Re: mz-n707 service manual

On Monday, Dec 30, 2002, at 08:16 Europe/London, gmx wrote:
> has anyone seen this?
> http://www.minidisc.org/manuals/sony/service/sony_MZ-N707_service_
> manual.pdf

We're familiar with it ;)


> there are many settings  which you can change and
> people have reportedly enabled such things and variable speed
> playback and pdm, personal disk memory which remembers individual
> settings for up to 20(?) minidiscs.
> i just thaught i would pass this along, i dont think i have seen any
> mention of this as i have been attempting to keep my self up to date
> via the archive, thanks very much,  i hope that this is found of at
> least of intrest by some,.

We have covered this to some extent before, eg
http://gargoyles.monochromatic.net/pipermail/netmd-dev/2002-November/ 
000817.html
http://gargoyles.monochromatic.net/pipermail/netmd-dev/2002-November/ 
000822.html

(it's mixed up with discussion about other stuff, sorry)

There's nothing in the service manuals to indicate that PatchWriter
can read or write firmware... Just the non-volatile memory (EEPROM)
used for storing the settings and calibrations that you can adjust
via test mode.  In fact, there's no indication of whether the
firmware is "field updatable" at all.

However, I still think that being able to read/write the EEPROM
would be useful (certainly a lot less fiddly than using test mode),
so a couple of weeks back I made an effort to get hold of a copy
of PatchWriter from Sony UK.

I started off with the people who supply replacement manuals, they
didn't really understand what I wanted and passed me to a general
tech support number.  I wasn't very hopeful there, but the guy I spoke
to had access to the service manuals, so when I pointed out the
exact page he figured it out (he had the the older revision of
the MZ-N1 service manual which refers to an "ESI Homepage" :)

He did a little digging and referred me to "Sony Trade Technical"
who I haven't been able to get through to as they have weird
opening hours (10 to 12 and 2 to 4) and I didn't really want
to call them from work.  I'm not hopeful of getting anything
out of them as their answerphone message says something like
"Be sure to have your 6 digit Sony Dealer Number ready", so
I suspect they will refuse to talk to me as I'm not a dealer.

Changing tack, I called a dealer that was registered as being
able to do audio repairs in Sony's directory. He was reasonably
helpful, but the gist of the conversation was that the
software was "dealer only" and there was no way he could
sell it to me (sorry, I forget the details of what he said).

Sooo.... I'll give Sony Trade Technical another try in the
New Year, but I suspect there is no way to legitimately
get hold of this piece of software.  :(

If anyone has any further information, I'd love to hear it.

Pete.