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Second Law of Thermodynamics... you don't get something for nothing? I agree with you 100%. The price you pay for the USB fast upload (IMO) is the loss of squeezing it to ATRAC 256K. Somehow the original coder managed to avoid it with the SP and Sony has been scratching its corporate head ever since. He decodes it in some pseudo lossless manner and then playing that back on optical is as good as it gets. I assume you mean that you, too, upload in real time via optical out? http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=19514 However I think the RH1 has the ability to "save" the whole concept of MD, so don't let's knock it too much. Maybe Sony's apparent reversal in favour of MDSP is technology based after all....... I wonder how an HiMD deck would sound, if I can ever afford it. Especially if it would record 240 mins of SP (or so) on a 1GB disk.. that might be the best of all possible worlds. I thought I saw a reference from someone here that hacked a machine to do that, but maybe I misunderstood the post. Meanwhile the interesting test is 95 mins on a 1GB with raw WAV 1411 on RH1. I just got some affordable 1 GB disks, so maybe that's an experiment to try sometime soon.

http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=19931 (I just posted this an hour ago) Stephen

That's patently nonsense. Sony made minidisc decks for over 10 years with optical out. I have bought 3 of them (1 about 6 years ago, and 2 more when it busted, earlier this year). The optical out can go into your computer without any problem. Sony must have done something magic with the 292kbps format of the original MD. The uploaded results sound so close to CD quality, even the same thing uploaded on MZ-RH1 doesn't compare (yes I have one, and I did the comparison). My personal suspicion is that they couldn't duplicate the work of the original programmer (I read somewhere about some tricks he used) and were stuck with this code that they couldn't even augment to do upload etc. Never ascribe to a conspiracy what might be simple incompetence. Also with MZ-RH1 you will get at most x2 upload speed (on SP discs). Hardly worth the money, whereas for $100 you can buy a second hand deck with optical out (check on the information pages to see which models do) and for $25-30 a sound card with optical in. Now you can make beautiful recordings, no SCMS to worry about as the sound card won't care. Also on the decks you can record speech in mono, so that increases your capacity a lot, a great feature. I don't have a deck with the MDLP formats (LP2 and LP4) but there is a list here http://www.minidisc.org/part_Decks_Sony.html Many of these show up on a weekly or so basis on Ebay. Happy hunting! Cheers Stephen

Hello folks, I have a recent MZ-RH1 purchased from MDC in July. I have the service manual, and the magic information is missing from the beginning of the manual. They just say "when you have entered Test Mode" I don't particularly care about the Volume hack (in fact I strongly recommend you NOT do it, as I have had trouble with my ears ever since I started using the headphones). My interest is more in things like equalizers, and seeing if there are other interesting things I can fiddle with. Don't worry about me turning the RH1 into (a la Steve Jobs) an expensive gold brick! Maybe someone can email me or PM me in the worst case. But I tried the only version I can find on the forum FF FF FR FR FF FR FF FR || || (with hold on and track mark held down) and it doesn't work. HEEELP!!! Also, I had trouble accessing this forum from any browser running Windows XP or Windows 2000 (Server 2003 was fine, bizarrely). Does anyone know why? The main page comes up but when I try to read a topic, or to click on a link (such as from a search of the forum), the Firefox (or Mozilla) window goes blank. This makes me curious if the forum is doing something that the security systems on XP don't like. I feel like one day I will wake up and the world will be a blank screen, on BillyBoy's sayso, or that my RH1 will refuse to play all my MD's, because Sony got mad at me... Any ideas?

Doesn't this do what you need? http://www.terratec.net/en/products/Aureon_5.1_PCI_1988.html I bought it for optical IN but it does optical out, I just checked by firing up Sonic Stage on my PC and recording onto the MZ-RH1 via Toslink cable. This card cost me all of 12 quid (pounds). The only catch was I had to get my relatives in England to send to me because the shipping was 3x the cost of the card from the outlet found. Stephen

I'm a new owner of an RH1 and I have been trying out all the different capabilities. Most of it works fine, but there are some real strangenesses perhaps one of you that's had one for a while could explain please. 1. When recording on to some regular MD's there seems to be a problem with reformatting for Hi-MD. From the length of time it took, I am assuming the system does *not* do any sort of true format - there simply isn't time. The Sony 80 disks behaved better than the Arita 74's, for reasons that escape me. Specifically shortly after recording (but AFTER it finished its legitimate SAVING and SystemFile Writing, from a mic onto an Arita the head is jumping all over the place, lots of clicks and whirring, and generally it sounds like something is wrong. Ideas? 2. I also saw some recently recorded disks give read errors which are cured by removing the MD and reinserting. 3. I took a Sony 80 (since I guessed that they may be more reliable for some reason) and formatted it HiMD. Then I tried to do an analog line in recording. A half hour radio program was broken into about 10 unequal pieces. Is this normal behaviour? Is there any way to prevent it? 4. Very strange things seem to happen when I plug into the USB power supply that came with the unit if I was listening or recording at the time. Is this also expected behaviour? I may have more to report but I'm currently wondering if there is something wrong with the unit, or whether converting "old" MD's to HiMD format simply has major problems..... Thanks for all help and advice, you guys know a LOT Stephen

Concur 100%, Norton is as bad or worse when I last tried. These "dynamic" anti-virus solutions take over all your file I/O. Thus a file-close is a very significant event, which may be accompanied by much activity. For us "soundies" this usually means an unacceptable delay while the stupid virus scanner goes through the entire 600MB we just created. If there is a way to exempt one or more directories from McAfee, that would probably do the trick, too. Good luck! S

I don't understand. Either you can remove it or you can't. If you cannot, then probably noone can help. If you can, I for one am eager to know the results (which you don't tell) of your experiments. Cheers

Fine. Can you now eliminate it hogging the bus as a cause of messing up your connection with the MD? All you have to do is to see if that behaviour goes away when the hub and all associated USB devices are absent. If you can't remove them all, remove as many as possible (and, if that solves the problem, try adding them in again). If you can remove them all and it doesn't solve the problem, I was wrong, and you need to start looking to see what other software routinely spikes the execution profile (eg some virus scanner, checking the mail, who knows......). Hope this helps

I would take a good look at what's in/on that hub. Does it have its own power-supply, or is it relying on power from USB 2.0? USB is quite well known that the power supplied via the connector is marginal. For example my external DVD burner from IBM is very clear that you can only read and write CD's and (maybe) read DVD's with bus power only. If you want to burn DVD you must connect the second source of (external) power as well. This implies to me that there is a general problem with USB devices sucking power from the bus. What do you have connected to the hub? Can you disconnect it entirely? If not, can you buy a USB card for the computer that has lots of outputs so you now don't need the hub?

Even more than before this sounds like a USB problem. What else have you got sucking power out the USB bus? For example an external hard drive. Some actions such as closing a file are liable in that case to cause significant uproar on the USB bus, making SS think the NetMD got disconnected. But it may be something as simple as a webcam, or Bluetooth adapter or even mouse or keyboard (no i haven't seen those cause problems, but a HUB most definitely will mess you up especially if its only 1.1 USB instead of 2.0). What about scanners and printers? Mind you, neither should happen to do something to USB at the end of each song. My money is on an external HD.

Thank you, most gracious. As I mentioned at the start I have a good pair of ears, and only to back up the ear conclusions go to the data, I did. I would be most intrigued if you can provide a counter example - as this would tend to suggest a defective unit as one possibility. One very weird thing I noticed - Sonic Stage (indeed Windows itself) treats the RH-1 as a different type of device if you change from MD to HiMD, going to far as to uninstall the USB driver (di-duh) and then load up the other one (duh-di). But there appears to be a dropdown box marked "mode" over on the right of the menu panel, above the area occupied by NetMD or Hi-MD listing - and this seems never to operate. Maybe this is something to do with it - I can't easily imagine why this would be there an inoperative, yet the system makes an automatic mode switch by changing device drivers. All enlightenment gratefully received, it is. S

Ok, to recap; it looks to me as if Sony is not delivering on its promise to provide uploadable ATRAC (which it knows is the Holy Grail of its possessions - anyone who can really decode ATRAC can wipe the floor with any other compressed format). I thought I had found a solution but it turned out when I looked really closely I was analysing background noise initially. The portion to the right of 16kHz is essentially just noise, then. There seems to be an absolute cut off at about 16KHz, more dramatic than in your post in the other thread but nonetheless around the same frequency. (does 16384 sound a possible number? hehehe that is 14 bits of resolution) Does anyone, familiar with the specs of OpenMG audio format, know if there is a limit on what frequencies it will try to encode? I can't wait to try out the LinearPCM upload when I get a TosLink input cable in the next few days. Now if *that* is broken, do we (and Sony) ever have a problem!!!!!!! Cheers S

I deleted the post that was here and I now replace it with: Grrr! I managed to get the wrong frequency analysis to look at, the one of the "right" file. It's still broken. If you read my previous post, please ignore where I say it got fixed.

The IRQL_ error sounds a lot like something to do with USB. The only thing in all of this that needs to know anything about IRQ levels is the device driver. However there's nothing very special about the USB driver for the device, I had mine talking to SonicRage quite early on, and the driver is pretty generic at the computer. I note that Sony specifically say that you cannot connect a MD player via a USB hub to the computer - could this be the problem?

You could try installing Windows on Innotek's VirtualBox software. It works quite nicely under Linux. Cheers

Hi folks. Please feel free to correct me, if I got it wrong. I want to be wrong!! I am the proud owner of a brand new MZ-RH1 (and a good pair of ears). I was busy uploading all sorts of stuff from MD's to my computer when I noticed that the sound was unusually flat, dull and lifeless. Let me give a little bit of background - until now I have been recording via the analog input of a JE 5xx or 6xx deck from my stereo system, then walking the MD to another deck in my computer room, and playing back the optical output into the digital input of my sound card. This works perfectly but it's a bit slow - I have to play through the music (at least) twice. The advantage is I can use a wave editor easily before burning the results to CD. I love the sound I get, and eventually I will be able to retire all my old equipment. So I thought perhaps "eventually" might become "soon" if I could do fast uploads using the new technology in the MZ-RH1. Back to the results of my uploading. I took the first 20 seconds of a recording that I made using the old method, and frequency-analysed it using CoolEdit (now Adobe Audition). The music source is a Rachmaninov Piano Concerto - piano music with orchestra is probably one of the best things for testing listenable sound. The result is shown in the first attached graphic. Then I repeated the procedure with the USB upload from my new MZ-RH1. The result is dramatic. There is a loss of high frequency so bad that on the default setting of the wave display (0 to -120dB) there is nothing showing above 16 kHz. I expanded the scale to -160dB just to show that it is apparently still there but hugely attenuated. Please can anyone try to confirm this? Is there anything I can do? NOTE: I also tried changing the upload setting in SonicStage to "PCM-1411Khz" and the result appears to be unchanged. Thanks to all you MD experts for your advice on this. I am getting a bit ticked at Sony - it looks like they convert the "NetMD" tracks before uploading them and the conversion kills the sound. I haven't yet tried recording from HiMD as I don't yet have an optical cable to plug INTO the MZ-RH1 as a source of "good" sound, and of course I cannot record Hi-MD's with a JE630.