sfbp

Type-R, yes, you are right if the unit doesn't have a white socket. Type-S, no I don't agree. Still matters on playback. Interestingly many members are coming to the conclusion that optical in is the soundest way to get good recordings. Possibly true but compressing sound properly and downloading works too. The trick is to find out exactly which transcoding steps work, IMO. Cheers

I sent you a PM

NetMD (and PCLK for MCrew) drivers won't work under Windows 7 (or Vista) 64-bits. If you have the Home Premium version, you may as well give up. At the very least you need Professional. This enables a download of the XP compatibility layer (actually a full copy of XP running under MSFT's Virtual PC). Should then be able to install the USB drivers and stuff for what you want to do without problems. Note that it may be possibly to run 32-bits on top of one of the other Virtual machines. But I fear that the problem there is going to be the drivers. It's not clear to me if VMWare or another VM setup will do what you need. So it's probably time to get the upgrade. (Yeah, I know it's a Microsoft plot, heheh). Hope this helps! Welcome to the forums.

You cannot put the M10 in your shirt pocket, Oz.

I just wanted to chime in and say that my newly resurrected CMT-PX3 (HCD-595MD) does level synch with a digital input. I sit and watch it in MCrew and the tracks mostly magically divide themselves. Clean up after a recording is trivial, when a silence in the music became a track mark (most often because of movements when I didn't want to divide the track for a piece), you can just rejoin them (with a couple of mouse clicks). I am unsure if this is some magic property of the Sony-built PCLK-MN10 or of the Bookshelf unit. But this is something I have been looking for many a long year. I feel a review coming on... still a couple of things to resolve though. Stephen

I don't understand. This unit has (according to the manual you posted) a "world band" range, i.e. 76 to 108 MHz which should include both Domestic (Japan) and overseas (eg US, UK) frequencies just fine. Furthermore from reading the specs, I see no mention of ATRAC. So, what I assume is that you have found that the Domestic model in fact supports ATRAC. I just went through trying to modify a Japan-only unit (bookshelf) to use a different tuner block. I thought it would be enough to plug it in, but there are clearly some other differences in the Domestic unit. Caveat emptor. Stephen PS isn't analogue FM getting turned off soon? I read something about both GB and USA recently. Maybe it was only TV but I was wondering about precisely that this morning.

Both the M10 and the SXnn0 line have Bass enhancement. I certainly find with the latter (I don't have the M10) Off, Bass1 and Bass2 are easily sufficient. But at least in the SX750, the MP3 playback doesn't sound as good as the same thing on MD or converted to LPEC/STHQ (the best compressed format on these). This is an unscientific sample, but many people have observed this reasonably generally about MP3. Unfortunately the M10 doesn't have LPEC. The biggest reason not to use the M10 as a simple player is its bigger weight (almost 1 pound). Drop it, and I feel sure there is more likelihood of damage.

Right. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to slide the metal contacts back into the plastic of the door. Takes a bit of patience, but eventually you will see how. This is a necessary step to disassembling this unit. And you have done it by accident Nothing is broken. Trust me.

The metal part is detached too, or just the plastic part?

What exactly is busted? The plastic is *supposed* to detach from the metal part. That's how you get it open.

Tried it - "cannot install with this Windows Language" Could you tell us what the possible benefits to us might be? I have no idea what an X-application might be. Thanks Stephen

Yes, and for some reason it has been stubbornly refusing to show up in "View New Content".

Confirmed. I repeated the observation with the 192kbps stream - it records just fine at LP2.

Just a couple of observations: 1. Don't necessarily trust your average random DVD player to give you good output. 2. The 520 is the base unit for the amazing MDS-W1 which is praised to the skies by audiophile philippeb. Check out that other thread, maybe you would be interested? 3. I really like the next generation after the 520 which is the 440/640/940 range, and all record in MDLP as well as SP. I have the 640. But my 630 (SP only) has done sterling service for a few years recording from vinyl (admittedly I use the analog output of my 1996 kenwood because it has the only decent phono preamp in the house). The 630 and 640 are both Type-R, which is as-good-as-it-gets IMO. Sure the fancy ones may be slightly better, but for what you and I want, I think these 6xx models are plenty good enough. Maybe you can fix the jacks with contact cleaner.... I dunno. Stephen

The point I made (and still subject to verification/proof) is that (maybe): - starting from ATRAC you CAN get losslessly back to ATRAC (via CD quality) - if you start from CD you cannot get losslessly back to CD (via ATRAC), because ATRAC must throw away information in order to compress the data and store it. Clear as mud?

I think the long discussion above basically tries (maybe unsuccessfully) to make the point that the external properties of a device do not necessarily give an infallible guide to its construction. At this juncture I believe the properties Philippe is talking about arise out of some inherent properties of ATRAC rather than from some fundamental trickery done by the Sony engineers in this deck. Stephen

Your price went up again?

If it cannot save them as WAV it sounds like you are getting them into the PC at least. That's the good news! 1. Check you can play back the PCM track on the computer (not the one on the HiMD) 2. Check to see if the file destination for the WAV exists ****AND IS WRITEABLE**** by you and all other users. 3. Try right-clicking the PCM track in the computer (in SS) and specify somewhere else that you KNOW you have write access to, to save it. My guess is you have either run out of room in the destination, or, more likely, got SS in a corner where it isn't ALLOWED to create and update files in the destination directory.

Only way I know is to start each name with a number string. Careful here. If you have 10-99 tracks then a 2-digit string works, if you have 100-999 tracks or more you need 3 digits (leading zeroes). I think you can probably retrieve the playlists but they likely point to entries in the existing database. It's just possible they could be revived using the Backup Tool, but I wouldn't place much hope there. On the whole I suspect you're out of luck. Sorry. If it were me I would try to analyze the database structure by opening those files in Excel 2003. It might be more trouble than it's worth, though.

That's the function we are talking about. Unless you mean cloning of the TOC entry (copying the title), which is indeed possible because it doesn't go through the S/PDIF interface at all.

Finally maybe you're starting to see my point (and it's only a point). Now, please, don't take it as read, I am not a H/W expert either. I am still hoping to get some more answer from my hardware expert friend. Couple more points: 1. See page 52 (of the MDS-W1 service manual). I am not sure what this is but I see some frequency dividers, that seems rather suspiciously like what we are talking about. 2. If I had 2 decks with coax (less sure about optical because I believe it's not so accurate) I could probably rig something that looked like the MDS-W1. Unfortunately I don't. There's also the problem of SCMS, which we KNOW Sony can solve by tweaking the chip the way they want to (see their Pro Decks which use all the same basic hardware). So mine is in essence still a "thought-experiment". But Schrodinger and Heisenberg relied on same or less I wonder if converting one of the CD-MD decks would be possible. I don't see any sign of the divider circuit in there but that maybe because 18-bit oversampling has been routine for CD's forever (and that's all you need, right? 4x is just 2 more bits). So one might be able to clone the idea, just not with x4 speed. Presumably the difference between highspeed and normal on the CD-MD decks is something about this, where you reduce the oversampling (perhaps from 20 to 18?). Stephen PS were it not for your pointing out of the remarkable properties of this unit maybe no one would have ever figured this out.... thank YOU!

OK, maybe it's time for me to get brutal. 1. You can't prove that my previous explanation is wrong 2. You can't point (neither, so far, can anyone else) to something in the hardware showing any physical connection how this "fairy-tale" version can be accomplished. There are plenty of (more, or less, wildly) inaccurate statements in that website, so this would not be an isolated occurrence. Whoever did it (Eric W?) based their information on the best that was available at the time (and there were probably no service manuals when that page was written). 3. The few errors you see may well be related to something like frame completion/roundoff/skipping/padding, as you yourself admit. That's exactly what you would expect with some timing or other errors associated with a digital (coax or optical) transfer. I imagine the 4x can be done by changing the frequency of the clock, correct? 176.4 is not exactly unknown these days, there are plenty of hardware devices that support it. Even in 1998. Stephen

Right. You are saying there are three modes. I see nothing in the hardware that convinces me that more than 2 modes exist. But I have asked a hardware-expert friend this question too. One more point: your statement "ATRAC compression/decompression is asymmetric and lossy" I totally accept. Otherwise you'd be breaking the second third law of Thermodynamics, more information in than out. But I believe the statement "ATRAC decompression/compression is lossless" may well be (and should be) true. Consider Sound C on CD. C->A->B is clearly going to be a lossy process where B is once again on CD. But if you take B and transfer to MD(->D) and back to CD, it should be lossless. Just as A(MD)->E(CD)->F should yield F is identical to A, give or take a few bits (as in your experiment). The key in this case is that you have two identical decks with identical chips and identical encoding characteristics. Stephen

Haven't tried to do anything useful with PM. Yet. But the next thing I think you should do is to go into disk management and UNMOUNT that wretched D: partition. There's absolutely no reason for it to show in normal Windows operation. My guess is SB wants to write to it and there's no room. Yes, probably a bug. Also I am certain that changing or deleting the mount point will do nothing to your ability to actually RUN the recovery partition.

So here's the question: if I can do the same thing by uploading SP to WAV and transforming back to SP, would you believe my assertion about the mathematics of it? At the moment this is a thought-experiment, as there is no software encoder WAV->SP, although there IS a software decoder SP->WAV From what I can see, there is NO magic whatever in the hardware circuitry. And there should be.