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I don't think so. My suspicion is they only figured out the smarts of compensating for MP3's obvious deficiencies after they shipped their first MD units that had MP3 support. Several technologies get a mention: for example in their more recent stuff, BBE (head units) and DSEE (Sonic Stage) coming to mind. BBE was licensed, which seems to me to suggest they wanted to enhance their offerings to allay criticisms of MP3 support. Judging from the number of models, their head units have a pretty good share of the market. If you look at the dates that people came up with MP3 addons (nothing to do with Sony) I bet many of the popular ones postdate these first MD units with MP3 support. I don't like conspiracy theories.

Sorry, you're not (quite) making sense. SP transfers at about x10, and there is NO WAY that the link would support 15 mbps. Stephen

WRONG. This was the myth until quite recently (for sure, I repeated it) when the group in Germany exploded it. AGAIN WRONG (sorry for shouting), the handlers are buried so deep that it is quite impossible to decode that software. Instead they looked at the data. Try to figure out how much data there would be if it was 1411kbps, and you'll realise it simply couldn't transfer in the time available. Stephen

Close. A CD has (roughly) 750MB data for 80 minutes of music. So that's about 60 seconds for 10 MB (10240kB) or about 170 kB/sec. A bit more for the (serial) overhead. Try it. Where do you live? There are literally dozens. Lowest price I saw currently in UK at under $300 if the guy still has them, here Yes, you are confused. The only software decoder from Sony is hidden deep inside SonicStage versions designed for the RH1. It requires the unit firmware to output MD data direct onto USB, which (we think but are not 100% sure) none of the other units is capable of doing. There exists an open source project that can do this, but ONLY with the RH1 as starting point to generate the data streams. Right now, almost no one has generated and stored any files in this format, which is not of itself a barrier. And which Sony has used first hardware, and later major encryption, to prevent. What's that? You will, I think, find that that is not possible. The only digital OUTput comes straight from the master chip (after decoding from ATRAC to normal S/PDIF. There's an ATRAC ENcoder that is separate in a number of units (not the most recent portables, IIRC), but the decoder is built into the ATRAC chips. You can take a look at any of the schematics. Even the MDS-W1 uses the same chips. The only difference there (and on the combo CD-MD decks) is that the hardware decodes and encodes in real time, so the transfer is "effectively" digital. In reality it's not. Show me where the digital signal is available, and I will believe. That's the method I have used for almost 10 years, and it works. Go ahead and waste your time. In terms of marathons, you might be able to coerce two of the "pro" units into relay-playback so you could automate things a bit. But for that money you can afford an RH1.

Right. He says he wants optical out. That's simply not on the menu. For USB, it's already done with the RH1, of course.

One gets a normal playable CD-quality wav file by recording the optical output. And I am sure OP does. I don't see what we are arguing about. There's no such thing as compressed optical output.

huh? (optical signal coming from the 530 is already 44.1kHz sample rate 1411kbps)

Sorry no, that is misleading. You do NOT get 292kbps in a WAV container (which is all that WAV is). You get 292 expanded up to 1411 khz using ATRAC decoding.

Sounds fine. It's exactly the transcoding which trashes it. My thinking is that what happens is too many bits are used to encode the garbage and not enough for the signal you want to hear. Time to take a look at the frequency response. There's not much at either end of the spectrum. It's possible to compensate for it, a bit, but you will never be satisfied with MP3->WAV. Whereas ATRAC->WAV, even from relatively low bitrates, sounds :balanced: (can't think of a better word).

Exactly right. Atrac3 (MDLP) is supported openly on the PC, provided you can get it decrypted after SonicStage upload. RealNetworks (them that got sued recently over something similar) actually used the ATRAC codecs for a while. Sony provide a tool for that decryption nowadays, for free. Fail to decrypt it and the music won't play on another PC. But they never gave us SP on the PC. Quite deliberately.

Well..... it's not clear from my experiment. I think the overall view is that the LP conversions work fine when the original doesn't have distortion of any kind, but that the codec gets caught up transcoding the distortion as real sound when going to lower bitrates. I tried several things: 1. hispeed CD->MD in combo deck. 2. normal speed ditto ditto. 3. 256K HiSP (from AAL) using Sonic Stage. 4. LP2 "netMD export" (from AAL) using Sonic Forge 9. 3 is the best. 2 is not significantly better than 1. 4 is in between, maybe there are some smarts in there we don't understand. I have seen the same effect trancoding old videotapes. The worse the recording, the higher bitrate you need to make it sound right. Maybe this is the end of the great LP4 debate, too. Stephen

Please re-read my reply. Even if you can do it, you cannot play the result on a PC. Maybe someone can, but you probably can not.

1. Atrac3 IS MDLP, sorry, there's a terminology mistake in your assumptions. 2. You can't. At least not at present. Maybe with the #linux-minidisc software; currently it is known how to do it, but (I think) there is no means of playback of 292K (MDSP) on PC (possibly ffmpeg will work). In addition that new software still requires the MZ-RH1 (see below). 3. If you buy an RH1/M200 and use SS to upload your SP tracks, you will/can get a WAV file, and this is the closest to what you want. 4. IF you buy a second hand unit that works with PC Link (PCLK to the initiated), provided that second hand unit has optical out, you can use MCrew to help you a bit. I am not clear since I still don't have a system with MCrew on it, working. OK? Welcome to the forums.

Each of the different generations seems to use a different means to get from the chip to headphones. Study of the circuit diagrams will probably tell you better than me what to expect. In some cases (early models) there are separate D->A. In the HiMD there are some with digital amps, some with analog amps. To complicate things further different revisions of chips have special output for headphones right on the chip (eg the RH910, which is one of my favourite). The RH1 changes the game again by having special logic for the sound engine (including the dynamic Normalizer). Really I am not the expert. You might get a more intelligent technical comment out of Avrin, but I haven't seen him here for a while. It's purely subjective, but I get the impression that borderline recordings do better on playback when there is only one analog step. So I am playing with an opera that I made a CD of, copied at x4 using combo deck, to LP2. It sounds quite bad in places, but now I have to go back and check if the CD->MD step was the cause..... Starting from distortion you can get anything. Starting from perfect sound you may or may not get distortion. In terms of what to listen to, I know many afficionados listen to percussion instruments carefully. However for my purposes (there's not that much percussion in most classical tracks), I tend to listen to: - solo instruments especially high in the register, such as trumpet, oboe. - sustained passages by 'cello. Make sure there are absolutely no glitches in the long notes. - solo voices especially any passage where the singer is "blastissimo" sustained (eg Pavarotti belting it out) or any very quiet passage high in the soprano voice. - piano either on its own or in chamber music (small group) or in a concerto. Each different. - human speech (mind you this is often bad at source, so be careful before drawing any conclusions). Any sound which is smeared (Lots of violins playing together using vibrato, or a large vocal chorus) there are lots of overtones some of which can sound like distortion and some of which cancel - so that's not really a good test IMO. Now, back to my test - I have the same two models as you. The problem was definitely in the source. I will try and see if it is better with x1 copying using the CD-MD deck. Download from AAL to 256kbps (NH600D) sounds much better on the passage that was causing trouble. As I say it wasn't great to begin with but that's the test, to try something borderline and see what the system (or conversion) does with it. Stephen

Of course not. Especially since I am not part of that process. That's what is meant by "behind the scenes".

Too bad you live in the USA, Chris. http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/New-Sony-Walkman-MZ-RH1-Personal-MiniDisc-Player-/150491657302 In your money that's about $286, almost $100 less. And the guy has 10 of them, all new. Cheers Edit: I remember, you want to sell one of these. Lucky you, they are too expensive in the USA!

The ones I like the best are the GP. Vapex are available and work too, but not sure how well they hold their charge (but see below). There seem to be some problems with NiMH batteries where they need to be reconditioned. So far the only way I have found to wake them up is with my MZ-R91. I am sure there are other units which also charge them well but I don't know which ones.

I will do some listening tests with my NE410 and get back to you. I have a feeling the lowest models may have had some other corners cut, but who knows? The DN430 is a fine piece of equipment. But it and the NE410 both lack wired remote capability. Added: I note the 410 does have the same main chip as the top-of-range 910, meaning it is Type-S. The main defect IMO was the supplied headphones had a jack that was not gold-plated. Right there is probably the single biggest route to a bad listening experience. So far, it sounds nice. But will give it a good day's listening. I'll never forget my iPod-toting son trying the 410 with some classical chamber music and immediately commenting "Holy C**p".

You'd better speak to Avrin about bit-perfect copies. With optical that's not really true. But you will come very close if you don't scale the output (except by powers of 2). Never been an issue for me since I was always wanting to use MD to get from analogue into digital, and would be editing the result of the upload. Certainly the biggest thing with most of this compressed stuff is leaving the bit patterns alone. If you got an LP2 recording, leave it as an LP2 recording, for example.

Right. I have lived in a world of digital output for so long I forgot the headphone output is even something I would mess with. If the Sony MZ-F40 is anything to go by (the Aiwa isn't listed in the equipment browser), then there's no way to switch it to line out. The unit is probably old enough to do a hardware mod for digital out, though. If you want good fidelity and don't mind x1 uploading speed, by far the best is to get a deck that already has optical out, along with a USB sound card with optical in.

higher power does not equal better fidelity. lower power with an extremely good A-D with clean input and good gain may be as good or better.

It's not completely out of the question that NetMD will eventually upload. Behind the scenes there are discussions with Sony, and anything is possible.

The MZ-RH1 really really does upload a bit perfect copy of SP. Sonic Stage insists on converting it to WAV or 256K but the Linux-Minidisc team have shown it's possible to upload (still using RH1) to SP format on the PC. The file extension is ".a3a" IIRC.

yes