I have bought this machine and am delighted with its simpliciy of use, its performance and sound quality. It even plays CDs that other players reject due to poor disc surface quality.
However its recording firmware was programmed by a congenital idiot. I discovered the problem while dubbing (can one still use that term with MiniDisc?) Songs of Distant Earth by Mike Oldfield. All the tracks on this CD ellide into one long one with no discernable break in sound. However this unit places a 'hiccup' at each track change. The same is true of classical recordings, such as Beethoven's 5th Symphony between the third and fourth movements.
I spoke to Sharp in the UK about this and the simple-minded support person told me that this is because the medium is digital and that there is nothing that they can do. However you can record between Hi-Fi separates with no problem and you can still have the track numbers correctly recorded. I pointed this out to said 'expert' but it didn't seem to make any difference to her.
Clearly this is a bad oversight. I have to borrow a portable recording unit in order to dub anything without discrete tracks on the source CD. I imagine that at some stage these idiots will correct the program in firmware and release a new model as 'enhanced'. Whether they will do the decent thing and offer a firmware upgrade to we pioneers who bought the first model is a moot point.
Otherwise it's a very good unit.
-David Garfield (London UK)