sfbp

I don't have a laser power meter. But I think that settings 0211 through 0216 (pages 18 and 19 of the service manual, available on this site) have to be the problem. That's likely all Sony will do for its $99, change the settings. Avrin had reported that the laser power for single layer disks (ie non-1GB) had been the difficulty (too high) on his RH1. We appear to have the opposite problem, 80m works fine but the 1GB (HiMD3 in Sony speak) are failing. Ir could be too low or too high. Note: the M100 is the same as the RH10, the M10 is the same as the RH910. All came out about the same time, but yours has an OLED display, mine a common-or-garden LCD.

Hold your horses, James. I am having the same problem with my apparently MINT RH910. Let's see if it can be solved. The RH910 is the same as the M10 but not so different from the M100. More later. OK - here's what I have observed. Simply doing optical in to Hi-MD. Two different scenarios, same data rate 256kbps (Hi-SP). The RH910 was plugged into the standard Sony 3V adapter during recording, so we can be reasonably sure this isn't a power supply problem. In the first case (which I repeated with two different 1GB disks) I found that the recording had dropouts in it, and whilst it could be partially played, it absolutely refused to upload anything I had recorded except the very shortest track (2-3 minutes). In addition, when "System File Writing" instead of taking 10-20 seconds (AFTER the "data save" phase) it took 2-5 minutes, ie forever! The resulting disk(s) could not be uploaded using ANY machine I possess (I tried RH1, NH700 and NH900 just to be thorough). Several times I got the famous "Format Disk" error, which I sidestepped by removing the disk from the unit immediately. Upload using the same RH910 from a PCM microphone recording of something previously recorded on an RH1 worked just fine. It was rather suspiciously slow, though. In the second case, I merely substituted a blank 80m disk and recorded on that using the RH910 at Hi-SP also. That uploaded without problems. So what I am thinking is the disk is not being written properly when recording. Presumably this is a matter of increasing the laser power. (or could it indeed be decreasing it?!?!?) Avrin mentioned performing something like this adjustment with his RH1, many moons ago; I wonder if he or someone else could give us a clue. If I succeed, you can then try it too. Stephen

Dubbed or subtitles? It had me right on the edge of my seat.

Seems like I had the same perception of LP4. But there are two things which may change your mind, 1. Playback with Type-S (the recording is still Type-R so Type-S enhances playback) chip. Check your deck or portable. 2. Playback from optical out into a good receiver which has optical inputs. You may be surprised. The other thing which will also surprise you is that HiMD machines generally do a great job of playing back LP2 and LP4, either on true NetMD disks, or on HiMD formatted disks where the MDLP has been transferred there from the computer.

Should be identical. I may have claimed that optical out was better. I'm no longer convinced that it is, and really the major obstacle to USB transfer was a driver issue that slowed down the process to the same speed as playback!!! That issue has now been solved, and the RH1 no longer wears out its moving parts at 10x the rate it should. I have looked at the code in ffmpeg, and (to my inexpert eye) it's quite simple. The interesting part we now know is that the RH1 does send SP (or MDLP) to the computer directly. Sonic Stage immediately converts it (to whatever) and the result of that conversion may play a role in things being inferior. ie. if you have the import set to 256k then you may lose some information since you are doing lossy->lossy, by then generating WAV. However if the import is set to PCM (WAV) 1411k then it will do the same job as ffmpeg. The one difference is that ffmpeg will actually keep a bit perfect copy of the SP on the PC's hard disk, which was always claimed to be impossible. Of course there's nothing much to play it with except ffmpeg Clear as mud?

I thought that is what he was attempting to do, Avrin. And saying that it worked at only x2. Or are you implying that the conversion each time is hampering the effort? I've never cared about true formatting, but somewhere I recall seeing a format function. Can't find it, though.

Ah, you need to catch up on the whole RH1 fast transfer issue. There's a mega thread on it. Turns out that if the USB system EVER saw one of the other portables (in NetMD mode) the transfers from (and, presumably, to) the RH1 are crippled to about x1 - instead of between x8 and x 30 depending on source and bitrate. So having decided you want to use the RH1, now you have to clean up windows. Life's a *()_ isn't it? (all the stuff they quote relates to HiMD mode, I think, which simply doesn't apply in your case).

I think only the MZ-RH1 has USB 2.0 interface, and therefore high speed.

To be fair, the $2.50 was probably the automatic amount to increase his bid to beat yours, placed by Ebay itself. It could be his bid was $50 or $100 more - would you have been willing to go to THAT level? Don't torment yourself, there are deals, and you will get them in due course. Stephen

There's a decent-looking N710 on right now....

To me the main thing I look for is sheer music quality, which ATRAC seems to deliver. I have yet to have a satisfying aural experience with any form of MP3, the bit rate not making that much (if any) difference to the "inequities" in the sound I hear. It's just about ok for recorded speech and even then sounds kindof "tinny" whereas the ATRAC codecs seem to be just about perfect for most music (I don't listen to pop at all) even at 66kbps (I don't have extensive experience with 64kbps but I understand it should be as good or better). MP3 is convenient when the range of bitrates enables things that simply don't resolve, spacewise, to the media I want (excluding a hard disk which has all sorts of other problems, in my view). Another reason for settling for AtracCD is that noone will steal them from my car, I would think. I had $400 worth of real CD's pinched before I started along this road by getting the MD changer. They would have fitted on 3 or 4 Atrac CD's at the most, which would have been easily re-generated. Like many other folks I don't want a portable player in the car, simply because it's one more thing to have to keep track of as I get in and out of a car... and one more thing to be stolen (if I leave it there). Not to mention all the hands-free debate that is going on right now, as MVD's rightly toughen up on what you are allowed to do safely in a vehicle when moving.

Thank you so much for checking. When I sit down to think about it I must conclude that a PC running Sonic Stage is probably more powerful, then. Especially with large, offboard hard drives on Firewire (or ESATA) and the .oma files decrypted and accessible to the whole LAN. Now it remains to be seen if I will try to put an existing machine up there next to my MD deck, or simply buy one of these tiny-footprint jobs they are selling at the store - the guy was claiming it has a standard motherboard with a couple of PCI slots, too. Everyone has told me the same thing... AtracCD is a route to nowhere. I enjoy it my car, though. Stephen

FYI another unit that does AtracCD is the CDX-GT705DX. Like the others it does WMA and MP3 but unlike the 510/610/710 it does NOT do AAC. Unlike the 510/610/710 it does NOT have a 3.5mm jack for AUX in, but it does do AUX in via a couple of RCA connectors at the back, so one would have to bring those out with a dangling cable. They all have Unilink for changer-controller and/or satellite.

To be fair, the only time I have seen the exact set of circumstances you describe is when the overwrite head is no longer working. If so, getting mad at something Sony did (that doesn't affect you) won't help much as the recording was stillborn regardless. Suggest you exercise it a bit and see whether you can perform normal editing and sound track creation operations on the unit (using a different disk as it's quite possible your recording could be recovered). The non-transportability of ATRAC files was designed in from the beginning. Since version 4 of SonicStage there has been a way out, however, which is well known on the forum here - the File Conversion Utility. Until this happened along I never wanted anything except WAV files anyway as my goal at the time was to edit with sound processing software - and generally WAV was the only format that I could do this with. I personally weigh the excellence of the sound and convenience of the package against the nonsense of Sonic Stage and all the futile protection they employed.

Sadly there is no good way for you to do an exact copy of the disk. Don't attempt it, the result will be worthless and you may change the disk irretrievably. If the disk was recorded in any HiMD format you are most likely out of luck (though Sony Media Services might be in a position to help, for a fee). If it's standard format disk (80m disk and SP, LP2 or LP4) then one of us can help via TOC cloning. However it's clearly not SP

Service mode on the minidisc consists of poking apparently arbitrary numbers into NVram. This could render the unit completely inoperable, so is not to be undertaken without LOTS of research and great care. I think Avrin probably has the necessary knowledge.

try PMing user Michaels63 here

It's probably an adjustment issue. And... I don't care about you filling up 80m disks with PCM, what I would like to know is can you fill up a 1GB disk with 256kbps (HiSP) songs?

I mean that there is a setting for the LP in the NVRAM. Cool your heels, and I am sure the right advice will be forthcoming. Furthermore I believe there are separate settings for the 1GB disks and the regular disks, because the 1GB use a unique technology (DWDD) that isn't needed by the others. It makes sense to me that some parts of the disk might require more power than other parts (minor variations but enough to screw things up). All disk technologies have this problem, the density can vary quite a bit between the middle and the edges. You don't want to keep changing the length of a track for every single track, so some are necessarily a bit more crowded than others. You can change it a bit (more per track as you go towards the edge), but there may be problems when the laser has to transform slightly bigger chunks of disk (for the same amount of data) as it goes further from the spindle. I sorta doubt anything is actually warped as you are able to fill the 80m disks, which are physically the same dimensions.

tush, tush! You didn't read my other reply. There's no missing 39.1 it's just nomenclature. It is beginning to sound like some sort of laser power issue. Avrin is your best expert for that, and I am sure he will leap in here to help shortly, if I am even halfway right. The reason there are so many formats is that choice is good. You can pick which one you want for the particular application. I wouldn't be without PCM for live recordings. But I rarely need better than LP2 for portable or even armchair listening. And LP4 will do fine for a lot of broadcast material.

I think you might be able to fix the jog dial - I would recommend getting it apart and (once the face is separated from the rest) spraying some contact cleaner in and around. Make sure it all dries off or the unit will smell forever. USB sounds like a case of heating up the solder joints that the USB is connected to. Should be easy enough, except for one small problem, they used lead-free solder so it's possible it might take more heat than you've got. I'd give it a whirl.

yup its the "&tab=core" which is missing from the script. Well done, hope you will pm christopher, this sounds like something that got broken in the upgrade.

Nor am I. But both my unit that I bought new developed, and the one that I bought second hand already had, a fault with the jog lever. I "pretty much" fixed it but so many people have complained that I thought it would be worth the comment. YMMV, of course. Stephen

FWIW I wouldn't wait. Most of them seem to develop faults, sadly.

I bought an MZ-RH910 somewhat on impulse off Michael last week. It nicely completes my collection, being the only second-generation HiMD unit that I own. Michael was a dream seller, included some brand new MD's, a case, all accessories and then some. The unit was in perfect condition and the battery (gumstick) functional. Shipping (to Canada) was fast and communication was excellent. He asks me to mention that he is also selling a couple of home MD decks, an MDS-JE480 and another whose model number I am not 100% sure of (he said 430 but I am thinking this is either 330 or 530). And a couple of hundred MD's. He asks me to mention this, and you can (as before) reach him using the contact details in this post Stephen