When a Sony MD deck (pre-MDS-JE520) is in record-pause mode, the disc is spinning and the magnetic head is in contact with it. How long can it safely be left in this state?
[Note that this issue does not arise on portable recorders; in the interest of conserving battery life they do not spin the disc beyond what is necessary for reading and writing data. ] In their IEEE paper on the MD system, Sony writes: A very high durability of the [magnetic head] contact cycle can be achieved, e.g., more than a million passes. Taking the worse case scenario, an MD machine left in record-pause mode at the lead in (i.e. innermost) area of the disc [diameter: 32mm] and running at the highest linear velocity (1.4m/sec) would spin at [1.4/(.032*3.14159) * 60] = 836 rpm. At this speed, 1 million revolutions [passes] would take approx. 20 hours. So, record-pause for several hours is okay. A day or two is probably not. Here’s a tip when recording a CD unattended: put the CD player in repeat-all, this will cause the MD player to record to the end and stop (rather than go into record-pause). You can easily delete the extra tracks later.
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