A440

Sony mics tend to cut out the bass--they only go down to 100 Hz, and there are another two octaves of musical bass below that. They're also not very stealthy, they have noticeable self-noise and they're overpriced. The only good thing about them is that they're easy to find at a retail store. If you're outdoors, you might be better off with cardioid microphones that are directional, so you point them at the PA speakers. But look at the frequency response spec. What you want is 20-20,000, like your ears and your MD. A lot of cardioids have the same limitation as the Sonys, cutting off at 100 Hz For all purpose recording, indoor and out, it's best to get a pair of omnis that you can separate--if not the Sound Professionals, then something like them. For one thing, they're smaller and easier to conceal, and for another, they sound fuller and rounder--cardioid recordings can seem strangely backless. Look at the specs, lots of people make mics from the same basic capsules. I know Europeans sell similar ones on Ebay--maybe you could get in touch with Deadwing's guy directly. I'm not particularly thrilled with the design Deadwing got for a few reasons. Plugging directly into the recorder picks up the noise of the unit and puts pressure on the mic jack--you definitely need an extension cable, which is one more connection that can go wrong. Having the two mics in that Y-connector looks cumbersome (and harder to stealth) and separating them further would give you a better stereo image. But the basic mic capsules are probably the same as Sound Pros'--maybe you could get him to make you a custom pair that are just two mics with clips on a wire. If you point them forward rather than sideways, as The Low Volta says, you'll get a perfectly good stereo image. And with the exchange rate what it is, you shouldn't be that concerned about postage....

Can that be true? I thought all the Hi-MD's have on-the-fly. My NHF800 does.

I'll second the AA form factor power supply--not outboard, and rechargeable in the unit. I'll also second having it hold settings from the last recording session and making it easy to have Manual Volume as the default. A mic preamp that can finally handle some bass. Backlit display with artist's name instead of album title as you scroll, and if there's not enough room for characters, make them scroll faster at the very least. Remote-wise, the RM-MC40ELK is almost there, but it needs a Record slider (why did Sony ever get rid of those?) and a way to distinguish buttons by feel, maybe a bumpy one, a smooth one, a triangular one, a T-shaped one (for track) etc. They ought to make their designers use one in the dark. Finally, the complete elimination of SonicStage as a gateway and encryptor for transfers. Drag and drop of files, albums, folders and anything else, in every MD format old and new, with firmware smart enough to figure it out once they get where they're going. Compatibility with Winamp, Windows Media Player, Musicmatch, Realplayer, iTunes and other playlist software. USB 2.0 and maybe even Firewire, with MAC compatibility taken for granted, too. Oh, and 3GB super-Hi-MDs, so you can get the whole concert in PCM without changing discs.

It looks just like an NH600. Is it any larger than that?

Listen to the samples on that page, which all use bass rolloff. They're pitiful. The bass rolloff makes them sound all tinny, like a clock radio, because there's not enough bass and too much midrange. You're better off without the bass rolloff and running them into Line In or into Mic-In with an attenuator (Radio Shack Headphone Volume Control, $6.59, see the pinned thread at the top of this topic.) With the battery box they should be able to handle the volume--it's the MD's mic preamp you have to worry about first. There are live recordings in the Gallery (top of this page) and at the www.yahoo.com mailbox livefrommd, password 1minidisc1 .

The frequency response of that mic is 100--15,000 Hz, which means you're not getting a lot of the bass that drives the MD preamp over the edge. I've never used that mic, but I would guess that if you're going through an attenuator and you have it set to Low Sens, then you are probably safe at 20/30. While everyone else is playing with their cell phones and cameras, see if you can sneak a peek at the level during the show--it should be between the two dashes. If it's above the right-hand dash, you're in trouble, and below the left-hand dash will be good but a bit quiet. Yes, you can crank it up in Audition, but it's better to get as much as you can in the first place (without overloading of course). Hope he does "Red, Red Wine" and "I'm a Believer."

Take a look at www.soundprofessionals.com www.microphonemadness.com www.reactivesounds.com and get the best mini binaurals that are within your budget. Get a pair that you can separate and clip onto a shirt, hat, eyeglasses, etc. You'll get excellent recordings even with the Sound Professionals BMC-2 basic binaurals. You can hear various recordings and mics in the Gallery at the top of the page. How do you tweak a CD player to record?????

Are you getting playback through your speakers/headphone when you play back through SS? Look at your volume control (little speaker icon on bottom right) and make sure Wave and Volume Control are not way down or muted.

I can't read German, but that looks like the right sort of thing. The attenuator I use is under my name--jack, volume control, plug--and yours looks similar. You'll have to try it--they're not made for this use, and it's possible it's got the wrong resistance. But an English user found that the headphone volume control from Maplins did the same job as my (American) one from Radio Shack, so if that's a headphone volume control, it should probably work.

I mean the $6 volume control from Radio Shack, but for the kinds of sounds you mention you might be able to do without it. You'll just have to try and see. True, you can't monitor with in-ear binaurals, but basically you just want to make sure the level isn t peaking by watching the meter. To anyone's knowledge, the recorders all work the same. No, I haven't used those mics with that recorder, but I'm confident you'd get the same results. The BMC-2's I use, and a lot of other microphones, all seem to use the same basic Panasonic capsules--WM61--or something with identical specs. The in-ear binaurals have the same specs too. Take a look in the Gallery (link at the top center of this page) There are a lot of ambient recordings, with information on what mics and settings were used.

You don't just push the Record button, you have to push the red Record button and the Play (>) button together. (Obviously with the Hold slider off.) If that doesn't start recording--it will say Line Recording if you don't have a mic plugged in--then it's defective and should go back to Sony.

Note to users in the U.K. : deadwing has discovered that the Maplins chain has its own Headphone Volume Control that also works as an attenuator. http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?Module...ldID=6&doy=17m4

If you're using SonicStage 2.3 get .wav converter from Sony. http://sonyelectronics.sonystyle.com/walkmanmc/wav.html Highlight the .oma file in My Library, convert it to .wav and all the idiotic rights and keys and DRM are gone. You can then convert it back to .mp3 or any other usable, transferrable format. If you upgrade to SonicStage 3.x, then .wav converter is built in.

Stealth is my priority for mics, so I'm using little binaurals, Sound Professionals BMC-2 . If you want a handheld mic, and you're not worried about stealth, you could look at www.soundprofessionals.com, www.microphonemadness.com and perhaps a pro musician's store like www.samash.com or www.guitarcenter.com . One-point stereo mics--two channels in one enclosure--don't give you as enveloping a stereo recording as two mics that you can separate like your ears. You can get in-ear binaurals from Sound Professionals or Microphone Madness that are stealthy and pretty close to what-you-hear-is-what-you-get. Self-noise is one of the most expensive things to cure in a microphone. Super pro models like Schoeps are quiet, but way out of my budget. Two other things: 1) Forget about the little mics attached to the plug that sit on the recorder. You'll get lots of whirring and clicking from the MD unit. 2) Sony mics are not the best price/quality ratio.

I'm talking very basic binaurals: Sound Professionals BMC-2, itty bitty things in a mini-gumdrop-shaped rubber housing. Sometimes Sound Pros has them on sale on their own site for $29, or around the same price on eBay (search for soundpro99 , which is the name they use as an ebay seller). The soft rubber housings allow me to use this clip: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller...u=217592&is=REG which fits snugly around the tapered rubber end. Some ofther mics that use the same capsules aren't that easy to find clips for. They are stealthy, secure in those clips and they sound good. Core Sound apparently uses the same basic mic capsules for its binaurals--they have exactly the same specs--but claims to do some extra tweaking and to make sure they're well-matched pairs. The clips on the Core Sound cardioids are great, so I assume binaural ones are also good. But the price is higher. If you want to hear some recordings I and others have made with various mics, you can go to the Gallery here or go to the Yahoo mailbox (mail.yahoo.com) livefromminidisc with the password 1minidisc1 . Greenmachine, I changed to Lame's alt-preset-extreme, for higher-fidelity mp3, and uploaded it to the gallery.

I assume you mean the dbpoweramp settings. Lame encoder, VBR min160- max 320 Stereo, 44100 Hz. I'm as suprised as you are about the cutoff at 13Khz. The EQ curve I used with Audacity was flat (after 100 hz) up to 20K. Core Sound is reputable, and if they're saying the frequency response is 40-18K, I would believe them. There are a lot of people who use cardioids for music, and Sound Professionals' FAQ recommends cardioids as the "if you only have one mic" choice. But maybe they're talking about cardioids at twice the price, or people are so relieved not to have the preamp overload that they're willing to accept the lack of bass. Beats me.

You've pretty much summed it up yourself. Track marking is a great advantage of MD. It was a journalist who introduced me to MD, and now that I'm aware of them, I see lots of journalists using them. Whether it's DAT or MD, PCM is PCM--the only difference is the MD's mic preamp. Since you can stay all-digital with MD, you're trading the very minor preamp noise for the very minor digital-analogue-digital transfer noise. No one should notice either one on the radio. If you want to be ultra-safe with your recordings, you can still do a realtime copy that's digital: Connect via USB, play back through Sonic Stage and record with the TotalRecorder soundcard recorder in realtime. Look at the uploading FAQs. And then you can upload via SonicStage once you have the safety. When I've had occasional upload problems with SonicStage 3.0, it hasn't destroyed the track on the disc. It has tagged the track as uploaded but left it playable on the disc to be rescued, if necessary, by TotalRecorder. The MD asks you a few times if you really want to erase something, so you have to really work at accidentally erasing a day's recording. The one-upload restriction is a pain, but MD has a lot of convenience factors in its favor. Why not try recording some inessential stuff with your RH10 and see if you like the new way of working? If your DAT habits are really ingrained, then you might want to stay with it, but I suspect you'll become an MD convert.

Thanks for the spectrum analysis. Very interesting. I recorded at Hi-SP, not PCM, because I expected a long set. Then I used dbpoweramp with Lame to encode to mp3. The 11K peak could be a resonance of the room, or it may be in the mics. It could also be some quirk in Audacity's Amplify function. "The Low Cost Stealthy Cardioid microphones have a frequency response of from 40 Hz to 18 kiloHertz. They have a rising frequency response over that range with the exception of a slight (2 dB) peak between 9 kHz and 12 kiloHertz and a bass response fall off of roughly 6 dB per octave starting at 100 Hertz." If I don't send these back, I'm only going to use them for truly noisy rooms and for music without a lot of bass. A lot of people see that cardioids are more expensive and assume that they are thus automatically better. Cardioids are clearly for a specialized function: directionality. These are bottom-of-the-line, it's true, but from this experience I'm more convinced than ever that omnis are the way to go.

SonicStage 2.0 is awful. If it has a tool to backup your library (look under Tools or Options or whatever for "backup tool") then do that. Then uninstall it completely according to this FAQ http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=8071 and download SonicStage 3.1 either from Sony http://sonicstage.connect.com/SonicStageInstaller.exe or from here: http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=9845 The new SonicStage should run a lot better.

In this case, the newest format is the best. Hi-MD, unlike previous MD's, records in uncompressed PCM and uploads to your computer. Previous MD's only record at best in SP (compressed) and don't upload. They're lovable--I've still got two of them--but they're pretty much obsolete. Although everyone who uses MD gets annoyed by their quirks, overall they are extremely impressive gadgets. For the moment, Hi-MD is a one-brand market: Sony. The recording quality and available settings are the same on all the Hi-MD's--what varies are features, display, battery and the built-in headphone amp. There's a Browser tab at the top of the main page that lets you compare features with all the available models. I have a first-generation Hi-MD (from last year), the MZ-NHF800. I chose it because it takes a regular AA battery (or rechargeable AA battery) rather than the rechargeable gumstick in the fancier, thinner NH900. Most of the gumstick models (except the NH1, which only runs on its rechargeable battery) also accept an outboard AA, but it's bulkier that way. I'm very fond of my NHF800, and have recorded everything from a cappella church music to salsa to thrash metal to peeper frogs in the yard. You can still find the last of the MZ-NHF800 at www.minidisco.com. Kurisu, this board's administrator, is just as fond of his MZ-NH900. For about the same price, you can also get one of the second-generation units--the MZ-RH series. The choices with mic input are the MZ-RH910 and the MZ-RH10, which has a lighted display on the unit if you're recording in the dark. If you have friends with older MDs, the RH series (unlike the NH) doesn't record in the old MD formats (SP, LP2, LP4), although it does play them back. That probably won't matter to you, since those old formats don't upload to the computer anyway. (Tradeoff: the RH series imports mp3s without re-compressing them.) Basically, a Hi-MD will reproduce as good a signal as your mic puts in, plus a tiny bit of noise from the mic preamp. The preamp noise is completely negligible in moderate to loud recordings, slightly noticeable if you're recording very quiet things. (Mics have self-noise too.) To do the best job on the quietest sounds, you'd probably want to get a pocket preamp and record through line-in. The mic preamp also has problems with loud bass-y sounds--you can alleviate them with a $7 attenuator. If you want to do a quick recording, there's perhaps a 1-2-second delay between pushing Record and starting--not bad. All the recording controls are through menus. Mic Sensitivity can be set to default to High or Low (and changed in the menu). The annoying thing about Sony is that you cannot set Recording Volume to default to manual; it always reverts to Automatic Gain Control. Manual volume purists quickly learn the four-click menu sequence to switch. If you're trying to record ambient sounds on the fly, though, AGC might not be so bad. With manual volume, you can change volume as you record, though except for the RH10 it's not always easy to read the (unlighted LCD) display. There's a little learning curve, and then suddenly you're making great recordings.

If you're going to be recording music, try the low sensitivity--maybe you can do without an attenuator. If you're also going to be using them for speech and quiet sounds, get the high, and then use the attenuator when needed. PCM recording and uploading via USB with no loss: yes, with all Hi-MD recorders. It will take a while to upload because it's a slow USB 1.1 connection, and when it's uploaded you have to "convert to .wav" to get it out of SonicStage's encryption. But this is one promise Hi-MD actually does live up to. When you get the unit, install the latest version of SonicStage (3.1) rather than the one on the disc that comes with it.

I agree with you, greenmachine, about the bass rolloff. In theory I had always been dubious about losing a chunk of the music in order to get it into the MD--to me, attenuation was a better choice than rolloff. There is, however, a big business in bass rolloffs, so I had entertained the distant possibility that I was wrong. And the ability to focus forward in a noisy room tempted me toward the cardioids. Anyway, here's that other hard-rock cardioid recording from the ideal spot, right in front of the soundboard. http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?act=m...&cmd=si&img=505 This time I used EQ to compensate for the limited bass. Have to say, it's a nice clear recording.

Line-In works either optical or analog. You should have control of manual level for line-in, but keep it high because the battery box is providing little or no amplification.

The AC adaptor is known to introduce hum. Battery life is so good on MD recorders that even one fresh generic AA battery should get you through a few hours of recording, so skip the adaptor. I never noticed a hum on my MZ-N707, but I didn't record a lot of acoustic music on it. What kind of mics are you using?

The battery box is meant to go through Line-in unless you're recording something extremely quiet. Which Core Sound cardioids are they? Low-sensitivity ones can run directly into mic-in without the battery box. With high-sensitivity mics, either go mic-batt box--Line-in or mic-attenuator-mic-in. But try it first with just the mic into mic-in and see if that works without overloading. If it does, you're good to go.