Sony HARLH500 80Gb HDD CD/Deck - plus recommendations please!

Anyone got one of these? What are they like?

Saw one today and am rather tempted. It's a bit smaller than my Sony 300 CD carousel multichanger and much better looking

I'm also looking at an amp to go with this, nothing too fancy, but it must be in silver to match the HDD unit - any recommendations?

Also looking at some speakers, but really want something small but powerful. Can anyone point me in the right direction for these and recommend some?

Thanks

 

sony make a matching amp, It is surround sound Receiver but is currently going out cheap!
It is called the STRLV500 RRP £270, seeling for about £160.
This is an exact style match.
Unit itself is good value for money.
In 125hr mode it is brilliant,
In 1250hr mode it os resonable but obviously good value!

 

Thanks

excuse my ignorance but what 125hr and 1250 hr mode?

 

i saw this at the show, and got the manual from Sony, and after reading it, it seems a little short on features.

 

I'm interested in onw of these, does anyone know if you can just copy MP3s from your PC to the Harl via USB or something or do you have to record the tracks directly onto the HDD from CDs?

 

at the least you would have to convert them into atrac3 first but unfortunately i'm fairly sure the USB is only for titleing etc...

 

you can rip tracks from the Cd directly to the HDD, and it uses ATRAC or no compression.

 

Sounds like a halfway house, so no point for me, I need something that I can put my existing MP3s on and copy from CD to the HDD, possibly into MP3 format, anyhting out there that fits the bill?

 

a PC

 

It looks like you CAN do this - in the manual it says the following:

You also get a USB cable supplied.

 

Posted a new thread before I saw this one, does anyone know if the HARLH500 can record from radio or burn CD's? would like to record radio from the new STSDB900 DAB tuner. Any ideas?

 

It can't burn CD's but it can record in real time. The problem is though, if the onboard disk crashes you've got zippo and have to re-transfer. I like the concept, but I'm not fully convinced about the practical execution. The HAR-LH500 is one of the nicer examples of stuff like this though.


Personally, I like my Squeezebox better. Although it can't record from live sources, I can program in shortcuts to Internet Radio to play back on my stereos (OK, so Internet Radio sounds worse than a badly-tuned SW radio at times but it's useful to me), and play back choons without deferring to Sony's ATRAC format directly from my music server's HDD in a variety of formats... which is of course easy to back up. You do back up your HDD's right?


It should be noted that everything you transfer to the HAR-LH500 gets transcoded into ATRAC. There is no native support for playback of audio for anything other than ATRAC and PCM, so MP3 files are transcoded to ATRAC (which means lossy files get further lossified during the transcoding process).

 

the str-lv500 is £70 at empiredirect now, incidentally.

i've heard the harl500 and whilst its certainly ok sound quality, it certainly wouldn't compare to the sq of say a £300 cd player.

if i were you, i'd look for the Yamaha CDRHD1300 which has a much better sq than the Sony and has a cd burner too. Theres a mk2 version out of it now which means the mk1 should be cheaper. Don't ask me what the difference is though. Its supposed to retail for £600

 

mk1 has 80Gb HDD the mk2 is 120Gb.
The only downside is there is no option of compression.
(The Multi room version comes with a hefty price tag but does allow compression and has alot of extra features that may be useful.)