sfbp

Back to the original comment, then. I am at a loss understanding in what circumstances might I observe a problem with this effect? Certainly the MD decks have it (a filter, not a problem). And anyone recording Vinyl from a turntable will have an analogue circuit not a digital one, as the output.

Does this apply to the analogue (line out) output from a DVD player in the event I record sound from it? I notice that only 2 of my 3 DVD players will actually record to MD from the optical out, the other is presumably producing SCMS signal, or is restricted in some subtle way I don't understand.

There seems to be a lot of useful MD equipment for sale in the UK. I wish we could collectively find Axel (Habakuk Tibatong) in Chicago a way to get himself the MZ-R2 that finishes tomorrow evening. I've been stocking up thanks to the good graces of my dad, but I think it's too much to volunteer him in that capacity. I just did some overhaul on my MZ-RH1 as I dared to fix it (now I have a working spare in hand), from the seemingly inevitable jog-lever problems that it developed. Not a recommended procedure unless you are desperate, those darned things are very flimsy at best.

Remember my whole purpose was to turn analogue media into digital sound via MD. Sure, I have a Sony CD player hooked up to the amp, but in an analogue way and Sony presumably may put such a circuit on the analogue output, just as they do on every MD deck I can find (take a look for yourself, I am sure you understand the circuits much better than I do). I used CD optical out (from the changer) to go straight to MD deck a couple of times, and the results were exactly (AFAIK) the same as using the intra-deck transfer on the MXD-D400. So what I am puzzled by is: what device could I possibly have that doesn't have such a filter? Unfortunately I don't have a service manual for that deck. But most of the time I do like anyone else, and use Simple Burner (or Sonic Stage) - it's faster.

I think the only DAC is in an output stage? Anyway I don't care about output at all, since once I get the sound to the MD, it is digital and stays digital until burned or converted to analogue by being played. So I can definitely master a CD without ever doing D-to-A.

But I am not doing anything of the sort. I have an analogue amplifier. I am not attempting to record digital playback of anything. I have connected to it: a tuner, a reel-to-reel deck, a cassette deck, a turntable (Phono preamp in the receiver), and several video components (which video components have only been used about once in this way). Which one of these has a DAC?

FWIW, for any LP modes it is **essential** to have have Type-S for playback. LP2 is amazingly good (considering the low 132kbps bitrate), but only with proper replay chip. I had recordings I made with Type-R machine that really sounded no good until played back on a Type-S deck. There's not so many Type-S decks, though. For a portable, it's less critical, you can fudge it with the equalizer. However even the cheapest machine with Type-S sounds amazing.

What DAC? I have an analogue amplifier.

Now we're getting beyond what I know about. Best you read some of these guys here. It does seem like they talk about using Line In rather than Mic in. Good luck! Stephen

Well, magicians and secrets..... spoils the game, dontcha know? Sorry about that, didn't want it to be there for so long that one of the inevitable scalpers would re-sell it for profit. Stephen Seriously though, there's no secret... I just happened to notice it.

Me again.... did you find some stuff here, for example this? Also reading that triggered something in my memory. I recently did a recording with my "new" NH900 and I had a problem that I've never experienced with the RH1, namely a loud sudden chord from piano (chamber music) being more than the microphone/AGC can cope with. It may be that there are some improvements between NH900 and RH910 and RH1. I got a complete opera using NH700 (quite similar acoustic and volume levels), and no problems at all, so it may have been the microphone (I used a better one for the opera). Or just the problems (since fixed) with marginal battery supply for the NH900. Certainly for live classical music (everything from tiny to massive ensembles) I have had much better luck with AGC than with manual levels. However the rock concert guys seem to say that very high volume levels are simply better with a battery box to modulate things.

Oh, for Wally World! (If you don't know my favourite bad humour movie you won't understand this comment) The problem is saving backups of "real" (originally made on MD) recordings... I don't count CD's as they can always be regenerated if you owned the CD to start with. Yes, the so-called backup tool is useless Sony didn't want anyone to back up their CD rips, really. Or give them a way to reproduce them and share them. So it's not surprising they didn't try very hard to do that. I don't even blame them for this given their ownership of Sony Music. But AAL (included with 4.x SS) does a nice job IMO, I am sure many here would send you off in the direction of some freeware, but there's no particular need as long as you can get the SonicStage contraption installed on your PC.

I think you have to download the XP compatibility add-on, if it's not actually included with the RTM Windows 7/64. Essentially it's a whole copy of XP. It should work flawlessly, and I think someone here tried it already. No I haven't tried it, as I don't have a need for Win64 currently.

Very simple, if you are only importing CD's don't bother to run the conversion tool. Alternatively, import to AAL (which is what I do) and avoid all the hassle, since this is an unencrypted format. Yeah, the software assumes they are on the same drive? IF you put optimized files on the external drive (it's an O(ption under Tools I think) they will at least be somewhere near each other.

25 minutes to go, and still only $150. I reckon to watch this auction. Almost noone outside SI forums will have spotted this one, though, as it was essentially mis-listed (well, underdescribed). It finished at 122 pounds which is about $200, not bad at all.

Avrin is the expert. I gave up and installed Sonic Stage over top of this and it started working. I wonder what happens if you now DEinstall Sonic Stage? Maybe MSI is smart enough to leave you the components you need? Stephen A couple more notes: 1. If "31" means MagicGate version 3.1 this is a valueless antique. You need to get one of the recent ones and they are contained in the post by Avrin. The issue is probably all related to the mandatory encryption and decryption which the audio data must undergo on its way to the final (unencrypted) destination on a NetMD, or (encrypted) destination on a HiMD. 2. (obviously) the links in his post (start of this thread) are out of date, simply because of the move from MDCF to SI.

In case you haven't done this (pulled the plug), I will tell you about one of the "quirks" of SonicStage. At times I have noticed that perfectly valid files (unencrypted files, I don't even consider the encrypted ones, for all I know they may be no problem) such as .WAV or .OMA somehow get marked in the SonicStage database as untransferable. I have no clue why. They can always be played, but the act of transferring causes them to fail in (IIRC) roughly the manner you describe. The solution for a single track (or even several tracks from the same album) is extremely simple, especially if this doesn't mean destroying the album to which it belongs. Delete the tracks (from the Database, not from the Hard disk) you care about and re-import (select the Files option rather than the Folders option) them back. This is pretty trivial for WAV files so much so that I usually end up putting all my WAV files in a separate folder nothing to do with SonicStage (I call it :sound:), so they can't get deleted by mistake. For lots and lots of tracks, it is a bit more complicated. Once you have proved to your own satisfaction that you can "fix" one, then you may find that it helps to be very organised, quite a military campaign in fact. I generally leave one song as a placeholder (you can tell I have done this before). Then it's quite easy to go to the newly-imported tracks and rename the Album and Artist, whereupon the tracks should pop back to where you had them if you typed everything correctly (including the state of the "compilation" checkbox). You can do the last track after that. If they are imports (.oma or .OMA) you need to be a little more careful, and decrypt your entire database first, just to be sure. If you haven't ever done this, you should. It really helps to turn on the File Path in the details view (rightclick column heads in SS) so you can see what files it is working with. And to have Sonic Stage automatically rename files when you edit the title of a song. Of course THAT doesn't work when you move from one disk to another, so it really takes a delete and re-add no matter what. There's nothing intrinsically locking the files to a single drive letter, or even a single machine. You will find you can add OMA files (but not oma files lol) from another machine if you have a home network. The other thing to try is to delete ALL non-critical files from ..\SonicStage\...\Optimized Files (or wherever you have it putting them). However it may be this action that effectively killed your efforts to transfer. What I have seen is that converted files from a previous transfer somehow mess up the poor thing which gets its k******s in a twist. In which case you might imagine (I don't have proof unfortunately) that the procedure above might fix it. By the time I am forced to do it, the Optimized Files are always long gone. But if they got deleted from the disk but not from the database that might be the problem. SS thinks that it can find an already converted file, but you have deleted or moved it. Best to turn off that option that allows the converted files to be kept around, for future incidents. It may be sometimes there are 3 or more files that the software "knows" about as converted already, and these extra files somehow gum up the works. You can see this by looking at the properties of the track and looking at the File Info section, where you will see whether there are multiple files associated with the track. You get the third copy as soon as you try 2 different bitrates for the same track, for example. Note: changing the database location may have weird effects on the location of "Optimized files" and where SonicStage wants to put them. I'm sorry if this (long and rambling post) is not clear. They tried to design something for fast re-transfer (I can imagine management standing over them and saying "just cache the files") and didn't track the second or third copies properly. (from another thread, you never did tell us what the model numbers in the store were!) Stephen

I'm not a microphone person but you might try searching here (if the site search is useless try a Google search and add site:sonyinsider.com on the end of the phrase) on "greenmachine battery box". I believe that the recommended treatment is to use a battery box and feed that into line in instead of the mic input on the MD. Not sure, this is definitely the right place to ask. Good luck. Stephen

There's no horrible things happening..... so I guess I'm ok What do you mean "in the playback device"? This is an analogue signal. I could filter wave files once they get to the PC, but I don't think I need to since the output has gone to effectively zero well below Fs.

awwww bob, there you go spoiling my little mystery....... Cheers Stephen

Just a word to the wise: 120481033165 If you know what this is, be happy.

Are you sure that the MD decks don't have it (as opposed to portables)? I know little about such things but I always seem to get "perfect" digitization of LP's when using the analogue input to an MD deck. Either that or my line out on the Kenwood amplifier does it first. I looked at the block diagram of a couple of MD decks, and I didn't see any lowpass filters in the relevant signal path - but I wouldn't know one of these if it rose up and bit me I don't even know how I would tell for sure if such a filter had been applied, but looking at the freq response of any WAV file that's come from Analog->MD recording, it seems like there is nothing at all above 18Khz. I always thought that was a side effect of the ATRAC encoding, and if so, your comment about lowpass filters means that one is not needed because ATRAC basically throws that away during signal processing.

In theory they do have a limited life. But so far I have not encountered one that couldnt be revived. It's mostly about resistive drop. There are also some issues with crystal formation - typically the gumstick gets very hot as it charges, exactly once, and then is ok (if it didnt burst!) for a long time. Maybe get an older MD unit to force the charging. I have found the MZ-R91 to be excellent for the purpose of reviving gumsticks. Contact cleaner should not be hard to find if you can locate an electronics store locally. Not sure it is something that can be safely mailed, which gives you a shipping problem if you live in a remote location. Make sure you don't get it anywhere INSIDE the MD unit, though

There's only one known way to get your music off - and if it is LP4 the quality will probably leave you completely disappointed. You can record from the Line out (or headphones) socket (analogue) by playing back into your computer sound card and recording there. I seriously doubt if this is worth doing for LP4. If the recordings were ones you made, then the MZ-RH1 has the capacity to upload the tracks to PC. But you cannot use USB with NetMD tracks if they were downloaded to the MD unit, even with the MZ-RH1. Don't throw your discs away, the #linux-minidisc may eventually allow you to do the upload from an MZ-RH1. I am pretty sure it doesn't work YET. But with the NetMD unit you have, there is no way, the hardware won't do it. Sorry.