sfbp

Something in the back of my head is a remark made by the worthy Jim, that servicing is mostly about lubrication (and in really bad cases replacement of gears). It may be that the stepper motor requires one (tiny) drop of oil. Be very very careful though.

You know what? I don't know, as I've never done it. There are several people here who might have done this. One is AWOL (our friend Jim Hoggarth in England) and ill for many months. Another is Jonathan Dupre, "JonathanPotato" in France. And there may be some others. My guess is yes you can; but I honestly, don't know if replacing it will force a complete realignment. In which case wait for the CD to arrive in the mail. Initially I would be more inclined to wash it gently with a solvent taking great care not to get the solvent and the result of the washing mixed up with anything critical like the laser head. This would be perfect for a (very very careful) spray. However if you use a Q-Tip (swab) dipped in TCE (Trichloroethylene) I am going to wager that you can do it without removal. A toothbrush may be helpful. Honestly, you're way beyond me here. Maybe we will all be sending our stuff to you soon Good luck! Stephen PS the grease you need is white and quite light/thin. Not the heavy, transparent stuff.

There's another possibility: the sled/lead screw (if you know what that it, it's lead pronounced LEED, not lead like the metal Pb) may need some grease on it. Quite often the tracking is slow simply because the motor has to work too hard. I'd try that (palpate with your fingers by turning the worm gear) and see if it feels sticky (You can compare with the 500). Be careful about oil (don't use it), you should only use silicone grease - however it is THAT which may become crusty. So you'll need to clean it off and apply some fresh grease. Very pleased that things are quicker because you got the power back into shape. You did well! I wouldn't tamper with the Servo stuff just yet - it's likely to be fine.

Start by making the power adjustments. This may be all that you need. Page 25 is the outline, the details are in pages 19-23. I can walk you through the Overall Servo Adjustment (automatic sequence). But do that later. The reason you need to do the 911 reset is that it will force the testing and calibration of the different reading and writing types with the mechanism. But once you do the reset, your MD will not work, at all, until the testing/calibration is successful. I would avoid doing it for now, otherwise we are forced to tweak individual settings in the NVRAM to pretend that the testing worked (which is not a good idea).

Hmm. I don't know what the exact requirements are but would be inclined to try a real Sony power supply. Since you have regulated power supplies, I would strongly suggest setting the power to 1.2 V in place of the NiMH battery and see if that improves things (unlikely but still possible). I would then do a partial service of the unit. The most important is the power adjustments. Don't do anything which requires a laser calibration, just fix the power supply voltages. DO NOT do a "911 Reset". I have only the 610 service manual in front of me but it should be the same. Under Electrical adjustments: 1. Do temperature correction 2. Do Manual power supply adjustment. For mains power use 3V just as they say, to the external terminals (NOT the battery terminals). If everything is still sluggish then you may have to do a servo auto-adjust. This requires some disks for testing. IIRC this would simply be a blank disk, but you WOULD need 1 prerecorded disk (CD). Don't start the servo adjust unless you have a CD to hand.

What's your power source?

You don't really need the PCLK control part for the dongle to act as a nice USB sound card. In fact I run it this way with W7 even though I know I cannot control anything with the PS/2 connector. Provided the Mac understands generic PC sound card (USB) dongles, it should work.

You have to disable driver signing. It's been written down in many places. I think it's something like Shift-Start in W10. But the common technique to all versions of Windows after XP is to hit <f8> during boot and look for something that allows you to turn it off temporarily. There's one more issue yet here. The "DISC MODE" of your RH1 is important, and is either MD or Hi-MD. This is the mode that the computer will see when the unit has NO disk in it. If you only use HiMD formatted disks then you have no problem, set the DISC MODE to Hi-MD and be happy. However if you need NetMD for uploads and so on you will need the 64-bit NetMD driver from our downloads section. I'm guessing your RH1 is defaulting to MD "DISC MODE".

Sonic Stage isn't too bad when you realise you can TAB forwards (or Shift Tab backwards) to the next title without having to wait any appreciable time.

Fabian, look at the link. There are at least 3 differences, the most critical of which is the distance between tracks that changes. There are ways to override the TOC stuff and get 86 minute disks (approximately), but the alignment is a problem. It's like your washing machine has a dual voltage setting but you never tried it because in the country of manufacture the voltage is 220V 50Hz but in your country the voltage is 110V 60Hz. It's not that surprising that when, to save energy the higher voltage is introduced to all green homes, the washing machine doesn't actually work because no one ever tested it to work at 220V 60Hz (they never thought of that one). A related (true) story was the atrocious support for time zones provided by a certain international conglomerate that made TV's and video recorders. It just so happened that the lab/factory was in a certain state in the USA that does not change its time for Daylight Saving. Consequently all the usual glitches for things that go wrong at 2am on the 3rd Sunday in October (or whatever the changeover point is) had never been tested, and the engineers had no idea about DST because they had grown up without it. "Well sir, it works in the factory here". "But what do you do when the time changes?" "Sorry, sir, but it doesn't - we have been unable to test that feature". Of course it didn't work.

You CANNOT make PCLK work in straight 64-bits... the stub is fine, and then you can do it in Virtual XP mode. The fact that PCLK shows up as NetMD is probably my fault. Sorry.

Are you sure it actually DOES PC-Link? Very annoying if you discover it doesn't. Just plug whatever worked with PC3 in and it should behave identically. Strange - the user manual I found on line shows (p.6) that the PC-Link is not there. This is totally annoying - the 640 I have resolutely refuses to do PC-Link and I have given up pending finding the right service manual. The MXD-D5C doesn't match the service manual I have for it, and the critical page is almost blank of information. You have to figure out what the voltage levels and timings are for Ctrl-A1. Even then, the only way is to find a circuit with both implemented. The 940 may be the ticket but unfortunately the US model doesn't work with PCLK - and I have no idea if the circuit is right or not. Oh I see... the PCLINK on the 470 is on the back, how odd! And on the 770 there is Ctrl-A1 as well as PC-Link. The problem I foresee now is that the control chip (IC1) on the 770 actually has different inputs/outputs for Ctrl-A1 (3 & 24) and PC-Link (IIC) (29 &30). I think the protocol must be different.

I think and hope that a mac recognizes pclk-mn10. However i don't know this. If it does, I think the PClK has the right smarts to drop the signal altogether thus forcing a track mark.

Electrically the same, no. Protocol both use SIRCS but not 100% guaranteed the commands are identical. The only way to solve this is to find a unit that supports both and snoop the commsnds. The 640 and 940 do, but only actually implemented jn the Japanese version. You'll need the all important service manual which i have failed to find. The 770 however DOES support both and all the manuals are available. The 470 doesn't have the pclink connector tho. Please do keep us advised. Most interesting. I have a 770.

I mean you need, mostly, a laser power meter. And tons of patience and experience. Unfortunately the service manual isn't going to have any specific stuff for 80m disks. However it may be that by adjusting the power you can get a setting which works on both inner and outer tracks. The following may give some insight: http://minidisc.org/minidisc_faq.html#r_q5 Good luck! Stephen

It's quite likely that they simply were not aligned correctly to cope with the increased capacity, since there was no such thing (80m). Doing that properly is going to be a big pain.

I think it's a bad disk in some way. If you really want that 5 minutes of music, you must play it back on the MD and record the result somehow. Sorry. Added: maybe if the file does play in VLC all the way to the end, you can use ffmpeg to transcode it. Possibly what's happening is that you have a file which is for some reason partially encrypted (i.e. the last 5 minutes are encrypted but the rest is not, or vice versa). This would confuse SS but possibly VLC doesn't care as it is coded to different standards. Be happy if you can play the file as that should allow you to recover it.

First off - we will try to help you, but PLEASE try not to create multiple almost identical topics - or tacking *your* stuff on someone else's topic. 'Nuff said - it's just a matter of tidyness and consideration. In case you're worried, almost everyone here reads every post. Secondly, we need a lot more information as to WHAT you want to transfer FROM where and TO where. I strongly suspect that you bought this unit hoping you would be able to get stuff off of NetMD using the USB cable. No luck, I'm afraid - the hardware simply is not capable, USB 1.1 is not fast enough combined with the fact that no firmware upgrades are likely (or indeed have ever been made). The one and only unit capable of doing (legacy, as opposed to HiMD) MD upload, the MZ-RH1 gets into trouble if the drivers for those other units are even installed. So it's a touchy kind of thing.

I think you have hit a glitch of some kind. FWIW I don't usually upload very large LP4 files (although I certainly have uploaded hundreds of hours of LP2 in large chunks). There exists a problem with long files where SS reports a strange % figure as it does the transfer. This corresponds to reaching the limit of the file size as a 16-bit number of clusters on the disk. This will differ depending on whether it's LP2, LP4, SP or some Hi-MD format. Note that this is NOT a real problem, just a displaying-the-data-as-it-uploads cosmetic issue. Guessing right off the bat, I would say that somehow you hit this wrap-around in the counting precisely when there was a fragmented cluster. Is this possible? Thanks for reporting it - of course there's nothing we can do because Sony doesn't maintain Sonic Stage (and neither do we have access to its code). The only other difference from my setup is the use of Sound Forge 11 (I use SF 9 and have briefly tried 10 which came bundled with Movie Studio Platinum). Try playing the file using VLC and BEFORE you run FCT, just to see if the bug was in the conversion (decryption) rather than in the transfer. If it plays correctly in VLC, then there may be a problem with the newest version of Sound Forge or with FCT. If not, then, as you say, Sonic Stage is messing up (I assume you tried this several times before reporting the problem). Oh yes, one thing - always run FCT from within Sonic Stage (the Tools menu when in "Library" view). Otherwise it does weird stuff. DO NOT drag and drop files as a way of importing to SS - this causes strange problems with copied files.

Does the JA30ES date from before 80m disks were introduced? I looked in the manual and can find mention of 60- and 74- but no 80.

Very good research. You are correct on all counts. Note that FCT is essential in case Windows update or System Restore nobbles the DRM keys - you should plan to run it either after every upload or on some regular basis if you don't want to risk some track becoming unplayable. Net MD tracks transferred by USB (except if you use a Hi-MD formatted disk) TO the device are stuck. Forever. Sorry. Even the RH1 can't help you with these.The only way that might work would be to create a fake TOC and clone it, IF the recordings to NetMD were made in such a way that you did them sequentially without erasure. In this case, I would then transfer the entire 5hr 23m (LP4) track to the computer and then edit with Sound Forge 9 (or 10). Other than that, buy a deck and play back at x1, recording the optical output either to (hi)MD or direct to PC sound card. LP4 (and LP2) tracks made by recording from analogue or digital sources at x1 (i.e. everything except USB) can be transferred, HiMD tracks made by transfer can be transferred provided they didn't have protection when they were transferred. They're essentially "just" files, and are copyable to the PC using a variety of techniques (i.e. software) not involving SS if that software balks. So you're OK and the microphone tracks will all be fine. I strongly recommend NOT transcoding uploaded MDLP tracks. They can be played just perfectly using VLC even if the DRM is still there, They can be transcoded using ffmpeg, too. So one way is to put them on a server and play back on demand. In this case ffmpeg on the server will likely transcode to CD bit rates which can be played by anything. Something else: MDLP (LP2/3/4) are transferred to the PC bit-for-bit. SP is not (at least Sony doesn't actually give you a way, transcoding to WAV or Hi-SP 256k when it gets there). When you transcode (assuming you don't like my recommendation), you should put into MP3 or HiMD (ATRAC3+) of at least 256kbps. There's little point in trying to convert to some lossless format like FLAC or WAV or ATRAC Advanced Lossless. You can experiment with all this using Sound Forge (which you will have to buy at a cost of no more than $50 - if you can't figure how, come back here and advice will be offered). One final point: using SS to transcode to WAV is not a great idea because any metadata (except title) carefully typed in on MD will be lost. And don't even THINK about putting to HiMD 1411 .oma format. Sound Forge doesn't recognize that, even though it's only WAV in a wrapper.

It may depend on the MD. I think the D400 has a doubling circuit in it which it uses for high speed copying. Not sure about the D40. My instinct would be to have the 'puter spit out 44.1 since it probably is running 96 (or higher) internally, and should have plenty of CPU to do the downsample (if CPU is required).

No point until you fixed the belt, though. Certain events will trigger it automatically, such as power off AND electrically disconnecting the drive. Be very careful that the level of reset you do doesn't require re-aligning the drive. Most probably there's nothing wrong... I just went through this with a new (second hand, newly-acquired) unit myself. The service manual is here on the board for download: http://forums.sonyinsider.com/files/file/171-sony_mds-je640_service_manualpdf/

a. the belt is probably gone west (the one which loads disks) b. you need to do a reset - should clear C13 unless something actually died. c. if you didn't wreck the overwrite head pulling the disk out, there's hope. DO NOT tweak the mechanism by hand when there's power applied to the device. Not standby, actually unplugged if you want to mess around. Jim'll fixit they say; unfortunately Savile is disgraced and Hoggarth is apparently out of action. I could take a look if you wanted to post it to Canada. But you'd want to remove the drive (for sending) as it is futile sending the entire box of tricks, as well as very expensive and risky.

How on earth did we all miss that one? In my case I think being in a strange location and attempting to respond at 1am. Sorry.