NickyJay

Minidiscs will never die trust me. I don't know why you guys are worried. Nothing can replace them so demand will always be there. Just continue spinnin' those discs and enjoying the superior sound quality. Life's too short to be constantly worried.

Minidiscs were designed to be a standalone media. The magneto-optical technology, the recording and editing, the absolute focus on sound quality....none of this required any interaction with the computer. That was the original essence of MD. Sony in later years did try to make the downloading process to minidiscs easier through Sonicstage and Simpleburner. But it was apparent right away that it was just not possible to fully integrate the technology of minidiscs with the developments on the PC/Mac side. So that was that. MD is now a niche market which will continue to exist but only for professionals and die-hard fans. If you need to enjoy iTunes you should just buy the most expensive audio equipment you can afford and feed it the output from your computer. MD was never designed for that in my opinion (though minidisc units admittedly do have very good DACs on board). Perhaps one day a new format will emerge that can fulfill all these requirements. But I can't see it happening anytime soon.

Buy a new one. The repair would cost a fortune anyway. The Sony player is superior to all your other MP3 players. I feel your loss at this time. Hopefully you can quickly buy another Sony player and get back to listening to high quality music as quickly as possible. .

Re-record all your music in Atrac to enjoy superior sound quality over MP3. Sonicstage was optimized to meet this objective from day one.

That's Sony's policy of regional differences for you. You're right there the 710 is a UK model. I don't care much for MP3, which was crippled for the usual reasons. The way I think about it though is that Sony may have deliberately tried to boost the quality of Atrac on these units Oddly enough I don't listen to portables anymore that much. Mostly it's decks and hi-fis. When I start my new job that may soon be changing. I have first and second generation Hi-MDs in the pipeline. But I will also keep the R37 close (I have two new ones stored because they are just so friggin' awesome).

For Hi-MD I rate the MZ-RH710. Very good full sound indeed. The best sound I have ever heard on any MD unit though has to be the MZ-R37. It took two batteries and had all metal casing. The sound of the in-built amplifier to my ears is better than a CD player playing uncompressed audio. Then again I recorded through the analogue input thereby making full use of the superior A/D converters.

Try ebay. I'm pretty sure you can find MD stuff selling for peanuts. Your old model can easily be had for maybe $10 plus whatever for postage. Hi-MD is a bit more. For new units there is only the MZ-RH1 which will set you back $300 or somewhere in the region. Good luck.

Does anybody here still use Atrac CDs? What results are you guys getting? Are there any issues I need to know about? Thanks

1. There is no audio gap on any Sony professional equipment (including our beloved minidisc recorders). 2. Can't say what the exact size of each folder is, but it should be more than sufficient to meet your needs. Like I said, it is simply the best recorder out there at the moment. Stick with Sony you will do no wrong.

Sony is known for their support of the highest standards of audio quality with their hardware. This is a top of the range recorder, make no mistake it easily beats the other offerings. You won't be disappointed when you buy Sony, whether it is audio gaps or any other issue. It never ceases to amaze me to this day the quality that this company is capable of.

Great work. Hopefully the student will be working late nights on it (like most of them do!).

Ah was it the 'legato link' conversion? I remember these Pioneer decks now. Now I understand why they go for such high prices on ebay.

Supposedly the Linux crew are working on a project to allow open source of Atrac on the PC. Though they are proceeding at a snail's pace given their limited resources and the extremely difficult reverse engineering obstacles, it is possible that a solution may be on the horizon. I'd personally give up using Sonicstage and Atrac on the PC until these Linux guys finally solve the issue. It's simply not worth the hassle. There's nothing more frustrating when a product doesn't work after you have invested in it.

I read somewhere that units made by non-Sony companies will work poorly when played back on Sony machines and vice versa. Some of the manufacturers like Sharp and Panasonic stated that they used different Atrac chips based on their own algorithms and technologies. I think this is why Sharp units sound better to some people. Who knows, your Grundig may also use its own unique Atrac encoder/decoder.

Hopefully other forum members will help you out with specifics. I don't go through Sonicstage myself, I record directly from a digital out on my MD deck to a Tascam CD professional recorder that can take a pure digital in signal via a special menu feature. I am very particular about sound quality, and to my mind any transfer from SP audio through Sonicstage I am still not 100% convinced that it is the full signal. (From memory other people here have observed their frequency analysis to support the result that the full audio signal is transferred over to the PCM file so I think you're alright). I believe the track titles will have 'Track 01', 'Track 02', etc at the beginning of each track name when they are saved to your folder in Sonicstage. Please check with other people though to confirm. If that's a problem it shouldn't be too hard to change them by hand afterwards if you care enough about the tracks? Be thankful you get this service from Sony, they have a notorious history of stopping two-way transfers of audio files! This RH1 unit was the last swan song, and they nodded their head to their consumers by essentially doing away with nearly all of the previous limitations. Myself I don't use the RH1 or Sonicstage even for titling. Instead I use a unique feature in MCrew, a software which has its own hardware unit to go with it (PCLK-MN10). This allows me full control over track titles using Microsoft Excel and Notepad on the PC in both directions.

I think you mentioned that track divisions are very important to you. If that is the case, you MUST remember to upload in 'Linear PCM'. Do NOT upload in Atrac3+plus 256kps. Otherwise gaps will occur in your tracks and your divisions will be mixed up with bits of one track contained in others and vice versa.

No harm in making sure. In a sale what usually happens is that a prospective buyer might ask to confirm certain details with the seller. This is especially so when the price is very high.

Why would you sell it? It is a complete one-off work of art. If you need the money maybe wait a year until the recession's over. It could probably go for $2.5k. Are there any instructions or documentation that came with it? An original box? . .

You can buy a Sony MXD series cd-md deck and that will transfer the titles over. Only other alternative other than sonicstage is M-Crew with PC link unit. It can do bulk transfer of titles from a notepad spreadsheet to the MD directly. Both options require you to buy more equipment I'm afraid.

The great thing about Sony is that they absolutely rocked with their hardware, but their software sucks. Regarding the portable units, they of course have similar AD filters which means they too can access 24-bit resolution. That is going through the analogue route though, you're stuck at 16-bit if you go digitally. On my Sony decks however I can send the full 24-bit stream through the digital out with the flick of a switch. I can't prove that Sonicstage maxes at 16-bit resolution, so you may well be right when you say it must go higher than that. It is just a hunch - I remember reading that the program itself can only burn audio at 16-bit 44.1khz.

The problem with hi-md is that it maxes out at 16-bit resolution in Sonicstage. I'm not sure about the Onkyo hi-md units that rip directly from CD to MD, these may have 20-bit or 24-bit resolution. The older Sony decks which had standard SP 292kps have 20-bit, 22-bit and 24-bit resolution on the AD filters. This is the reason MDs recorded and played on them sound identical if not better to an uncompressed 16-bit CD. Oh and vinyl does sound a lot better than CD, but I still listen to CDs so it's not too bad. With some adjustments I can make up for it.

Try here http://forums.sonyinsider.com/topic/26515-nac-hd1e-gigajuke/page__pid__176157#entry176157

For your particular needs I say stick to traditional MD. It's still very easy to find second-hand MD units, you could easily buy 10 for the price of one PCM-M10 and you're good to go. Despite all of its negatives, nothing - and I mean nothing - can ever replace the specification of Minidisc. You know it and I know it. Other people here I guess have moved on with computers and their tiny sized gigabyte storage. That's fine for them, but for others it is wholly irrelevant. For certain professionals in the field, out there in the desserts of Africa minidiscs would seem the obvious choice. The things are indestructible and the audio quality is certainly up to the job. I really wish people would start to read what people are asking for, rather than what they see as being the right way of doing things. Hope this helps.

That was always the issue with Sony and sonicstage. Personally I believe in burning tracks directly from CDs so I can kind of see the logic in building in restrictive procedures on the end user. Unfortunately most of the world doesn't seem to care about doing things 'the right way' instead preferring to mass consume mp3 files like there was no tomorrow. Not saying you are guilty of it by any means. I'm just pointing out the huge problem facing the music industry today, of which Sony is acutely aware of. Apple of course has no qualms as long as they can extract their money from you in creative ways.