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King Ghidora

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Everything posted by King Ghidora

  1. The devices designed to record more than play are pretty much all drag and drop. I guess I should have been more clear about that. It's the consumer driven players that pretty much all have their own clunky software. There are exceptions to this of course but they really aren't very popular at this point. That's why the music industry hasn't raised a fuss about them. It's the iPods and the original Nomads and early iRiver's that were not drag and drop. Many of these companies are releasing drag and drop capable devices already. Archos makes one. iRiver's can be converted to drag and drop I believe. And newer Nomad's are also drag and drop. The device industry has definitely dragged it's feet to keep the recording industry off their backs but I believe we are already seeing the loss of control of things by the recording industry.
  2. Loading music on an iPod isn't so quick either. The transfer is pretty fast once you get it started but the software for iPods is every bit as clunky as SonicStage. Maybe even more so. I'm not so sure that there will never be a drag and drop audio player. Eventually the bone heads that run the music industry could lose their grip on things. Right now there is a top 40 song that has never been released on CD and has no connection with any music company. It's strictly a download. If we start to see more of that then the stranglehold the cartel has on things could be broken. Those jerks have had their way for too long. The payola scandals should be enough to make our government see they have sold out the public airwaves to a bunch of crooks. They call us pirates if we copy a song that we paid for but they break the law and the government helps them do it. If the playlists on radio stations weren't influenced so much by the record companies there would be a huge market for independently produced music. Let's face it. The recording companies have a lock on what gets played so they have a lock on the free advertisement they get for their products. They don't want to pay for real quality so we get a steady diet of crud on the radio. Back when there was good music on the radio the artists were able to demand a lot of money for what they did. Now the record companies get the big chunk of it because they control distribution and the airwaves. They keep the artists on a short leash because they can kill their careers with the stroke of a pen. If we could get independently produced music on the airwaves we would see a big increase in quality because actual competition would take place. The upshot of this would be that the government would be forced to stop caving in to what the recording industry wants. That's what I hope will happen and I think we're starting to see it already. The days of big recording corporations controlling everything are almost over. They are losing money now big time because they can't control what happens on the net and they can't keep people interested in the crap they put out. When the money dries up the control over portable players and recorders will dry up too IMO. I hope Sony Music goes bankrupt myself. They have screwed the public for far too long already. Does anyone think $20 for a $1 product is fair? Does anyone think payola controlled radio promoting that $1 product over the public airwaves is fair? I don't. If I could get my music played 3 times an hour on a dozen local radio stations I could probably sell CD's too and I stink as a musician (but that doesn't seem to matter considering what's being marketed on the radio these days).
  3. I already addressed long term storage. I don't think anyone is going to be using flash media for that for a long time though it could happen in the future. I believe people will transfer their recordings to optical media just as many already do. The price of storage on optical is vastly less than MD plus the installed base is huge. If you are a person who stores on MD I strongly suggest that you back up your data to optical because you could lose all of your data if your MD players all fail and they can't be replaced. There's a lot less chance of that with optical. Ideally a person would create new backups of optical after a few years because optical can and will fail after a while. But considering the cost of CDR media that still comes out a small fraction of the cost of storing on MD. I actually don't trust the projected storage time of any media. I've seen things that were supposed to last 50 years last only 2 years. If you have important data you might want to back it up to tape because it is the only media that has a track record of lasting a long time.
  4. I don't think the current flash recorders are going to kill MD Russell. It's the 2008 and 2009 models that I think will have serious advantages over MD. We're already seeing 4 gig cards too. That means the capacity for multiple tracks for musicians. But the musicians I know are already choosing either hard drive based equipment or multi-track flash drives. I use MD for recording a band but my main business is video production. I put lavalier mics on people and stick a HIMD in their pocket. I recently bought another MD because right now they can't be beat in a bang for the buck contest. But there are limitations that we all are aware of for MD. Just like me any reporter who uses MD knows what can happen if something goes wrong before the TOC is written to the disc. You won't have a recording. Flash players can get around that (I don't know if they do currently of if the manufacturers will have enough sense to implement it but I know MD has a problem in this area and Sony has so far refused to address it). I think this problem alone will be enough to hurt MD in the future. I thought we were talking about the future of MD. Compring the current crop of recorders to MD isn't really in the spirit of that. I'm looking at what can easily be done with flash recorders in the future. Look at the way cameras have progressed over the past 5 years. If we see that kind of progression in audio recorders MD will be dead. And I think we will see that happen. I just think we'll see great improvements which will outstrip what Sony will be willing to do with MD. In fact I see Sony jumping on the flash drive based recorder bandwagon soon.
  5. I think the market is in for a big shakeup. Sure flash cards are hard to keep up with but picture game cartridges with multiple memory chips inside. People who want to do portable recording are already leaving MD in large numbers. They aren't leaving for Ipods. They'e leaving for Zoom H4's and Edirol R-09's. Once someone gets the idea to remove the mics from such devices they will increase their sales considerably. People don't want to be locked into a single mic and a mic attached to the body of the recorder reduces the capacity to do stealth recording. They just won't fit in your pocket even if you want to record with a different mic plus they don't have remotes which make stealth recording much easier. We're in a time of flux now. HIMD will be around for a while yet but the writing is on the wall. Flash drive recorders are the future IMO. Right now companies are making the same kind of blunders that Sony does. Recorders with mics that are attached to the body of the recorder and other small issues have hurt the sales of the flash recorders IMO. If someone comes along and makes an Ipod size recorder that does true 24 bit audio (or higher) and allows you to swap out flash cards then HIMD will soon be dead. Permanent storage will be on CDR like it already is for many people who do mobile recording. That's how I do things when I record the band I work with. I can give all the band members copies of a CDR because they all have players. Storing audio on MD's is still way more expensive than CDR too. I know there are dedicated HIMD fans that do it anyway but all those $.20 blank CDR's are hard to compete with. I hope in 5 years that I have a very high quality audio, flash based recorder that allows swapping cards or even cards in a cartridge i.e. game cartridges. If I can record 10 hours of music on a cartridge then transfer with ease to a computer for editing then I can't even conceive of a better setup. I think that might be why they are dragging their feet and including things that hurt their products because they will need some room to improve so they can sell you a new one in a few years. If they sell a perfect recorder they will essentially be putting themselves out of business and we are in sight of a perfect recorder IMO. Unless they build in device failures after a certain amount of time there will be no reason to ever buy a new recorder once we get a device like I described. If anyone can suggest an easy to accomplish upgrade to a machine like that good enough to make people buy a whole new recorder the manufacturers will have sold their last recorder to a big part of the user base.
  6. NT was geared toward networked systems and wa far superior to it's actual competition, W9x, in many ways. Let's not forget that XP is based on the NT kernel. It's why XP is far more stable than W9x. I go months without having to reboot sometimes now. I had to reboot several times a day back in the W9x days. NT was completely useless for gamers and music type operations. But if you wanted a VERY stable Windows based system back in the late 90's you bought NT. Your network stayed up almost all of the time because of it. And BTW I have a very old set of Sony buds that sound great. I wore the plastic down to the metal listening to them so much. I guess I got them about 12-14 years ago and I still have them. They still sound good. My worst experience with electronics stuff was with JVC stereo equipment. I had so many JVC components quit on me I vowed to never buy their stuff again. They had some nice features at the time like the ability to control a cassette deck with a remote and also an EQ that could be controlled by remote. Their VCR's had better specs than any other equipment too. But just about every piece of JVC stuff I bought broke down within a month after the warranty expired. Sometimes it broke down before the warranty expired but it took almost a year to get it back from being repaired. The best results I've ever gotten from audio electronics would be my Kenwood Basic M2 amp which pumps out staggering amounts of clean power (rated at 300 wpc RMS and 480 wpc peak at 4 ohms) after 20 years of operation and my Cerwin Vega DX-9 speakers (4 ohm speakers rated at 107db at 1 watt so you can imagine what they do at a strong 300 wpc). The audiophile types will say everything made by CV is junk but these speakers will rattle the walls down to 20hz (the specs say 30hz but I have the test tones to prove they play 25hz very well and 20hz where you can hear it - most humans can't even hear any 20hz sound so who knows if it's the speakers dropping off at that level or your ears) and they will play clean all the way up to the point the fuses blow. I've never heard them distort even when being pushed by my monster Kenwood amp which means they were putting out 130db of sound easily. They play details that most speakers can't touch and they do it as loud as you can stand it (if you actually want to do that of course which I don't recommend). I've owned a lot of speakers over the years and I've listened to a lot more in the sound rooms of various retailers. I'll admit that CV does make a lot of junk and there are audiophile speakers that sound great but these speakers can hold their own with speakers that cost 5X as much. It takes a lot of cash to get true audiophile quality that also has the bass that these speakers have. They sold for around $600 each and I've seen speakers that cost $2500 each that couldn't compete with them. I can make out every word in albums like Dark Side Of The Moon and still have earthquake quality bass. They are a real treasure IMO.
  7. Hey A440, what's the deal on Maxell, Hi-Space and Memorex discs? I don't believe I've ever seen any Hi-Space discs but I do have maybe 3 Memorex discs that I've had for probably 5 years. I haven't had any problems with them. And Maxell used to be known for making quality cassette tapes. I don't own any of their MD's though.
  8. Up until the past year or so MD was really on a plane that no other portable recorder could match. There were more expensive flash based recorders that were beginning to make a splash but they were designed for music recording and little else. Now the flash based market (and even the hard drive based market) are making strides to catch up with MD. In some ways they have exceeded what MD can do in fact. 24 bit audio comes to mind as one thing that the current flash based recorders can do that te HIMD devices can't. The future sure looks like it will be in flash drives. With a removable card slot and possibly multiple card slots the storage will eclipse what MD can do easily. It just isn't that easy to swap discs in the middle of recording a concert in stealth mode. The latest HIMD models took some of the grief out of swapping discs by allowing recording level to be retained after a swap. Having to reset the audio level is a big pain on all other HIMD units IMO. But it can be dealt with. I'm still VERY happy with my MD equipment. It really does do an excellent job of recording quality audio. I don't do a lot of stealth recording so swapping discs in that situation isn't that big of a problem for me. HIMD is nearing the end of it's life IMO so that has driven prices down on first generation HIMD units for now. I prefer those units for various reasons and since I'm a budget conscious consumer I didn't hesitate to buy a first gen. HIMD when I needed a better quality recorder for my business. I was using regular MD which is great but having to upload through a sound card was driving my quality level down too much for my needs. I didn't mind the slight loss of quality for recordings that were for my personal use but I have a video business now and I needed top quality, uncompressed audio. Considering the prices of the various units the choice was very clear for e. I bought a used MZ-NHF800 and a bunch of discs for about a third of what I could have bought a new quality flash recorder. The possible slight increase in sound quality just wasn't worth it to me. Prices of new first gen. HIMD have been going up and so have used prices. But I believe the best bargain by far is HIMD. It's a great and reliable format that has a long track record of excellent service. I know I've used my MD recorders for several years and I've always been happy with them. Maybe it's because I came from an age where mobile audio recording was accomplished only with a mono cassette recorder that was designed strictly for voice recording. Believe me MD is light years ahead of the state of the technology I grew up with. The slight improvement of the flash recorders is just a drop in the bucket compared to the leaps and bounds I've seen over the years.
  9. I know HIMD sounds good so I'm not anxious to run out and spend a bunch of money based on the word of anyone. Even when a person does a live audition of equipment they sometimes fail to notice problems in the audio. It doesn't get noticed until they have lived with it for a while. Audio is a very tricky thing to master. Experience is the only true teacher and like I say I don't have any personally with anything except MD equipment. I do know it works very well. Actually I guess I have experience with MP3 devices and I've found them all to fall short of MD. I don't own any of the 24 bit recorders on the market. I'm not going to speculate about whether their a/d converters are up to the job. I was reporting what is happening with people who have access to both. I've seen testimony from people who might well be all about the gee whiz factor but I've also seen comments from people I have come to know and respect as the true professionals that they are. Both groups have said essentially the same thing. They say that 24 bit is much better than 16 bit. If you have a bone to pick with that assertion I can try to direct you to the people who said it. I'll skip the gee whiz crowd and direct you to the known professionals so you won't have to sort through the questionable comments. You can concentrate on making your claim to people who do professional recording but I have to say that it looks to me like you're making assumptions instead of relying on evidence. You can start with this professional recording engineer's post on this web site. I'll go ahead and quote him saying: "...it's much better to record at 24 bit sampling rather than 16 bit and then use your audio editor to normalize the level (increase it to the maximum non-distored level) and then output to a 48kHz/16 bit version of the audio. Mastering at 24 bit gives you more freedom with setting the recording level." His choice for mobile recording devices include a MicroTrack model of which he says: "For small size with superb sound, you can't beat the M-Audio MicroTrack 2496. It records stereo at up to 96kHz/24 bit sampling..." He also says that Edirol makes a recorder that sounds almost as good as the M-Audio. I've seen several professionals say similar things about 24 bit devices like the Edirols and the Zoom H4 and also a RockBoxed iRiver H120. I can find more such examples if you like but I think it might be a good idea to ask this person I already quoted about his experiences. His web site is linked in the post I linked. I just think it's better to take the word of a known pro than to just speculate about something with what seems to be a good bit of loyalty to a particular technology involved. I really like my HIMD and I still really like my regular MD. These devices have served me very well. But progress happens and I don't think we should hold on to the past out of nostalgia or any other reason. I've trumpted the value of MD for many years. I have been a member of this board for quite a few years. But I can't accept that it's going to be the case that all of the new devices on the market are going to have low quality A/D converters just based on speculation. Some of them might well lack the quality that HIMD has. But I just can't assume that all of them do in light of the testimonials I've seen by pros and dedicated hobbyists alike. I'm not saying I know for sure that these recorders exceed the quality of 16 bit HIMD. It's always very hard to judge by what others say. I see some pages that claim that the current set of devices only claim to have 24 bit audio but in reality are limited to 16 bit in certain bottleneck areas. I really just couldn't say for sure without testing these devices for myself what the real truth is. I just know what is being said about them and I know the reputation of some of the people making the claims. But people can be wrong even with the best of intentions. People can expect to hear better quality and end up claiming it's there even when it isn't and that includes pros. I do think it's better to take the word of a pro than it is to speculate but I think the real proof is in the pudding. I wouldn't claim to know the bottom line on any of these devices without hearing them myself. I've seen too many audio technologies be hyped to no end only to end up not sounding good at all.
  10. Transfers are faster at the lower quality settings on HIMD Dave with 48kbps being the fastest. Also the 1 gb discs are considerably faster than than the original MD discs formatted to HIMD. So the 48kbps setting, which will give you the most record time too, is definitely the setting to record when quality isn't an issue. The higher the encoding mode the better the quality and the slower the record speed so you just need to determine what works best for your needs. I've seen lots of people who are serious about audio talk about the differences in quality between HIMD and the Edirol R-09 and the Zoom H4. Essentially all HIMD sounds pretty much the same but the new flash based recorders have the ability to record in 24 bit audio. And 24 bit audio is definitely better than 16 bit audio. Of course if you're transferring from CD you're already down to using 16 bit audio so the 24 bit advantage is mainly for stuff you record yourself. If you could find a source of 24 bit recorded material it would definitely sound better than anything a HIMD can do. That's not to say that HIMD isn't really good quality. It is. But there are better things out there today. Unless Sony steps up and makes big improvements to the MD format the war is already lost. I can't see them doing that though since there are big advantages to recording to flash media. The price of a 1 gb SD card is already down to under $20 and it's dropping fast. I've used MD for several years now and I've enjoyed it a lot. I still do. But the future is in flash memory. Serious mobile recording people are selling their MD's and buying flash based units. When my current equipment wears out I'll expect to buy something better. My thing is to buy up used HIMD units right now because they do sound very good. And they are pretty cheap compared to the Edirol's and the Zoom's. They are destined to be bargain basement stuff but the demand for them among people who still have money tied up into discs will likely make the price higher as it becomes obvious that the format is going to be gone soon. I really think we've seen the last generation of HIMD. It was a great run while it lasted and it was only killed by better quality equipment. It will still be good for years to come for me unless I win the lottery or my video business really takes off. In fact I'll still be looking to buy HIMD at good prices for a while. I'll stick with HIMD because I'm on a budget and it's the best bang for the buck on the market. Yes it's slower and it has it's nagging problems (the software for example) but it still sounds very good.
  11. The price of really good consumer video cameras is going up too. People charge twice as much for a used camera that I paid for the same camera new a year ago. It's because they hae stopped making really good consumer video cameras. We'll likely see the price of MD continue to increase as it becomes more obvious that they will be gone all too soon. I just hope the ones I have hold up for a long time. I've already gotten several years out of one but that might not be the case with my newer models. Obviously there are other devices that will do the job I want done on the market but I have all these discs that will be pretty much useless except to sell to someone who still has a working MD.
  12. Just so you know Sparky I didn't read your post. You like to insult people too much.
  13. Why do you do feel the need to throw in a personal insult "dude"? It doesn't advance your argument any more than claiming that large sales figures translates to higher quality. They sell a lot of penis enlargment pills but that doesn't mean it's a good product. But hey maybe you bought that stuff too like you bought an Ipod. See that insult stuff works both ways. Now let's try to be civil shall we? Actually sales dropped last year. So does that mean they aren't as good as they were before? And you can try to explain to me why anyone has a genuine use for carrying 80 gig of compressed audio around with them. How much listening can you do before the battery goes dead on that Ipod? When that happens it's back to the house and the charger so the idea that it takes 80 discs to keep up with an Ipod is absurd. You're talking thousands of hours of listening which is also completely unneccessary. If they make a 80 tb version of an Ipod will you argue that it's an advantage too? I have over 2500 albums. Do you know how often I listen to some of those? Never is the answer. So why would I need to carry a copy of all of them around with me? Why would I spend the time loading all those on an Ipod? Why would I risk losing all the work I did loading all those if my Ipod failed? 80 gb of compressed music is overkill to the extreme. BTW I carried hundreds of tapes around in my car at one time. If I wanted that much music now I could do the same with an MD but I never really had a need for all those tapes to be with me. Even when I used my cassette walkman until it wore comletely out I could stick a couple of tapes in my pocket and be set for hours. If I got tired of those tapes I swapped them for a few more out of the car. The idea anyone needs thousands of albums in their pocket is just incredibly silly. And you think you're a mind reader. I've been doing audio since long before you were born most likely. Just because they say it's so it doesn't mean it is so. I make my own judgements on quality issues. I can hear quite well and I know what I hear from Ipod's isn't as good as HIMD. That includes a model from this year too so please refrain from telling me that because I don't agree with you that I'm somehow less intelligent than you and don't assume that I don't know the issues. It just makes you look silly when you make assumptions. I'm talking about what I hear coming from an Ipod. Buzz words really don't impress me. I learned better than to listen to buzz words 25 years ago. In short they can call it lossless if they like but from where I'm sitting it isn't. Lossless is an analog signal from a brand new vinyl album. There's no such thing as lossless digital of any kind and lossless compression only exists in marketing meetings. And it's completely bogus to infer that the speed of replacing the data in a MD player is slower than replacing data in a Ipod Nano. I've "prepared" my discs years ago for the older MD formats. I have "prepared" enough discs for my HIMD to satisfy a very long period of listening. I don't need to make new recordings every week. Well I do have a playback only MD device so that's apples vs. what apples should be. And the point of being able to record is that when you want to you can. Sure it isn't "needed" but none of this stuff is really needed. It's just something I want and if I can get better audio quality and the ability to record that makes for a better device which is of course what I said. The only thing Ipod has over MD is the size. And this "most people" argument doesn't change that fact. "Most people" do all sorts of things I don't do because I know better. If we always went by what "most people" want then Apple would have been dead long ago and there wouldn't be an Ipod because "most people" want to use Windows. I don't think what "most people" want has anything to do with what I want. Maybe that's where you got the idea that people are "sheeple" which is a disgusting and destructive mindset. There are lots of people that think for themselves and don't believe what they read on the back of the box just because someone put it there. So how about you stop insulting my tastes in audio equipment and I won't come after you in my next post revealing you for what you really are? You can stop putting people down because they don't swallow the hype of the masses and I won't show the world that believing what you hear from others doesn't make you smart but rather just makes you easy. The bottom line is I can hear a difference between the two devices and the fact that you can't doesn't make it true that there is no difference. I really don't care to discuss it any further with you because you think insults equate with winning an argument. I could easily demonstrate that the best insult really doesn't make your argument stronger but what they point of that? It only proves that the person making doing the insulting is crude and not very good at real debate.
  14. That's the way I have understood the problem ozpeter. But I've never tried to make a cable directly connecting the balanced pins to an unbalanced cable as was suggested. The stuff I've read about it says you will get hum if you try it but since I haven't done it myself I can't really say for sure. I think the idea is that you get interference from the side of the balanced signal that you don't use. The longer your cable the more likely you'll hear interference because after all you have essentially two unbalanced signals side by side using the same ground in a balanced cable setup. Yes you can use one channel or the other but you will have about the worst possible situation going for a cable. You will have another cable running right with your signal carrying cable from one end to the other. You just stand a very good chance of picking up interference. But like I say I haven't tried this myself so maybe it will work. I do know that devices like mixers and that Shure adapter cable use a transformer to eliminate the hum you will get from trying to use a balanced cable like an unbalanced cable. There's a good explanation of how a balanced cable works on this web site but it doesn't go into what will happen if you don't use a transformer when connecting a balanced cable to an unbalanced cable. I just know what I've heard on the subject from various places. I didn't really try to find proof of the problem here and for all I know the method described here by allan may work just fine. In fact I'm not sure what is meant by a "transformer" that is used by mixers etc. to convert to an unbalanced line. The method described by Allan might be exactly what those "transformers" are actually doing. I didn't understand the use of the metal film resistors in Allans description so I'm really not sure of anything here. I just know what I've read but I don't have the technical knowledge to know the details. If someone does know I'd like to hear an explanation of what the "transformers" used in mixers etc. are actually doing.
  15. I do understand how the format works. I just think the Ipod is overblown in the area of storage. Yes the hard drives can contain a lot of compressed data but a box full of HIMD's will allow you to take more data with you in the most common mobile enviorment where audio is an important consideration. I can carry quite a few HIMD's in the back seat of my car. I can keep more data with me like that than with a hard drive based Ipod. But my real knock on the Ipod's is the on the Nano's. I can swap out a gig of music in a flash but it takes quite a while to do that over a USB cable into those Nano's. Yet people portray the Nano as a device of considerable storage. I just happen to think they aren't all that great in the storage arena. I think HIMD exceeds them in that area hands down. I also understand the lossless format. I just don't agree that it should be ok to lose quality just because a device is primarily used for mobile enviorments. I wear my MD's around the house in a fanny pack for extended periods at times. I know the quality of the Ipod's and it doesn't compare to the quality of my HIMD's. My son has a hard drive based Ipod and my daughter has a Nano. I'm familiar with the sound quality of the Ipod and MD. I'll take the MD any day of the week. I don't accept that quality is less of a concern in a mobile enviorment either. I plug my HIMD into my car stereo quite often and sound quality can very much become an issue when I do. At what point do you think compression artifacts become a nuisance? Because I can hear them when the backgrond noise is low I know the artifacts are there when I listen drivingdown the road at 65 mph. I believe the brain tunes in to the distortions at times when it knows they are present giving the listener a less than perfect musical experience. It's like in the old days when a scratch was known to exist on a vinyl platter your brain would be tuned in to hearing that crackle making the audio less enjoyable. BTW since I depend on my HIMD to record high quality audio for my video projects (which I do make money from and am currently working on a major project requiring better audio than the "sheeple" will generally settle for I think I qualify as something of a pro or at least a semi-pro. I can see uses for an Ipod like keeping notes or whatever but I could never use Ipod audio in a project because the quality just isn't there IMO. I'm with rayzay here in that I much prefer the tried and tested old standard of MD to the flash in the pan Ipod. One level of audio compression may not be bad but when you start stacking levels then you will certainly have an audio problem pretty quick. Two levels of compression wouldn't be all that bad but there are lots of other reasons Ipods don't qualify as acceptable in the audio department for my projects. I guess what I was beating around the bush to get at in my previous post was that Ipods are far inferior to MD in many respects and the ability to record in the fiield is a big part of the inferior nature of the Ipod. Yes Ipods can be acceptable as players but those that think they are years ahead of MD (as suggested in this article for example) are just completely out of touch with the reality of the situation. I don't believe Ipods have even matched the level of quality of MD yet. Yes they have some advantages over MD in some respects but they fall far short in others. For my needs an Ipod is completely out of the question. Not only are they priced far higher than similar quality MD's but they can't do some things MD has been doing for years.
  16. Gee I guess I better not put my son's Ipod in the same drawer with my MD's. It would seem like MD is the one with the mouth but who knows. I'd like to see an Ipod eat a MD really. Maybe I could sacrifice just one of my MD's. Ipod is still years behind MD if you ask me. You still can't record with them and you have a limited amount of storage space available no matter which model you get. Sure it's a sleek format with lots of uninformed fans. Maybe someone should tell them that compressed audio doesn't sound as good as uncompressed audio. But they wouldn't listen of course. They only pay attention to the teeny bopper gadget crowd. When they grow up maybe they'll figure out why the bought the wrong thing. AT least it would certainly be the wrong thing as far as I'm concerned. I use my MD's to record a lot. I use them as players too (one of my MD's is a play only device) but their value would greatly diminish if they weren't able to record. Now if they made Ipods that would record in uncompressed formats I might be interested. Oops! They already do but their called M-Audio MicroTrack's, Edirol R-09's and Zoom H4's.
  17. Ditto here. A company was selling a lot of NH700's and NHF800's out of California for very good prices for well over a year. Some sold for as little as $75 USD. Now you're lucky to see one being sold for $125 and that same company is either running low on their stock and trying to drive the price up or they are just holding out for more money. Either way their price has risen like the rest. I bought a used NHF800 with a bunch of discs for $115 a few months ago and I don't believe I could get one for that price now with all the discs I got. I checked today and the only NHF800 with a buy it now price was listed at $150 and it was used and didn't even include the remote much less any discs.
  18. I know that Shure makes a cable that will convert a balanced signal to an unbalanced signal. The reason I said a mixer is probably better is that you get more functions with a mixer and they really don't cost that much more than that cable Shure makes. There may be other cables that convert a balanced signal to an unbalanced one but I'm not aware of them.
  19. I'm well aware of the differences in optical technology between what CDR's use and what DVD formats use and what MD uses. I would expect all of the technologies to exceed what CDR's have done. That doesn't mean I trust them to archive all of my data. Probably MD is the best of the bunch but the cost is still prohibitive to attempt to store large amounts of data on MD. I can buy a blank CDR for about 20 cents. It would take about 2 80 min MD discs to archive the same amount of data and the price for that is far above 20 cents. At this point a person can archive much cheaper on hard drives than on MD. That's why I suggested that people should use hard drives. Plus I don't think we really know the future of MD disc data retention or hard drive retention either. Hard drives are much easier to deal with and the price per gig for hard drive space is much cheaper than MD. It costs roughly $7-8 for a gig of MD storage space (which doesn't even include the player you need to use these as storage) while you can get hard drive space for at most 50 cents per gig and it's dropping fast. And given the uncertain nature of optical media including magnetic optical I still say that hard drive storage with back ups is more likely to ensure that you still have your data 10 years down the road and it will cost less too. Yes you need to check your hard drives to make sure they are still working but if they aren't chances are the backup will be if you check often enough. We can already download data for music pretty cheaply. It could happen that music stores just allow you to download music onto a memory cartridge similar to what game systems use or even a flash drive and you could then upload the data to your computer or your DVR at home. You could use hard drives as a backup for all of your data. I just think we're going to see fewer moving part based systems in the future.
  20. I knew about the quality of MD basically from the very beginning but the price was just too high for me or probably more like it I was just in to spending my money elsewhere. I got into the cassette type walkman scene which seemed to work ok for me but I always wanted to get a MD or a DAT but I just never made the effort to come up with the cash to get one. Then I walked into a Sony outlet store in Jeffersonville, Ohio and they had a R70 for the ridiculously low price (for that time) of $70. It was refurbished but it worked and they gave me a fairly decent warranty so I just couldn't leave that store without my first MD. This was about 5 years ago I guess. My cassette walkman had just died because I had played it to death and I knew it would cost me more to get a really good cassette walkman. I couldn't believe my luck on that deal. Those R70's were selling for around $200 at the time and they only had the one in the outlet store. I bought a NetMD when they came out so I could get more audio on a disc to listen to and because it was much easier to load music onto a disc through a USB cable. I waited a while after HIMD came out before I bought one. I really bought it to use with my video business because of the uncompressed recording. I've certainly gotten my use from my MD equipment. I did a lot of recording with the R70 too. I bought the ECM-MS907 mic not long after getting the R70 because people on this board said it was a really good mic to use with a MD recorder. I still use that mic sometimes even though I have much better mics now.
  21. I didn't say that flash cards will replace hard drives or even optical storage. BTW anyone who thinks optical storage is permanent may be in for a big surprise when you go try to retrieve that photo from when your baby was still a baby 7 years ago. I've lost data on about 200 CDR's because they failed due to age. Optical is NOT permanent. I still figure hard drives to be the main storage medium for anything that isn't mobile. But anything that is mobile can use flash media as it exists today. All the talk I hear about cards being too small is a red herring IMO. Cards can be combined to form larger devices that are easier to keep track of for anyone that needs that. They can be grouped to play movies too. Anything that should be stored forever should be kept on a hard drive and backed up by another hard drive right now. You really can't count on optical. I lost that data after about 3 years on those CDR's. Hard drives fail but if you have backups then you don't have to worry about failures. I actually try to keep multiple types of backups for my important media. I actually trust tape more than optical or hard drive based systems but tape backups for data are way too expensive right now. I used to back up everything to tape when you could still get a decent reasonably priced tape drive for computers. Again my prediction here is that flash media will replace all moving part based devices for mobile use in the near future. I love my minidisc equipment and it has served me well but in the long run flash based equipment will be better. It really already is but it just costs more.
  22. I would expect the future of radio station systems to be hard drives. We're already seeing terrabyte hard drives for consumer use. You can store a lot of uncompressed music with a few of those. Even with backups they will be cheap. It's the mobile recording / playback unit that I think will be strictly flash based in the near future. I'm sure there will be room for lots of different types of technology but for mobile use a small storage card is just practically impossible to beat. The only thing better will be cards with more storage on them. For example if we had a series of SD cards put together in a unit the size of an MD we would have nearly 100 gig of storage with the technology we have today. Imagine what could be in 5 years. We could have terrabyte storage cards. New albums could be released on flash cards. New movies could be released in HD on flash cards. And this is all without moving parts. Moving parts aren't a big hassle if you are in a situation where your player is sitting in one spot forever. But when I want to go out and record video for one of my projects I'd love to be able to forget the hassles of tape. We are already seeing very good video cameras that use flash media. I just can't see the future of mobile digital storage going any other way.
  23. I'm hoping that Sony takes the plunge into flash card recording and does it in a way that blows the Ipod out of the water. Why not put two SD card slots in a recorder or maybe even 3. It would instantly give us the ability to have 24 gig of removeable flash card memory and an infinite amount by swapping out the cards. It can't get much better than that IMO so why not shoot for the best instead of going with another moving parts design? As flash card capacities continue to increase we could have incredible amounts of storage with practically no down side. That's my dream machine for the next decade. I've loved MD since it's origin and I'm still using it frequently but I really believe the end has come for moving part storage devices. If I can fit my entire music collection in a pocketful of SD cards that's what I want. I can't see the future going any other way including storage for high definition video. A block of flash cards that load into a reader like DRAM loads for example could contain plenty enough storage for a HD movie right now and capacity is growing all the time. This technology is already up and running and nothing else is going to be able to compete because it's cheaper to build cards and readers than it is to maintain a moving parts design machine and data storage soloution and durability is going to be incredible. The one thing that might hold back flash card technology is that is too durable and companies that are used to consumers replacing their equipment after a certain time because of failures wil not neccessarily like the idea of equipment that rarely fails. Like light bulbs that are built to blow after a certain time and cars that are only meant to run a specific number of miles we could see some kind of failure problem built into the design so companies like Sony will be happy.
  24. Here's an eBay listing for a Basic M2. The reserve wasn't met but you can tell from the Buy It Now price ($360) that people do still think they're valuable after nearly two decades. They list different power ratings than what came with mine. Mine says 480 wpc at 4 ohms which is a peak power rating. It's rated 300 wpc RMS which still packs plenty of punch. Maybe they were rated differently in different years. So anyway I guess I'll split the profits with you if you find one for $20. See what a nice guy I am.
  25. Optimus, a Radio Shack brand, has been known to make some very good equipment occassionally. They just don't do it consistently. You'll find some Optimus stuff listed in Audiophile lists of top equipment but of all the stuff Radio Shack makes maybe 1 out of 25 is really good. I have a set of Optimus bookshelf speakers for my rear surround speakers and they were listed in Audiophile as some of the best made back when I bought them. I've had people who really knew their equipment try to talk me out of them but I plan on keeping them for quite a while.
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