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damnspynovels

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Everything posted by damnspynovels

  1. ah yes I know. it wouldn't be worth the hassle, but thanks.
  2. Me again. So I just got the N707 in the mail. Have to say, this is the first portable I've held since I sold my R90 in 2001 - and I'm pretty shocked by the build quality (i.e. it's not great). Yes, I recognise that back in the day, the R90 was a more premium product (as were all sony recorders I think?) - and it wasn't until the next few years that cheaper models and plastic casing became more common. So I'm wondering what disadvantage I'd have from buying something like an R55 - which was pretty solidly built. Would there be any audible difference? If i record all my discs with my Type-R 940 in SP, would the playback on an R55 or other player from that era be any worse than the N707?
  3. that's interesting. i wonder what would happen if i pull one channel cable out - presumably the MD set to mono will reproduce it properly. Good idea.
  4. I'm curious about recording MD's in mono for a little project I'm giving myself. I just bought the Beatles mono vinyl box set, and figured I'd record to MD for portable purposes. I've spun a few of the albums so far and, all placebo aside, they really are fantastic. There's been a lot of chatter however about the fact most people (myself included) will be playing them on stereo gear. No issue generally, but it does mean that any ambient surface noise etc will be reproduced in stereo - which contributes a lot to the noise floor being louder than it would be if you had a pure mono cartridge or mono sim switch on the amp, neither of which i have. there's a cheap trick, which involves using two Y-shaped RCA cables between the turntable and amp that basically crushes the signal into pure mono before it's amplified. I don't have such cables. But I wondered if recording in mono on MD is much the same thing. the obvious benefit to recording in mono is space (i.e. double), but that's not an issue. I'm going to do this, unless anyone suggests I shouldn't... is there any audible reason why I shouldn't record a mono source, reproduced on stereo gear, with the mono setting?
  5. That's a fair point. If the 940 that i had sold for about £400 new (I think it did?), the DAC I have is the Arcam irDAC, which is currently £400, and obviously all that tech is to do one job - so it stands to reason this is the way to go. I imagine this is the one you're referring to when you say it's a cracker - as the only other hifi one (as opposed to the ones made for bluetooth etc) is the D33 and that runs into the thousands... I don't know if I'll run into any SCMS issues but I'll give it a try.
  6. that's the idea I suppose. i have the 940 too which I think sends actual 24bit digital to a DAC? I might as well. And as you say, the Arcam has a signature sound that I like, so it makes sense that I'd appreciate MDs conforming to that too.
  7. Great - i'll just get a keyboard then. I'll tackle the jog dial cleaning another time.
  8. Not quite sure I understand but ok I think you're implying I might be frustrated to the point that I'd sell it?
  9. File under 'try it and see' of course... For those who've been following my threads over the past few days, you'll know I have a 940 deck, and a 707 portable. The deck has been gathering dust since I moved house in the spring, and I'm ready to set everything up. Since moving, i've bought an arcam DAC for my cd player. Just curious, but does anyone play their MD"s through an external DAC, or do you leave it to the deck to do the converting? I love the sound of my DAC, and I auditioned a number of units before deciding on the Arcam. Part of me thinks though that it's going against the principle to attach an MD to a DAC for playback. Opinions?
  10. yeah no problem - i figured out what it was. i also watched a video of some guy cleaning volume pots on an amp and figure it's much the same process. i'll see how limited i am (if at all) with using a keyboard and then go from there - thanks!
  11. I was going to ask what contact cleaner is - you obviously don't mean compressed air? Also - I assume you mean removing the faceplate and working from the inside, rather than just pulling the knob off the front? But at the same time, and I haven't looked at the keyboard shortcuts yet (tho thanks for posting), but will a PS/2 keyboard give me all the functionality I need - therefore making the jog dial sort of redundant for editing purposes? I can't remember if i said, but i'm coming at this after using old portables in the 90s - tho stopped in about 2002. I never had a deck, so am inexperienced with the advance editing capabilities of decks. I was a master at making the track mark button work for me though.
  12. That's settled then. I've ordered an optical cable that's long enough to go from my tv box to my minidisc deck. So using a ps/2 keyboard - is that dead easy? like i said the jog dial knob on my deck is temperamental in that it might go backwards when i'm turning it clockwise, or it might jump more than one increment etc. Is there any documentation online as to what the key layout would be?
  13. Oh ok there's a programme on 6music (so digital only) in the middle of the night each night that rebroadcasts band's concerts and radio sessions. The kind of things I would've put on tapes when I was younger. 9 times out of 10 i delete the show from my tv box but every once in a while there's a gem on there. So I think really I'm fussing about nothing. The quality is so average to begin with I don't suppose it's going to make much difference? The ideal scenario I guess would be to find a DAB with digital out that might be 44.1khz (but I don't know if such a thing exists), and time record it to my deck. I don't own a DAB radio myself. But the convenience of letting my tv box record everything itself, with full text descriptions that tells me whether I need to bother with it or not (as i said, 9/10 episodes get deleted) is too much to ignore. Incidentally, on another note, whilst the jog dial on my deck is slightly iffy in that it skips increments when I turn it, regardless I find editing on the deck almost impossible. I'm coming at this as someone who only had portables in the 90s, and used the track mark button to splice and dice tracks with ease. That seems like such a chore on my deck. I don't think I've ever fully figured it out.
  14. Yeah i hear ya. I guess I'm now just asking opinions as to whether, considering the source (relatively compressed), there's any real world shortcomings in using a portable to record via analogue signal from my tv?
  15. Thanks for the answers. i imagine yes, the tv box is putting out 48khz, but it's in a different room to my deck so is really inconvenient to move. I wonder if analogue would be the way to go, in which case i guess the question still stands - editing aside (and i find it a pain to edit on my deck as it is), would there be any difference in recording analogue via either device, considering they're using the same dsp chip?
  16. I've got a JB940QS (the UK special edition, for what its worth) deck, and I've just bought a N707 portable unit. I picked this particular unit as it's a relatively late generation model, that's fully compatible with any recording i might make on my deck i.e. MDLP etc. It could wind up being a lot more convenient as a recorder. I have a stack of radio recordings saved up on the Hard Drive of my tv's set top box (in the UK, where I am, the BBC broadcasts their radio across the tv airwaves too), and it would be very, very convenient to just stick an optical cable between my tv set top box and the portable and record them all onto MD (real time, of course). So i ask, how much better is recording on my jb940 over the portable? Or are the improvements in sound quality only realised in playback? Factor in the source also, because whilst I'm not sure exactly what the quality of the radio audio coming to my tv box is, it won't be uncompressed.
  17. to be fair - how many of us had gear like MD portables, and even moreso expensive personal cassette players, made from aluminium cases that were held together with screws - only to realise that after time, half the screws had fallen out? Happened to me all the time.
  18. So you're saying CD to (Type-R deck) LP2 via optical should be ok? Maybe I'm being too hyper analytical. You talk about (pre) mastering to remove frequencies - but I'm guessing that's something you'd need to do on a computer etc.
  19. Yeah I totally understand all this. Like I said I've not really done any mp3 to MD transfers yet - and when I do I'll be doing them optically - though as my deck isn't NetMD or anything, it'll be real time transfers. The only real experimenting I've done is with CD to LP2 optically, and I definitely hear squashing of sibilants and a decrease in presence and dynamics. It's a messy process but my mp3 workflow will likely be iPhone (via Airplay) > Airport Express > Optical to MD. Not quite sure if there's transcoding but I don't think there is, as this method would usually use the DAC in the Airport Express, but I'm bypassing it by using Optical.
  20. is that how it works? i'm not entirely sure, but I would've thought regardless of whether a signal is analogue or digital, if dynamic range has been compressed, it's been compressed - and so whatever frequencies were removed / squashed just aren't there anymore.
  21. I suppose it make sense a little - tho i'm not particularly technical - that if there's less information in the source (i.e. mp3), there's less for LP2 ATRAC to make a mess with.
  22. So as mentioned on countless other threads I just got a JB940 - specifically because it does LP. My intention for using LP2 is for when I get around to archiving radio shows I've recorded onto my television's set top box. However I thought I'd give LP2 a go for recording from CD. It's horrible right? Like it's not actually acceptable to my ears. Cymbals sound like the gurgling of a murky pond. I've read accounts here and there that LP2 really does only suit already compressed sources (like DAB or MP3) and that it works well for them, but obviously it makes a big mess of a dynamic source like CD (and, whilst I've not tried it - presumably also vinyl). Is this people's findings? What do you use LP2 for? Is LP4 just a joke and not even worth considering?
  23. I've left my headphones at work over the weekend, so will see if I can get into the divide feature once I bring them home. I'm sure it can't be that hard but is made more troublesome for me thanks to the sticking AMS wheel. I've spent the weekend experimenting with how best to record playlists from my computer (in the absence of NetMD or anyway to transfer other than actually recording), and I've settled on actually inserting an mp3 of a minute's silence between each song. I don't know if it's a common feature, but the JB940 detects silence, and once it's broken, uses something called Smart Space to delete it and replace it with 3 seconds of its own, and starting a new track once music commences. I tried using mp3s of 3 and 5 seconds, but it didn't seem reliable enough and it would still record songs as one. I know this is all old news, but I'm just figuring it out all over again.
  24. Yeah, I just find the divide thing finicky too - I think my jog wheel is a bit temperamental (it sometimes doesn't register a 'click', and other times might jump multiple steps. So hopefully when I get the right remote (see other thread), it will be much easier.
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