Qwakrz

Could it be that the MP3 you have is a mono one? That would make sence if sonicstage cant detect the difference between Mono & Stereo and is feeding one sample to each channel at a time, thus making it play back twice as fast but not sound much different.

Eric. To record in MD format on your Hi-MD, use or format the Minidisc in MD mode, not Hi-MD mode & your recorder will behave as if it was a netMD unit & only allow SP, LP2 and LP4 recording.

Technically, I dont see why it would only work with the NH1 / NH3D. The only reason I can think of is the battery in the other Hi-MD's might have poblems with recording or the unit might be powered by the Hi-MD. Looking at the picture there looks to be a USB type A connector on the back so you use the USB cable to plug into the unit. Pop along to your local sony center and get them to go "You WHAT!!!!!" or "erm....ah......never heard of it mate"

I do use Hi-LP. Its for times when I dont need to REALLY listen to the music but it is just there to help me do things. I DO hear the difference between Hi-LP & Hi-SP and will listen to SP tracks when I am really listening to the music (quiet room, chilling out) Hi-LP is great for fitting lots of albums on a disc, Hi-SP is great at capturing all the "Stage" of the music that is left out of Hi-LP (The stuff most people wont notice in a noisey / busy background)

Ill elaberate a bit, The Hi-MD's can be swithed to the old Net-MD mode (automatically if you put a pre-recorded standard MD into them). This means that they can act exactly like an old NetMD unit, recording in SP, LP2 & LP4 onto MD discs and copying files to & from the PC with the same actions as a NetMD (basically you cant copy from MD -> PC while in NetMD mode) They also support LP2 & LP4 onto Hi-MD formatted media when running in Hi-MD mode (Only when copied via SS). This means that you can almost double the play time on a disc by formatting it in Hi-MD and then putting your LP2 files onto it.

I am interested in how badly it would drain the battery to keep the light on my NH1 perm on. I use it alot at night & trying to read each track when it changes means I have to find the little backlight button & press it. Might see how much of a change it makes when I get time (& when I have worked out how long it takes to discharge normally)

Ok, 1st If you have a Mac and want to use MD.... Nope, aint going to happen without a lot of fiddling afaik Macs are only supported if running virtual PC & even then I would get an oppinion of someone who owns MD & a Mac. 2nd Hi-MD machines can copy from Hi-MD to PC under the following conditions. The Hi-MD must be used in Hi-MD mode, use in MD mode will NOT allow transfer to the PC. All copies to the PC will have DRM (Digital Rights Managment) added to them which means that you cannot edit them or copy them except using sony's crippleware. You can get around this using some software to record the output of playing the MD back into your PC in realtime. (search the forums for the thread) 3rd Hi-MD can be used to store data information, the audio information is locked away in a heavily DRM'd file on the disc. It is stored at a specific location & encrypted. Only SS & SB have access to this data for putting the songs into it. The Hi-MD cannot see any audio tracks unless they are in Atrac format and stored within this file. Drag & drop audio will NOT work. 4th Sony are the only company that are making Hi-MD, all others are still making NetMD's. NetMD's as mentioned above will NOT copy audio from MD to PC. Hi-MD will but ONLY when in Hi-MD mode. Using a NetMD disc in a Hi-MD machine will NOT allow copying back to the PC as it will act just like a NetMD. If you dont have access to a PC I dont think that a Hi-MD is for you. It will record and do everything you want but you will not be able to get the recording back onto the PC / Mac without using realtime recording and either an anologue connection or USB, Virtual PC and some software to record the output of SS in realtime.

This should clear things up a bit (Read ALL the reports, especially the last one) And this is why everyone is getting confused (including us) Flac uses the MS J-Stereo version and then goes on to refer to the IS version as the lossless one (which is correct). So they are correct & wrong in the statment because they dont specify which version they are refering to. Unless someone makes it clear if its MS or IS they are refering to then everyone is correct & wrong at the same time. MS J-Stereo IS lossless (as used in FLAC), IS J-Stereo is Lossy

Skyther In reply to the "What lossless encoders use J-Stereo", Flac does depending on the source block & the compressability of that block http://www.firstpr.com.au/audiocomp/lossless/ - and scroll down to flac

ok, 1) Ability to transcode on the fly from a source Hi-SP file so that you can choose to transfer Hi-SP, LP2, Hi-LP etc onto the Hi-MD disc and it does NOT save these new files onto your HDD. (Yes I know there is a slight quality loss but I would like to only have to rip my CD's once and not clutter my HDD) 1a) Ability to choose the file format that gets put on the Hi-MD disc when more than 1 type exists 2) 128Kbps Atrac3+ codec rate for use on Hi-MD's (variable would be great but 128K would be a good middle ground) 3) Size (in MB's) of an album when viewing in the transfer window (I have to right click & show properties atm to see if it will fit on the disc). Ill edit as I think of more. Q

ok, the track is recorded in Hi-SP on the minidisc. The track is playing back in what way, presume using the USB connector & using SS to play it back. We need to know how you have things connected to your PC.

This is a personal opinion. Yes sony are misleading us in selling re-formatted 80 minute discs labeld as Hi-MD, but technically it is not as they will only work, as they come, in Hi-MD recorders. The thing is that people and companies are being caught out by this. My NH1 from Dabs arrived with a 3 pack of Hi-MD discs. I knew they were the 80 minute ones but Dabs were pushing them as Hi-MD discs or implying that they could store the 1GB of data. This is WRONG no matter which way you look at it & sony should go back to selling 60/74/80 minute discs & 1GB Hi-MD discs and change the packaging on the Hi-MD 80's. The give away on the crafty Hi-MD discs is that they have an 80 or 74 in the corner. I must admit though that they do look nice. A transparent yellow & gold disc on the front, black back & gold shutter.

Ok, I may be getting a bit lost here with your comments. Ill check a few things first We are talking about copying data / music from the PC to the Hi-MD I call this Uploading If so the write protect tab MUST be set so that you can write to the disc. If not SS has a spasum and reports that you must change the tab. The TOC holds all the data for the location of your tracks so when it is updated this is the most vunerable time to corruption. If anything goes wrong when its updating the TOC, say bye bye to the contents of the disc. Saying all this, I have never yet had any problems or crashes while putting data / audio onto any of the discs I own. (Even one that failed to record on ANY deck I had, due to bad sectors on the disc, now works fine again). The little write protect tab only tells the firmware to never turn the laser on to write with. If you look in the service manuals for some units it says that while in service mode you can still write to a disc that is write protected using the tab SO BE CAREFULL. If we are talking about copying from Hi-MD to PC (This only applies to Hi-MD as NetMD will NOT allow this) i call this Downloading. I have never tried this. You may be able to copy the contents off of the MD with the write protect tab set, however I do know that SS wants to update a flag to stop you doing it again on another PC so it may well fail. As such, again we have a TOC update and the same as above applies. There have been reports of the file failing to copy across and then you have lost it. SS allows you to keep a copy on the MD but its a tick box you have to tick to get it to NOT delete the file off the MD. Personally I might be tempted to say, use a digital recording program as descussed elsewhere on this board and just play the audio back in real time down the USB cable & into the recorder.

If SS messes up an upload it will 75% of the time trash the data on the minidisc as the TOC will not be correct. Only way out of that is to format and start again. What to look out for is an unstable PC (If it crashes while doing the copy it will cause problems) but appart from that there shouldn't be any problems. I have had SS freeze up for about 30 seconds once so if it does freeze give it some time to unstick (mine was during a copy when a background program launched). SS does not "Watermark" a recording as such, it wraps the recording up in DRM so that you cant do much with it.

I think the output is loud enough. I have a set of sony in ear headphones (Not the ones it came with, they are crap) & I usually listen to the volume at 5 when its quiet (reading a book at night) or 10 when its slightly noisey. The volume goes upto 30 in total (AVLS kicks in at 15 but can be disabled)

Dont know about the performance. However Yes you can run an external battery (AA Alk, Ni-CD or Ni-MH) in the external case so that the internal & external drain down together. You can also buy a bigger internal "GumStick" battery, NH14WM. This will about double the manuals figures for the internal only battery (and add the same difference to the figures with both internal & external times) The manuals were available in PDF form on either here or minidisct.com, I cant find them now.

Not quite Aeriyn. Type R is a recording DSP, it was made to improve the sampling accuracy of SP recordings by exploiting the fact new DSP chips can do twice the work the old ones could. It moves the encoded bits slightly to improve the quality before it is written to disc. It does not affect playback at all (except that any disc recorded with type R should sound better in any equipment) Type S is a playback only DSP. It has been designed to improve the sound quality of LP2 and LP4 (not sure on Hi-SP/LP) playback. It should improve the quality of any Atrac3(+) encoded files. This may explain the differences you hear between the 2 machines as the old one was Type R as stated above

No track mark button on the NH1 remote (looked for it but no) It has Display, Backlight, Playmode, Repeat, Sound, Sound Set, Menu joggy thing, Vol +-, Stop and a little thinggy the same as the old R900 units where you push in for play / pause and move left or right for forward & back. Prefer this to the twisty thingy on the other remotes. The NH1 has a T Mark button on the unit though Backlight LCD is a big plus in very dark places (not very bright backlight though) and it can be forced on in the menu's Oh, im in a thingy mood today :wacky:

ok this will be a first for you then mutant1345 I like the new amp in the NH1. It makes things seem clearer (hard to describe) also if you liked LP4, try re-encoding some stuff into Hi-LP and you will notice a good improvement over the old. I will not harp on about Hi-SP becasue if you like what you have, why change. The only reason I commented on re-encoding is you gain 2kb/s more space with Hi-LP (64k) vs LP4 (66k) (and of course you gain all round with Hi-MD formatted discs) and its a newer codec so it should give better sound.

I think this has gone Thankyou

Unlike the other Hi-MD's there is only one version of the NH1. The manual makes no statment of a seperate euro model like the NH900 does etc. Also I think all the NH1's are made in Japan (well mine is).

All it would take is a small change in SS to support 128K AT3+. The players (as far as I can see) support most bit rates but only display Hi-SP or Hi-LP when fed with 256k or 64k into the codec.

I use SS and allow it to save files simply because I can never find the CD I need (Its always hidden under paperwork etc). SS has been told to save all its files onto a seperate drive I have (150GB space) and all my CD's are being ripped in Hi-SP, Hi-LP & SP2 formats (indexed as H, M & L at the start of the folder name) because SS cant convert from Hi-SP to Hi-LP on the fly. 300 CD's takes some ripping (249 to go) For MP3's and simple burner do this MP3 > Nero (use image recorder to make an image) > Daemon tools (to mount the image as a drive) > SimpleBurner > MD

Have you updated the Data access components for windows XP? If you are not upto date with all the patches then the answer is no goto http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...&DisplayLang=en and install the update, it may also be worth updating the Jet datbase engine http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...&displaylang=en. This updates the database handling routines in XP to the current version (as needed by SS)

Ok, I had a blind listen today to 6 tracks, all encoded using the availbale formats I was shocked to hear the difference between LP2 and Hi-SP I have started to encode all my music in 3 flavours now (Hi-SP, LP2 & Hi-LP) purely because I do several different types of listening Hi-SP I use for quiet moments at home, listening to acoustic recordings LP2 will be used when I go out and about, lots more on a disc Hi-LP for when quality is not so much needed (out and about in town for a few hours) and where disc swapping would be a pain. I refuse to use Hi-LP 48K as it just sounds wrong. i like to listen to the track that is playing, not hear a representation of it played through something like a polyphonic phone. :laugh: (and yes i know I have Hi-LP in my list but its not really that bad for getting lots of music on a disc) Sony, why cant we record in Hi-SP and then re-encode as needed during transfer? (The track that showed up LP2 v Hi-SP are from "The very best of MTV Unplugged 2", tracks 10 & 11 (Bjork & Human Behaviour, Seal & Crazy. Both acoustic)