MDX-400

Sounds to me like you're playing ATRAC3plus @ 352kbps and not ATRAC Advanced Lossless Because there should be no bitrate mentioned with ATRAC AL. Additionally, the bitrate for ATRAC AL should be variable, not constant. When you encode ATRAC Lossless it makes two versions of the file. One, the lossless version; and, two, the lossy version in whatever you select in the dropdown box. That lossy file that gets encoded coincidentally is the file that goes to the device, not the lossless version. Now I'm not saying that it isn't possible for a device to support lossless but from what you're saying (mention of the 352kbps) it sounds like you're just transferring the ATRAC3plus file to the device (as happens with every other device) and not the lossless file.

$77 US? That's ludicrous! However, I was thinking the original adapter could not be as cheap as mentioned above... Again, I would do what I said and try using a universal switching adapter instead, as it will probably work out okay...

Blu-Ray and HD-DVD (in their current forms) are both the best thing ever, IMO. See, like Joe, I can post two-liners too--they don't mean much but hey it's distracting/pointless to do it

Sounds like part of the mechanism is out of alignment or has been compressed or warped somehow. Strange for a NOS unit, yes, but not unheard of especially considering shipping and storage that it's been through since it was produced. What I would do is disassemble it and try to find out why that is happening and fix it. But that's what I would do. If you're not comfortable with doing that, all I can suggest is a repair shop (though at that point you're probably going to spend more than what you paid and/or more than buying a newer better deck). As for the service manual note that S/Ms never give specific info for fixes. They just show the wiring and block diagrams as well as assembly details and other technical info (such as calibration procedures, etc.). In other words it shows you all the technical details but it doesn't actually tell you how to "fix" anything. Think of it as a guide with information that has to be "interpreted" by a technician. Interestingly that part is not replaceable (that's what the not supplied text means--they don't sell it as a part). Therefore to repair that problem you're going to have to manually do something to make it work properly. If it's a metal part you could try gently bending it one way or the other (if that is possible) or you might have to tighten or loosen screws of that part or other parts and even use shims (washers) if something isn't aligning properly.

I don't use Hi-MD at all, lol. I have DH10P that I bought not-too-long-ago and I transferred a couple things for fun/testing, took some pics for the hell of it, etc. but it's not really too useful for me, especially considering I'm not a big user of portables and nothing else I have can play Hi-MDs. I must add to all this, however, that Hi-MD is super slowww. I was actually amazed at how slow it is, LOL. Benched it with HD-Tach and though I can't remember the numbers I was thinking "floppy drive" when I saw how long it took and how low the transfer numbers were. I mean I knew it wasn't fast but I didn't actually realise just how "not fast" that meant, lol. I'm sure it's very useful for recording, with the 1GB capacity and all, it's just that I can't do that as I only have a DH10P (which is a downloader)...

While this was true in 1992 and perhaps even 1999, today's switching adapters are much more precise in their output voltages and have better tolerances for variation. The MZ-1/2P adapter is a brick to be sure. A large transformer-based adapter with the 10.5V 1000mA output as stated. Most transformer-based adapters have very wide fluctuations in their outputs. Meaning an adapter that is rated for 9V will probably float over 12V with no load on it. As a load is applied the voltage goes down and it will begin to stabilise in output as the current draw gets closer to the rated current output for the adapter. A switching adapter, on the other hand, will usually actually put out close to the voltage it's rated for, load or not. So using the float and load voltages for the MZ-1 adapter and applying them carefully with settings from a switching adapter may result in a better outcome than the fried MZ-1 documented on the EB so long ago. If you get a switching adapter with multiple settings (universal) and err on the side of caution with the voltage settings, I'm sure you could get a compatible voltage for the MZ-1 to work with. There is some danger in this (as we've seen the case documented on the EB) as the MZ-1/2P don't have any internal power protection as do new units (today's units will flash "Hi DC-in" or give a similar message if slightly overvoltaged). Overvoltage a 1 or 2P and you'll likely fry it. So I would use caution but I don't think you're guaranteed to burn it out as you would have done in the past, trying different transformer adapter voltages. If I had a switching universal I'd try it myself on my 2P, but unfortunately I don't have one and the only switching adapters I do have are not enough voltage...

So do I. Particularly the uninformed part. Chris Ayres should not be living it up as a journalist, instead he should be a homeless person trying to find food. If that was the case and he was as good at finding food as he is for doing research he'd have died of starvation long ago. Does this idiot even realise that when he states the [betamax] "two-year lag behind VHS" is a retarded statement considering Beta was released to market before VHS? Seriously, why does this guy have a job writing articles? Plus Beta did not sink as fast as he'd have us believe. Especially if you consider countries other than the USA. But of course he couldn't possibly consider that considering he didn't research his article at all right? And as if he goes on about "claims are still made" in a manner such as to imply those making such claims don't know what they're talking about. If he'd actually look at the technical details he would see it was "technilogically superior" and most of it's innovations within-format were also ahead of the VHS equivalents. As for LaserDisc I can't really disagree too much but he didn't say much about it. I'm sure he didn't do any research there either. Finally the joke (or surely it has to be considered a joke) that MD "enjoyed a brief bite" is pretty funny. I mean does he realise MD was around since 1992? Though it is probably not as popular as it once was, it's 2007 now and it's still going. That makes like 15 years. How long has the iPod been around again? 6 years? But I guess 15 years is "brief" in comparison to that Even if you take the year iPod was introduced and cut MD off right then (ignoring that the 1st gen iPods were not popular) we'd have 9 years for MD and 6 years for iPod. But yes 9 years is a relatively brief period compared to 6. Mr. Ayres either failed math class or english class because he either doesn't understand 9 > 6 or what the word brief means--given his absolutely uninformed article I'd actually think it was both. In closing Mr. Ayres I do hope that your employer(s) realise the exact level of your incompetence and fire you, leaving you as the homeless person you deserve to be. There (on the streets) you will probably find people that are far smarter than you and simply had some tough breaks in life. It's ashame considering you on the other hand have clearly gotten far too far on your low level of intelligence. The only turkey here is Chris Ayres.

^Not to mention Hi-MD, in general, is slow as hell. I'm sure with modern units people would be more likely to favour flash-based recorders over Hi-MD. Not trying to be "mean" to Hi-MD but I'm sure everyone will admit that it is slowwwwww when talking about computer transfers.

Uhm I hardly think this makes BluRay obsolete in any form, shape, or way. First of all Blu-Ray needs not be played on a PS3 (your assumption of that and your question about the Xbox makes it kinda clear that you've got little understanding of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as it is). HDD recorders are nothing new or innovative at this point in time, so I don't get where Sony's lack of innovation comes in. Furthermore optical disc formats and HDDs have co-existed since the very first CD-ROM disc/drive was used/introduced. HDDs were always faster and in the last 5-10 years they've always been quite cheap, per unit storage. You could record TV broadcasts (whether broadcast, digital cable, PPV, satillite, whatever) since before TiVo was invented. Did those things make DVDs obsolete? Yet you're telling us a device with a HDD and a DVD drive somehow makes Blu-Ray obsolete? LOL you're joking right? Blu-Ray makes DVD obsolete not the other way around. HDDs are a different topic altogether. Perhaps one day downloading or recording content will make optical discs obsolete for distributing movies and other video content, however that day is a long long way a way IMO. CDs are still selling but we've had services like iTunes and the like (along with illegal downloading) for perhaps over 8 years now, with at least 5 of those of it being "popular". Plus your talk of "adults" being more inclined to use your HDD box of the future being more likely? Okay, riiiight. Nevermind that the majority of downloaders both legal and illegal are the younger generation. Who do you think is buying most of the CDs and DVDs these days if not adults? If anything the Pioneer recorder you have is the obsolete one here. I mean you could compare that to a PC of the HTPC variety and find that you could do far more with the PC and it would be more cost effective. The price of the 940HX is coming up for me at around 1000 pounds. 1000 pounds??? LOL. That's like $2000 US. Do you know what kind of HTPC you could build with that money? I'll tell you this much it will have more capability than a simple 500 GB HDD and DVD burner. Even considering such a box would cost only perhaps half that marketed in the US (as things are cheaper in the US), you could still build a pretty competent HTPC that's going to do more for you than just be a set-top recorder unit. How on earth does a DVD recorder + HDD (which has been available for years, mind you) make Blu-Ray (cutting edge optical disc technology) obsolete? Have you been smoking something? What then, would you consider a Blu-Ray recorder + HDD? A miracle? LOL. Before you call Blu-Ray obsolete, do us a favour and come back to reality.

You mean an MD-Data drive or that NetMD drive that was included with VAIO MX PCs?

And what about the fact that this^ is utter nonsense? You could say the same thing about MD units with heavy use--the pickups don't last forever you know At the same time either could last several years with no problems as well.

Just another clarification here. SS doesn't do anything to the quality of the MP3s or alter the basic data in the file in anyway. It only "wraps" the MP3 for use with the portable device. It's the MD unit that is altering the performance of the MP3 through the way it plays it back. So it's technically not the tracks transferred by SS that are affected but rather the Hi-MD unit that is affecting the tracks' playback. The fact that storing MP3s on the Hi-MD in mass-storage mode and playing them back with another device is fine, should come as no surprise at all.

No. The JE510 can't even do MDLP. I'm amazed at how often this question comes up really. "Can this MD unit made in 1997 use Hi-MD discs [that weren't even invented until 2004]?" LOL. Well what you could do would be to use standard MDs and MD-mode on the RH10. But I don't think the RH10 can stand-alone record in MD mode as it's 2nd Gen Hi-MD. So you'd have to go through SS. But then you can't do "true SP" transfers over USB anyway, and the JE510 doesn't support MDLP (as mentioned). So in other words to get a disc to work, you'd end up with quality less than LP2 (ATRAC3 @ 132kbps) and only 80mins of capacity. Not worth going to the trouble for at all.

Back from the Dead!!!!

Though it doesn't fix your problem, it may be an alternate remedy... Try using the remote perhaps? If the panel buttons/controls don't work the remote may still work fine

This thread is still going??? LOL. This thread was made way back in the day (by myself, btw) to help people get exactly what the thread title suggests. However, in this day and age I feel this thread is fairly pointless--pretty much every modern PC/motherboard will have a digital audio output built-in. Most of these are based on AC97 codecs and the like, therefore you don't get 44.1kHz output but rather the 48kHz rate of AC97, regardless of what the sound file you're playing is. (You can fool with stuff like kernel streaming and "ASIO" to try to get non sample rate converted audio, but usually you're stuck.) Still up-sampled-to-48kHz digital audio is going to be better than not having any digital output at all. I don't think there are actually any decent computers these days that don't have digital audio out. So if you don't have that, your PC is probably outdated, lol. An easy solution would just be to get a more modern computer. Some motherboards require a simple adapter (plug-in type thing which mates to a slot connector) or dongle to get the digital out going, and these are usually cheaply available on eBay, etc. This thread may serve the purpose of reference or perhaps helping those with older computers get a digital audio out for use with MD, but it's largely out of date now IMO. For one thing people are either using NetMD (MDLP or Hi-MD) to transfer sound to their MD so digital outputs aren't really as necessary or needed as before. Another thing to note is that the RH1 allows uploading of SP recordings, negating a digital input for transferring things to the computer. As for getting sound from DVDs, as someone asked, that isn't that hard... However you need to output the sound in 2-ch PCM stereo, not one of the multi-channel DVD formats (DD/DTS). Once you do that you shouldn't have many problems recording the sound to an MD.

It might be more your grip on reality (or lack thereof) than "Agent Smith" that is causing your alleged hearing changes

Personally I would not take off the cores. Wasn't there just recently a thread about the core on the remote cord of the MC40ELK remote; which, when removed, created a hum added to recording?

You're correct there, but you're forgetting that on MD portables, this is not the case. This is beacuse that jack is used for both analog line in (which requires the metal contacts) and the optical connection. However that^ could bring another explanation. It saves space this way. You have analog line input and digital input all in the same jack. Perhaps you could have electical S/PDIF but then you'd have to switch something in the menu/software on the player in order to switch between the types. I wonder what kind of awful noise you'd get if you accidentally recorded a digital signal as if it were an analog one? Perhaps to avoid that situation, and to save space, the optical connection was preferred. What would be really quite cool would be a three-in-one input--one having switchable analog line, coax. digital as well as optical all in one jack! However again, it's not going to happen, lol.

It's commonly known that electrical S/PDIF (i.e. Coaxial) is better than it's Toslink (i.e. Optical) sibling. Toshiba apparently didn't give Toslink that much bandwidth, so that's the whole thing right there--a coaxial connection has higher theoretical bandwidth (though it's quite arguable/argued whether that's important for any of the uses we have for these interfaces anyway). However, where coaxial connections are subject to EMI/RFI interference, ground loops, etc. in the cabling, Toslink is impervious to such degratation/alteration of the signal through it's cabling. Optical cables, OTOH, are susceptible to what people call "jitter"... Technically, if we're just talking about the signal transmission with no external variables, coaxial is the "better" connection without a doubt. Note however that you'll never hear a difference between the two unless something is seriously wrong with the connection/cabling/equipment to make something different about the sound. There are people (usually so-called audiophiles) that "pooh-pooh" optical connections claiming some kind of huge noticeable differences in sound. Pure nonsense if you ask me--it's mainly in their heads in that they know coax. is technically better therefore it must sound better As for why they didn't use a miniplug version of coax. S/PDIF, I'm not sure about that. Could be a variety of reasons, perhaps stemming from the "coolness factor" optical cables have (or at least used to have) to the fact that some people might use cheap cables (non 75-ohm) of questionable quality, to make the connection. Toslink cables on the other hand, at least at the time, were at least of good/consistent quality. In any case, it's the way it is and given the roadmap/lifespan of both optical and electrical S/PDIF is near the end (as well as MD for that matter, lol), it's safe to say there never will be a miniplug version of coax. S/PDIF.

Yes I believe they were available in the US, but they were quite rare. I'm almost certain the deck was never marketed in Canada (though a US one would obviously work fine in Canada). The voltage converter would work, just be sure it's of the correct amperage handling for the deck. Note that it might introduce some electrical noise to the AC so it might be a less than optimal way of doing things for an ES-level deck. Of course the power filtering in the ES deck will be very good anyway, but introducing AC noise is never a good idea. You could always try to obtain the 120V parts for the machine and swap them out, however being an ES deck I don't think it is going to be cheap.

To clear this up, there is no "false zero-sectors" involved in transferring SP from SonicStage. It is true that it is "fake SP" when you transfer to "SP" with SS but not in the way you're making it out to be. SS will only transfer to SP to a device by sending audio from an ATRAC3 at 132kbps (LP2) "original". The recorder will then transcode this into ATRAC (292kbps, original) so it is in the SP format. In otherwords SP via SS is actually worse than transferring LP2 because of the transcoding loss. The resultant SP track is still SP in everyway (there's no sectors skipped or any nonsense like that--a track like that would not play on an SP machine at all), but the track was encoded from an ATRAC3 132kbps source, not a full-quality PCM source. By comparison, transferring MDLP to the device is entirely different. What happens is SS encodes the original (be it CD or whatever) to ATRAC3 and then that data is directly sent to the recorder to write to the disc natively. If the ATRAC3/3plus file is not ATRAC3 132kbps then SS will transcode that (unless you have the original to re-encode it to ATRAC3/132) and then transfer to the device at the proper ATRAC3 bitrate for MDLP. For those transfers the recorder does nothing, it simply writes data. For an SP transfer the recorder has to encode the audio stream it's given into ATRAC. There is no way to create a true SP track via USB on any MD unit, Hi-MD or not; the obscure and uber-expensive 3rd-party-modified MD-Data deck that once existed notwithstanding. Now the other part of confusion here (which greenmachine seems to have cleared up but I'll just explain a bit more) is the stand-alone pure recorder aspect of creating an SP track. Any MD unit that can record SP on a standard MD using via it's own means (i.e. not with a computer connection) through line, optical, or mic input is creating a "True SP" track. All MD recorders can do this (note that downloaders are not considered recorders), with the exception of 2nd Gen Hi-MD units which could not record on standard MDs in a stand-alone situation. Therefore they are not capable of recording True SP. The RH1 has that feature restored and stand-alone recordings on regular MDs can be made with that as well, meaning True SP capability is there as well. However note NONE of this has anything to do with the difference you might be hearing in the same SP disc you mentioned before. If that disc was stand-alone recorded, in the SP format, from a full-quality PCM (16/44.1/stereo/1411kbps) source then it is a true SP disc/track and one at the highest quality it can be given the ATRAC encoder revision of what recorded it. Playing that back on the R900 and RH910 has nothing to do with either recorder's ability or inability to record true SP. Those differences might come from many things including the headphones amp, quality of other electronics/circuits inside the units, as well as the ATRAC decoder/encoder chip. Rest assured however that all main ATRAC encoder/decoder ICs in MD units can decode ATRAC1 data. Whether there is some flaw or shortcoming of the IC decoding original ATRAC on Hi-MD units I don't know--it's a possiblity of course. But this is unreleated to SonicStage and "fake SP" otherwise.

Most of those things are scams of some sort. Either some pyramid business or whatever. There might be cases where they work for some people but other people are getting screwed at the same time, no doubt. Best bet is to stay away from them, IMO. The old saying "if it seems to good to be true, it is" holds here...

Yeah that's the seller I meant. Feedback looks okay, so I think you should be good. At first I was thinking some of that stuff has to be counterfeit/fake but I don't think there's such thing as a counterfeit remote lol. So yeah it's well priced but there's shipping costs too. I haven't personally ordered from them, no, but if you look at their feedback it isn't too bad I don't think...

Oh yeah, battery's done eh? Really that shouldn't happen with the switch OFF but Li-Ion does indeed lose it's capactiy all on it's own, particularly at higher temperatures The eBay auctions I bring up (on eBay.com) are mainly from the same seller. Looks like different seller names on some of them but it's pretty clear it's the same seller, LOL. None of those auctions indicate other ways to pay than PayPal but you could always email the seller to ask. There's a couple other sellers, though their prices are higher (still not as high as Sony I'd think). Those ones do indicate other ways to pay (like money order, etc.) so you could always try buying one from one of those sellers too...