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SP, LP2 and LP4 compared to HI-MD modes?

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thomasraden

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1) Don't double post. Edit your previous post.

2)

Hi-LP (64kbps ATRAC3+) equates to LP4 (66kbps ATRAC3)  

Hi-LP 48 (48kbps ATRAC3+) equates to... suck

No where does she say that 64k ATRAC3+ is inferior to LP4.

3) Thank you for policing the forums, but that's our job. If you did my job, Chris wouldn't be happy with me. :happy:

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When I wrote that Hi-LP equates to LP4, I did not mean that it was necessarily identical.

What I meant was that Hi-LP is the Hi-MD replacement for LP4. Although, I'm sure that Hi-LP is superior to LP4 by sheer virtue of the fact that it uses M/S Joint Stereo (lossless) rather than Intensity Stereo (which is very lossy).

Hi-LP (64kbps) doesn't suck its great for portable music, all you really need and in my opinion better than MP3 128bit.

I'd say not. I doubt seriously that ATRAC3+ is twice as efficient as MP3. I'm sure that 64kbps ATRAC3+ sounds better than 64kbps MP3, but I do not think that it sounds better than an encoded track with twice the bandwidth.

However, as is commonly said about audio in general, your mileage may vary.

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To me HI-LP sounds just fine for what it is.  I wouldn't run it through my hi-fi.  I don't know why half the people on this forum buy MD when it gets nothing but complaints about sound quality. :rasp:

It's funny that you specify "I wouldn't run it through my hi-fi"...

The masking principles et al that lossy compression are based on work far better when played over speakers than over earphones/headphones. Even with very low-quality earphones I can hear the artifacting from, say, 128kbps mp3 plain as day.

On the other hand, over a $2,000 portable [active] monitor system, a 128kbps mp3 sounds relatively okay.

And it's not that MD gets nothing but complainst about sound quality; it's that those of us who know better dispute Sony's claims that HiLP 64/48kbps are perfect for normal listening [when to many of us they are the equivalent of nails on a blackboard in terms of their artifacting and colouration].

I am, perhaps, slightly more liberal than aeriyn when it comes to one thing: while I agree with her that basically all modes below LP2 [in terms of bitrate] are basically unacceptable for anything other than radio or voice recording, I am willing to concede that if -you- like what you're hearing, that's all that really matters. To you.

I don't use anything but HiSP for portable music listening, myself. Anything less annoys me, unless the recordings were originally in mono - I'll use LP2 for those.

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Well I thought LP2 was acceptable for listening to music on headphones....nice crisp and clear cymbals, good for jazz and classical.

Now that I've bought a new HiMD recorder, I'm a bit annoyed that Hi-LP is just not good enough and I'll have to use Hi-SP (i.e. 8hrs on a disc instead of 34hrs with Hi-LP which would have been great, especially considering the price of HiMD discs....oh well).

According to SONY, Hi-LP ATRAC3plus 64kbps should be equivalent to LP2 ATRAC3 132kbps. Please see their chart at: http://www.minidisc.org/hi-md_faq.html - about halfway down the page. The dotted lines show the equivalent sound qualities, with the red part to the right being Hi-MD (ATRAC3plus). But this is obviously NOT the case.

I guess there should have been an intermediate level between Hi-SP and Hi-LP, equivalent to ATRAC3 132kps, as was touched upon by aeriyn, which perhaps would have given around 15hrs recording on a disc .....a good all round setting. And this could have been called Hi-LP, in place of the current lower quality Hi-LP setting.

I presume Sony must have thought this through, but still, they're not the best range of HiMD settings.

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^ This is incorrect. If you rip a CD to LP2 in SS, and transfer it to a Hi-MD formatted disc, it will work without additional transcoding.

To get the rip to be in LP2, you should choose Atrac3 as the codec, and 132k as the bitrate. You can choose this by clicking the "Format / Bit Rate" button in the Record a CD page.

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Sounds promising. Any guess as to how much recording time you can get with LP2 on a Hi-MD disc?

I've been put off using SS because the time factor for encoding, and the slowness on my 366MHz PC when using the software in general. Much prefer Simple Burner. But if the above works then I might be prepared to put up with it.

But what if your music is in wav or mp3 to start with? I suppose you could always burn a temporary CD (or use Nero Image Drive).

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I think I've found the answer to my question, on the http://www.minidisc.org/hi-md_faq.html page again.

You can record 16hrs 30min of LP2 on a Hi-MD 1GB disc. Which seems well worth it. Glad I found that out, and I think the extra time converting in SonicStage is the same as if i was using Simple Burner and the MD did the converting (or does Simple Burner do the converting anyway?), so same difference really. Either way you have to wait a bit.

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One thing I have noticed is the difference in quality between SS / SB Hi-LP and NH1 Hi-LP. It is very prenounced.

The real time recording has less sibalence and more clarity. It does not muddy the HF content as much as SS/SB. Sony really needs to fix this problem as Hi-LP is capable of so much more & is proved by doing a realtime transfer.

I still use SS/SB Hi-LP but am slowly moving everything over to realtime & importing into SS

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I normally use a blank disc & let it go overnight, copies all the track marks and then I just need to copy it into SS after naming them.

I have a few already done on disc, just need to put them into SS for later use (I hope)

Oh and for stuff I need quickly or good quality for small space I use LP2 or Hi-SP If I have enough disc space.

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It's funny that you specify "I wouldn't run it through my hi-fi"...

why is it funny, I know what my ears tell me.

The masking principles et al that lossy compression are based on work far better when played over speakers than over earphones/headphones. Even with very low-quality earphones I can hear the artifacting from, say, 128kbps mp3 plain as day.  

On the other hand, over a $2,000 portable [active] monitor system, a 128kbps mp3 sounds relatively okay.

I'm not really that bothered by masking principles. On my hi-fisit just doesn't sound very good and wouldn't want to listen to it for that long. Sounds ok on the computer. Don't bother slating my hi-fi it's pretty good.

And it's not that MD gets nothing but complainst about sound quality; it's that those of us who know better dispute Sony's claims that HiLP 64/48kbps are perfect for normal listening [when to many of us they are the equivalent of nails on a blackboard in terms of their artifacting and colouration].

Fortunately I do know better since I used MD for years and hi-md since it came out. I don't worry about bit rates and stuff like that or spend time comparing to Mp3 although I have compared to CD out of interest.

I am, perhaps, slightly more liberal than aeriyn when it comes to one thing: while I agree with her that basically all modes below LP2 [in terms of bitrate] are basically unacceptable for anything other than radio or voice recording, I am willing to concede that if -you- like what you're hearing, that's all that really matters. To you.

You are totally correct. I don't mind the quality so it doesn't bother me. I have happily listened to 48kbps, although that level really is pushing it a bit far, but has suited me on a couple of occasions. I use it to download whatever I want to listen to off the computer onto MD. The higher bitrate means that I can have more music with a minor drop in quality which doesn't bother me because I'm not worried about it, don't listen for it and just enjoy the music. I will happily listen to the radio so why wouldn't I happily listen to a compressed audio track.

I don't use anything but HiSP for portable music listening, myself. Anything less annoys me, unless the recordings were originally in mono - I'll use LP2 for those.

Don't let it annoy you, try to forget it and ignore the compression, don't analyse it. Put another way a few years ago I was listening to tapes recorded on a £400 sony hi-fi from LPs (not good), didn't bother me then and hi-md sounds much better than that.

What is a shame is that in this day and age why do we even need to compress audio? A bit like landing a man on the moon in 1969, and putting concorde out of service. We are going backward not forward.

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why is it funny, I know what my ears tell me.

It's funny because of the next sentence, which pointed out that the principles by which lossy compression work are better-suited, if not actually purposefully made, for working over speakers rather than headphones. It wasn't anything against your hi-fi.

Don't let it annoy you, try to forget it and ignore the compression, don't analyse it. Put another way a few years ago I was listening to tapes recorded on a £400 sony hi-fi from LPs (not good), didn't bother me then and hi-md sounds much better than that.

A properly-made cassette recording of an LP will have higher dynamic range, better channel separation, better frequency response, &c. compared to a CD ripped directly to 64 or 48kbps atrac3+. I would rather listen to the cassette dub of the LP, myself.

I can't not let it annoy me. Certain kinds of artifacting are very literally like nails on a blackboard for me. Given sufficient exposure, it will actually start to cause me physical pain to listen to music at low bitrates. [note that I also experience physical pain from things like harmonic dissonance - out of tune instruments playing together, and off-key vocals.]

I will specify though: I very rarely listen to music as something in the background. I almost -always- listen with either headphones or over my mini system [hooked up to the computer] from an ideal position for the spaker placement I have. Which means that while I am not constantly analysing what I'm hearing, I am listening in a way that most people simply do not - I listen closely.

I know of very few people who -ever- actually listen this way, including professional musicians, sound engineers, and people with 5,000-album CD collections whom you would think of as probably having a critical ear. But they don't. They enjoy their music in a completely different way than I do. They never notice the subtleties, or have the edits jump out at them.

It's not that I work at hearing the artifacts. It's that they're there, and they annoy me. Period. I can not shut that off. Or at least, I can't shut it off without heavy recreational drug use.

Of course, there is a threshold bitrate for every codec above which the artifacts no longer bother me. Which is why I wish that HiMD / atrac3+ had, say, a 192kbps or even 160kbps mode. For portable use, 256kbps still seems like overkill to me - but the next jump down in quality [LP2] just doesn't cut it for sonically dense/complex material. I think Sony really missed the boat on that one.

Mind you.. Here might be part of their logic as to the bitrates:

With MDLP, you can get 80mins@SP, 160mins@LP2, and 320mins@LP4

..

with HiMD - on a HiMD-formatted standard MD [80min] HiSP gives you 140mins [and 64kbps HiLP gives you 610mins]. So basically - it's like having SP quality with almost-LP2 recording time. Users who are accustomed to LP2 can now have higher-quality audio, just slightly less of it.

Also: given that 1GB discs are supposed to be the chosen media [ha. Hah! HAH! Hahahahahahaha.. yeah.. they'll be commonly available... eventually..], HiSP gives 7:55 recording time, which is a fair amount for one 64mm disc.

In any case - there are those of us who are willing to sacrifice a -little- quality [*not* half the bitrate] in order to get, say, 20% more music on one disc.

Wow. I'm rambling again.

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You tend to do that, dex. :rasp: But at least your rambling is insightful, while mine is just a mess. :laugh:

I just wanted to say, a properly recorded cassette tape on a Dolby S deck from an LP, with good ICs and a good turntable, and a clean LP, can sound much, much better than people tend to think about.

and you're calling me more liberal, while you never listen as background noise? I usually listen in that fashion; while doing something else, and low bitrate encoded tracks STILL annoy me, even while distracted.

Interesting that you pointed out that psychoacoustic principles work better on loudspeakers as opposed to headphones... 128kbps MP3 is almost unlistenable on my Beyerdynamic DT440 cans, but it sounds okay from my crappy PC speakers.

(note that I believe most PC game sound effects and music must also be heavily compressed, because I can't play games with my headphones. the artifacts are too annoying. blink.gif )

Meh, the soldering iron should be hot by now. Time to case up my amp! :grin:

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and you're calling me more liberal, while you never listen as background noise? I usually listen in that fashion; while doing something else, and low bitrate encoded tracks STILL annoy me, even while distracted.

I basically can't. It's how my attention span works; same thing with TV [which is why I don't have a TV, antenna, or cable]. If there's music playing, I tend to get sucked into it to the exclusion of everything else.

Then again, it has been proposed to me that I am at the extremely-high-functioning end of the autism spectrum.

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My listening habits are about 50/50,background and serious listening. I have ask many of people if they just sit down and listen to music doing nothing else, not many do though. I make it a must to do when I have time to. So like aeriyn and dex the lower bit rates drive me crazy. I just got my 510 and 610 about 10 months ago and was amazed at how much difference the type R made. Aeriyn I also own dolby S cassette deck, when recording on to it from a cd to a metal cassette I have trick many of people into thinking they were listening to a cd at the moment. I think minidisc recorded with type R is just a little better in high's than dolby S cassette though. I use lp2 once in a while for old music that I don't listen to very often, but I really don't like on my home or car stereo to much, it's just acceptable! For headphones it's really not that bad. I remember reading somewhere that lp2 is seperate stereo,not joint like lp4 and the himd modes are. With lp4 I think this joint stereo is what really gives it away on home and car stereos. What do you think?

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I previously owned a Sony Dolby S deck and yes it was a very good tape deck esp. with a nice metal tape; that powered cassette draw was a nice touch. Unfortunately or should I say fortunately I think tape has almost completely died off and your average joe bloggs was never likely to spend circa 300 notes on a cassette deck which they then shove in their cheap car stereo. Average mini system tape decks are appalling and inferior even to Hi-LP encoded which is what I was referring to.

As for principles, bit like anything, you can have a great stats sheet which on paper looks wonderful but when you get it out the box it still sounds like shite. Yes on el'cheapo headphones and computer speakers can happily sit and listen. Slip it on the separates and it sounds like pony.

I agree with you that Sony seemed to miss a trick when they failed to fill the void between Hi-SP and Hi-LP, and surely could have been so easy to put an intermediate stage in. Keep guys like you happy :smile:

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With lp4 I think this joint stereo is what really gives it away on home and car stereos. What do you think?

LP2 is indeed true stereo, while LP4 is in fact a very bad method of joint stereo known as Intensity Stereo (which is rather lossy). The Hi-MD modes all use Mid/Side Joint Stereo, which is lossless and does not affect the sound quality (or the stereo separation, afaik).

Keep guys like you happy  :smile:

I'm a girl, btw. :rasp:

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Well, I think LP2 is a reasonable setting that sits between Hi-SP and Hi-LP, and you can get 16h30 on a disc....so I'm happy with it. Just takes ages for Sonic Stage to convert and transfer the tracks.

I agree that Sony should have thought it through. And Hi-LP should have been the actual missing setting, but at a higher bitrate. How can Hi-LP be worse than LP2? Illogical......

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