sfbp

I WANT your problem. I have an NWZ-S754 and it resolutely refuses to be the Japan edition. The japan version is reputed to speak ATRAC instead of (or at least, as well as) the (unwanted) MP3. Your unit looks identical to mine, so perhaps the only thing has been the noise-cancellation and different memory capacity. Please tell me the exact sequence you went through! I know, I will get Japanese menus.... Thanks

Hmmm... I guess time in Europe is only used by armies The system controller on this model is actually a different chip between the US and "Euro" editions. Hope you don't plan to listen to AM on it, as the stations are preset with 9Khz spacing, which is quite annoying - whereas time is fairly simple to alter, you can just reconfigure the Hum in the HumVee. The CA790x has the same problem only worse - they may have never made a US edition at all. FWIW that model has three pins on the master controller DEST1 DEST2 DEST3 allowing the setting for different markets, but there's nothing in the service manual about how they are connected. On the CMT-PX3 (bookshelf) there are also DEST1 DEST2 DEST3 which control (by resistors pulled high or low) a. Number of bands (MW/VHF vs LW/MW/VHF) b. Channel spacing (9 vs 10 kHz on MW, 25/50/100 kHz on FM) c. VHF range. This is 76-90 for Japan, 87 to 108 for elsewhere and could be 76 to 108 for "world" except there was no World version. For cars, you would never need a "world" version unless you are that rare bird who takes their auto on the high seas. Even then it (the bookshelf unit) still uses a physically different "tuner pack", and won't work without the right one. I was lucky to get the replacement to fit into my "Japan-only" model, but on either of the mentioned auto units (680/790) there's probably nothing you can plug in. Better drive that car back to the old world....... To be serious for a moment, you can investigate what happens when you tie pin 9 (DESTSEL) on IC501 to +5V instead of ground - that's how we reconfigured the PX3 which is of the same vintage. But the side effects and assumptions of so doing are of course completely unknown. Stephen

Hi Albert Presumably that's an NH900 (or perhaps an RH910). AFAIK there's no RH900.

make absolutely certain there aren't any "unexpected" .oma files lying on your disk. You should search for them on the whole disk, and then compare to what you know. hang in there!

Glad someone has been listening to me raving on about importing to AAL (or at least has observed the same thing... I only wish I had one of the devices that plays this unmodified - would simplify life, but my new flash walkman doesn't support any ATRAC). I echo Jimma's comments about the WP switch. Welcome to our forums! Stephen

I think I found the AK4524 referred to for the SACD player. Can't find it now, so maybe this is duff gen. Anyway the JA333ES has a different chip (CXD9556AQ) from all the others I surveyed, it looks more complex. Presumably this is the S-TACT. I freely admit I don't really know about DACs and ADCs. However I have been reading that article by R.Daneel I posted a link to, about how most of the Sony decks do this 24-bit analogue input thing ("Wide Bit Stream"). To come back to your original point, there's nothing special about the JB980, from what I can see. Stephen

Looks like 920 uses CXD9767N (predating the S-TACT) 930, 770 and presumably 780 use the same one as 640/940/980. 480 does NOT, preferring something called AK4552VT-E2. Not sure what the difference is. MXD-D400 uses AK4584VQ CMT-PX3 and MXD-D40 and MXD-D5C (all have same MD digital board) use uDA1350AH

I just checked all the relevant service manuals, and can find no trace of anything except this AD/DA chip called an AK4524-TP It seems to be in the 440,640,940,980 and goodness knows how many others. Where is this S-TACT documented, and what is its part number? The cynical side of me wonders whether someone got peddling snake oil here... Stephen FWIW the datasheet for the AK4524 is here

Well, it appears to work, I tried it on my one and only MDCD. This finally suggests a reason why Sony encrypted files after uploading them to SS?

Seems there are very few NetMD decks made/sold in USA/Canada. This puts them at a premium. The JB980 never had a North American model. The MXD-D400 has no NetMD. If you don't mind either fixing the transformer or running on a 110->220 upconverter, the best place to find a 780 or one of the other NetMDs (with TypeS, of course) is the UK (or perhaps France/Germany).

1. you should go right ahead and convert to WAV and use Nero to burn the CDs. WAV means "native" CD format, 44.1kHz 1411 kbps PCM. 2. for importing, make sure the format is set to highest quality (PCM 1411 not HiSP 256) in the settings. 3. Once you imported to SS, you can "throw away" the files (they take up lots of space). There's only one small problem - you lose the metadata. This will have to be re-entered into Nero or whatever wav-burning program you use. If you haven't run into the "slow upload" problem for RH1, be happy. As soon as you connect another (non-RH1) MD unit to the USB, you likely will. It's a solved problem but it will occur unless you do something like what I did a few weeks back and documented here. So far no one has confirmed my findings so it's not stickied. This route is the best possible. You can capture WAV in the computer from optical out but it will take 10x longer to do the upload (that's how I did it before the RH1). Stephen

Hello there and welcome. Sonic Stage tends to cache things. You can suppress some of this behaviour by telling to to delete all temporary files. However when something goes wrong, to be sure you must actually delete the entry from SS database (no need to zap the original MP3 of course!) and re-add the file (after first making sure there is not a bad converted file lying where SS expects to put your conversions - again in the configuration for SS). Hope this helps. Note: there is no point in converting to Atrac then MP3, I think. The MP3 files should exist in SonicStage as themselves. Therein lies another messy thing - some players add metadata to MP3 files, and SonicStage thinks the original file is gone. But check the simple things first.

$250? I (of course) use it in 2 channel mode. It happens to give me good sound on DVD as well as FM and satellite radio, but that's by the by. We agree that it's not worth spending money on high-end MD whose main attribute is a great DAC, I think. But this particular unit got a lot of praise when it first came out.

What's your definition of "Hi-Fi amps"? There's nothing Lo-Fi about my Onkyo. It's head and shoulders above older amps with analog in.

Rinse and repeat. None of that changes what I said. You cannot copy the files. Period. It's possible that QHiMDTransfer will rescue them but it, like SonicStage, is designed to get them from a valid disc. You now have an invalid disc. If they are crucial, you can send to Sony Labs and they charge (last time I heard) about $50-100. The fact of this happening may be an isolated incident, or it may be (more likely) the sign that your adjustments have been on the edge for a while and now it's starting to go over that edge. Just exactly what happened to mine. Took 9 months of struggle before I learned how to adjust it. The other problem is that if you soldier on with it, there's a good chance something will blow. A fellow recently sent me not ONE but TWO units that had (presumably) worked in the recent past. Both blown and beyond repair (I don't have the parts or skill to actually replace the head). Question - when you see "SYSTEM FILE WRITING" how long does it take before a successful conclusion?

You might want to check that you really get optical out from MD (I agree it looks promising). Sony and its licensee Onkyo went out of their way on a number of models to make sure you could only get opti-out when playing the CD. Meantime, I am myself researching ways to add optical out to MD units (it's been done for the MDS-JE480, but I am going to try it for my DHC-MD595 aka CMT-PX3, for example). This might well give you what you want on a D40. Unlike the D400, the D40 does support editing from the PC with PCLink. Both of them have LP2 (and of course LP4 which you probably don't care about) whereas the JVC unit predates the introduction of MDLP. Stephen

Your unit is out of alignment and/or the overwrite head is busted. If you're in the UK perhaps Jim Hoggarth (here) who is an established repairman can help. You have 99.99% for certain lost the contents of that disk. If you can still play other disks, that is a plus. (it may be that you can play some types of disks but not others - there are three types I am thinking of, 80m/Std 80m/HiMD and 1GB). If you can successfully record on any of the above disk types above, then the problem is not the overwrite head. However it may be that you can (now) only record on some of the disk types. In this case you almost certainly need a laser adjustment.

Try searching (mxd-d4,mxd-d40,mxd-d5c) in ebay there's at least 3 there right now

I don't. Sorry I forgot about virtual XP. There's probably a flag saying "CD drive is OK" but I simply don't know where it is. Perhaps running one of those registry watcher utilities might tell you where, you know before and after sort of deal.

1. Forget 3.4. Honestly. Use the special version of 4.3 called "Ultimate" by one of our members (it has nothing to do with which version of Windows Ultimate/Professional/Home) 2. SB so far no one has working. Probably will not. 3. If you are running Windows6/64 (most new computers) then you need the NetMD760 driver from the downloads section. Install this before SonicStage.

Ha ha, I have the opposite problem, I think. I want the Japanese version because it does ATRAC, though my version is English and will only do MP3, WMA and so forth. Unfortunately I have 754 so a direct swap is not possible.

Sigh. Guess I had the picture upside down in my head, but you found it anyway. Well done.

No optical out. There's a recipe for adding it, but that is the main defect.

Hang in there. Quite straightforward, the best description is on page 14 of the NH900 service manual. I think they may have omitted this in some later models because a. they know we don't need to know it or b. we know already if foolish enough to want to tinker. Good Luck.

Still looking for a way to Japanify (or Anglify) my NWZ-S754. To sum up, the promotional literature for Japan and UK suggests the NWZ-S75x series available there are in fact capable of talking to Sonic Stage V (aka X-Application) and thus to Atrac. Can ANYONE out there in UK or Japan tell us of experience with these models (someone just joined today with S755 in comment)???? On the topic of workarounds, I tried converting all ATRAC to 256kbps MP3 and on this unit it actually sounded quite decent. Even my LP4 recordings (which up to now have not survived transcoding of any sort). I haven't done a controlled test to see where things get derailed. But this is the first time MP3 has actually sounded good to me, so presumably Sony researched the conversion and also playback as MP3 quite carefully.