kgallen

MD has a track limit (I think 255) and a total character limit for titles (and with I think a minimum of 7 per track). The titles limit should be pretty hard to hit. I’ve hit it once with an audio test disc that had over 100 very short tracks but very long descriptive titles. I’ll look up the spec - probably in that MD primer doc on minidisc.org ETA - beaten to it!

The master of the house has rung so I shall answer! I’ll answer slightly generically as I don’t own either pieces of kit… The management summary is it’s possible you will stress the PSU and the machine. However I would expect enough design margin in both for it not to be an issue in the lifetime of both. To be sure I’d have to check the spec on the power supply/charger chip in the machine. The issue for me here is that the power supply is single voltage type so I suspect it’s based around a transformer. It’s also likely the output of the PSU is unregulated. This means the output voltage will be load dependent, so measuring the voltage with a high impedance voltmeter will probably give you a high reading and we cannot tell what the voltage will be under the load of the machine and/or charging the battery. However it’s likely to be on the high side but by how much is hard to say. The machine will have a fairly elaborate and undoubtedly well designed power supply circuit that will be deriving the multitude of digital and analogue supplies required inside the machine. Similarly the charger for the battery will be based around a proper charger chip that will assess and charge the battery with the correct voltage and current profile. I would expect both of these to have adequate input supply headroom to tolerate a slightly high input supply. But to be sure the chip specs would need to be checked. I haven’t done any maths here considering supply tolerances to know what the range could be. However I recall we did go into this a little a while back on another thread. The boring advice is to find a charger that suits your local supply. I suspect there are a few Sony power supplies that you could use with appropriate specs. For a short while you could probably get away with the Japanese charger. At user risk.

BearBoy and I have made it to Rookie, and Richard is now at the heady heights of Apprentice! ...and I thought my career promotions were over!

Fantastic! Welcome - we'd like to hear more!

We’re all Newbie 😆

I’m glad everyone is finding us again! 👍

Nope…

Glad you’re back too Richard!

😃😊👌

Fantastic! I like the "forever" bit! 🙂

Thank you! We're delighted to be back, thanks for fixing the site Christopher, much appreciated! Kevin

Main question - are the recordings likely to be Hi-MD or (more likely) standard SP or LP recordings. The latter might make it easier to salvage your music if we can’t get the NH1 to cooperate.

Sort of. The supplied USB cable was broken, that was easily sorted. Need to install M-Crew on some suitable machine, plus the USB drivers. I did try with our main Win10-64 machine and whilst M-Crew would install and run, it couldn't communicate with the device so I guess the required drivers are missing. I think I'll need to install it all on an old XP laptop to have any hope of it working. Also I note from this page that use with the 770 requires a firmware upgrade. I'm not sure if the PCLK I have is already upgraded or if the required firmware update can be found anywhere. Plugged into the 770 nothing happened, although with a replacement USB lead at least the TOSLINK LED on the PCLK lit up. Dunno. Needs some more faffing about with. Any tips and sources for software appreciated!

Sony PCLK-MN10 (CAV-MN10 USB, TOSLINK, 3.5mm, PS/2 "PC-Link" Interface)

They look a little different at the hardware level. PC-Link looks to be real I2C (IIC), with Keyboard overlayed on the same PS/2 connector. Control-A1(II) looks to be a proprietary hardware interface - although admittedly it has similarities to I2C, viz an open collector output with passive pull-up. It may be that the bytes that are sent over these three interfaces are essentially the same. On the 770 the PC-Link, Keyboard and Control-A1(II) have independent connections to the uC. Looking at the uC pinout/datasheet, the PC-Link I2C is served by a dedicated I2C engine in the uC. The Keyboard overlay (KBCLK/KBDATA) uses uC pins that are simple GPIO only and the A1_IN/A1_OUT also look to use GPIO - so these interfaces will be "bit-bashed" in firmware rather than using hardware UART engines.

I'm not going to argue with the boss (he might ban me!) :-D Looks like I need to hit the schematics for the 770 as that seems the machine that has all of these on! The devil is probably in the firmware though. Maybe the 770 was a "more interesting" buy after all!

Yes it seemed to have an annoyingly short life. MD-wise it seems to appear on the 920 (but not the 520) which would be 1998, lasting though the x30 range and I think the 770 (2001) was the last. Not sure about the 640/940 without downloading the manuals. So maybe 8 or so MD decks? CD decks seemed to just drop it, and MD decks migrated to USB and PC-Link connectivity, rather than deck-deck connectivity.

They don't. They stare blankly at me. And then 150 audience also turn and do the same. Then the kids (in the audience) start screaming because the Fairy isn't singing her pretty song which keeps them at bay. British Panto - a daily roller-coaster of fear and near-panic for the cast and production crew. A delight (hopefully) for the audience! The audience love it when things go wrong. They like to see the fear and panic in your eyes.

Correct. Annoying.

Exactly. So far I've been lucky. MD reliability is good (which is one of the reasons I switched back to MD). But I'd like a get-out-of-jail card if I can. With my "new" MDS-E12 and CDP-D12 rack I have in principle a backup machine (2 E12's "on-line" [1xSFX, 1xMusic], plus 1 E12 "backup"). Thus I need a backup disc of both the music and SFX to be able to use should a machine or a disc go down. Probably I'm paranoid! I can do CD-MD dubs with the Tascam MD-CD1 - the material is prepared on a PC, written to CD-R then dubbed to MD. The trouble is the CD-R to MD dub on the MD-CD1 is not fully reliable. I've had dropouts and it's quite common for the titles to get corrupted in the transfer (MD-CD1 firmware is full of titling bugs). So just making another CD-MD dub for a backup is not reliable without listening through the whole disc(s) and spending time correcting the titles on the backup discs (the titles are important as they hold the cue numbers - another reason for using MD. CD-Text is so hit and miss). So it's something I don't always do when I should... As the Sony firmware seems to be much more reliable, an MD-MD dub with titles was my hope... I do tentatively keep looking at the Sony MDX CD-MD combos. But they hold their price on the bay and do I want yet another machine (don't answer that!). Watch me eat my words...

Well ok, so it took me 3 years, but hey ho. Using an MDS-E12, recording a track (or disc) with Copy=Permit, I was able to make 3 generations of digital (TOSLINK) copy of the track using an MDS-JE770 into an MDS-JE530. The point to note here is that I thought the 530 (as a consumer deck) might force the COPY bit on the 1st gen digital copy. It didn't, it still propagates the "copy permit" status which allows further digital copies to be made, even consumer-to-consumer deck as above. Note the 770 and 530 were also connected with Control-A1(II). Unfortunately I couldn't get the titles to copy, even putting the 530 into "CD Sync" with the remote. So I suspect the 770 is not spitting out the MD titles on the Control-A1(II) port. Shame, that's what I really wanted!

I’ll say nothing more than ‘great news’! These things are sent to try us.

Thanks for the Groups info - very interesting. Something I've yet to play with (my list of "to play with" is quite long!). Fantastic! That's what I love here - contributors who will take an extrapolated thought and try it out! Shame it didn't work, but great idea! :-D

Also as it was the issue a couple of posts ago...! Make sure the remote and keyboard don't have buttons pressed!

The titles are stored in the TOC, the audio in the main part of the disc. Regards Groups - this is only on a few later decks and portables I think. It's on my 770. However I don't know whether this is an "on deck" feature or whether it's some information that is stored in the TOC on the disc - I suspect it's the latter, but I don't know anything about how Groups are handled and what the effect is on a non-Groups machine (none I would hope!).