which is which is mds-je520. But usually a newer remote can work on an older deck recorder , reverse compatible like. Please get back to me, thank you! 😊