aeriyn

Calm down, people. A real live person might stumble in here and be shocked to see you two arguing over something so trivial. The potential for embarrassment would be quite large, I'd imagine.

How?

I don't like the iPod remote. That's one thing MD has everyone beat on. There's no better remotes than the ones on MD units. The dock I would definitely buy. Carrying case, who cares? The thing would always be in my purse.

30mW @ 32 ohms impedance. 50mW @ 16. :happy: It'll be a long while before I get any new toys of any kind. I have a lot of things I need to spend money on, such as my POS car, which has all sorts of problems that need to be fixed (such as the leaking oil... $165US repair costs), and I have a great number of holes in my wardrobe that need to be filled. :grin: I have a lot of clothes (doesn't every girl?) but only a few outfits can really be made out of them. Anything else just looks like I got dressed while drunk, or something.

Hi there. Here's the problem. The N10 uses a Li-Ion battery as its main power source, right? Well, that Li-Ion battery is 3.7v as compared to alkaline AA 1.5(ish)v. What the unit does is when the AA battery pack is installed, the unit draws power from the AA first, and once the AA is exhausted, draws power from the Li-Ion. If the Li-Ion battery is drained... the unit will not work at all, full AA battery or not. Kind of strange, but the only possible way that Sony could allow the N10 to utilize an AA battery pack along with its Li-Ion 3.7v 370mAh internal cell. There's a switching circuitry in there that changes the voltages over when using a different power source, I believe. Units that utilize the NiMH gumstick type batteries (which are 1.2v 1000-1450mAh) are much more similar in voltage to alkaline AA's, so they can actually draw power from both batteries simultaneously. Unfortunately, as I have stated above, this is not the case with the N10. I would get a voltage converter ASAP if I were you. Sony has some universal voltage (~100vAC-240vAC) adapters with 6vDCin, which should work great with the N10.

Well. With more space I could put a whole lot of music on in linear PCM and have no compression at all. xD Or I could use Apple Lossless and put even more on, and I doubt even the most golden of ears could tell AL from PCM. I'm not bitching about MD (even std. MD) lack of space... I just really, really, REALLY love the way iPod sounds. That beefy headphone amp (50mW+50mW, 10x more powerful than most MD units) can power a really spiffy set of 'phones... ... no more transcoding, or slow 1x transfer speeds. No more dealing with SonicStage (yay)... Slightly larger unit. About 1/4 the battery life of my DS8 (that irks me the most), but all in all, a fair tradeoff. Now to get the money... >.>; $270US for iPod... and another $270US for Etymotic Research ER-4Ps... x.x

Hmmm... Let me see... Well, if you want to go low price (although I'd cap my limit at $50US if I were you) I'd suggest either the Sony MDR-EX71SL (in-ear phones) which cost about $40-$50 US. Better than those would be the Sharp HP-MD33S, which sound a lot better than the EX71s (they don't have suppressed mids) but they are 4-pole when used as short-cord, so you can't use them with anything but Sharp units, unless you have the extension on, which switches them back over to 3-pole making them useful on any audio player. Audiocubes carries these for $39US. If you're not into earbuds, things get a little more expensive, and others would be better at recommending them than I am since I only use in-ear earphones (regular 'phones mess up my hair). :grin:

I still don't recommend Hi-MD even for recording... the 1st-gen units do not seem well-made to me. I mean, come on. The back half of the NH900 is made of plastic. I like Sharp units, but using old MD means you'd have to have a MD deck to transfer your sounds to PC digitally. Yeah, kinda sucks. So... despite my dislike of it, I'd recommend either NH1 or NH900, but I'd go more with NH900 for the external battery pack. (Even though it is big and half plastic.) With these, you can play through USB over the PC and capture the sound stream via a program like Total Recorder or Audacity.

Oooo... I may not be very impressed with Hi-MD, but I like that remote. xD

I don't think that SonicStage disallows the transcoding of MP3s in monaural mode. I'll have to try that later on, see if it really doesn't work.

*snicker*

But they sound really good. :wacky: I've invested a lot into MD also; you generally tend to invest in things that you are interested in. My friend Magaret has an iPod 10gb (old) that she never bought another thing for it. I mean, she uses it mainly as a USB data drive connected to her iBook to store bittorrent files on. :whatever: Although, if I were to buy an iPod... I'd spend even more money than what you have on it. ER-4Ps aren't cheap. If something that sounds better, is easier to use, is better tech than the iPod comes out, I'll probably get that instead. But currently for playback, iPod is hard to beat. Although... I believe I will stay with MD for now especially since I have so many blanks and other MD accessories. :happy:

Oi. Any battery, be it Li-Ion, NiMH or whatever, will eventually die. I consider replacing the battery in the NH1 to be somewhat expensive. $50 bucks for a replacement battery can sting a little.

That would be a prototype photo. Note where the remote cord plugs in, and note the lack of the dongle box which hangs on the actual NF520D remote cord. I have one of these units, purchased at a pawnshop for half the normal price, that I gave to a great friend of mine who wanted to get into MD. She liked the long battery life and the radio function also. The remote that is shipped with this unit, the RM-MC34LT, is NOT backlit. In fact it is virtually identical to the RM-MC37LT, with the exception that it doesn't support AM-band radio (unlike the previous radio-tuner equipped MD units). It's also big, ugly, and it has that strange thing attached to the remote cord which I presume is part of the antenna for receiving radio signals.

If you have your library encoded at 256kbit/sec Hi-SP, you better believe it's transcoding those files to get your 48kbit/sec files.

Why do you call your iPod 15gb pointless?

Compression artifacts are the byproduct noise generated by an audio compression codec, i.e. ATRAC. They sound most unnatural and if audible, tend to ruin my musical mojo. MP3's compression artifacts are metallic and generally irritating. ATRAC actually has more compression artifacts at a given bitrate than MP3, but they are of a less-disruptive nature (or so I'm told. To me, a compression artifact is a compression artifact, and if you can hear them pretty consistently, it is bad, and distracts from the experience of the music).

This isn't good... Jadeclaw, does this happen very often, or rarely?

When SonicStage transcodes MP3s or whatever, it leaves a copy of the track in OpenMG format in a specific directory on your HDD. The strange thing is, this is not temporary. SonicStage doesn't delete the copy after it's done transferring it to MD. Strange, ne?

THe RM-MC34LT and RM-MC37LT, the two radio remotes made by Sony for MD units, are both un-backlit.

Um... that isn't what I meant. But you sort of have the right idea. Uploading an analog recorded track can only be done once... but I imagine if SonicStage were uninstalled, your HDD formatted, etc, that would make SonicStage not know it ever transferred the track to PC in the first place. Eevn so, the OMG uploaded from your Hi-MD unit would only play on the SonicStage installed on your primary computer and not on your laptop because OMG is Secure media. You can always do the USB recording method via TotalRecorder or Audacity.

That would actually be pretty cool.

I guess if you enjoy it, then more power to you. ^^ In normal ambient levels I can't tell the difference from LP2 and CD audio. But right now, I'm listening to an LP2 MD and I can hear... compression artifacts. They aren't severe enough to annoy me, not even close. But LP4 does, and so does Hi-LP. It's all a matter of preference, and what you hear might be different from what others hear.

I agree. To my ears, which are not all that great (slight tinnitus in my left ear and a bilateral high-frequency loss in both ears), Hi-LP sounds just a tiny bit better than old LP4. The stereo effect is much more noticeable on Hi-LP than it is on LP4 (almost sounds mono on LP4 actually), but the compression artifacts are... well, about the same. I continue to use standard MD, SP and LP2, because I love the sound of Sharp's Auvi units, and since Sony has not licensed Hi-MD tech to Sharp for unit production (yet), I'm staying with regular MD. At least, until either Sharp releases an Auvi Hi-MD unit and/or Hi-MD battery life increases.

I hate to say this, but Sony has been fiercely protective of its ATRAC encoder and no other software programs other than SonicStage and the realaudio plugin can encode in ATRAC. So, you either have to deal with SonicStage (how lovely), or use the Nero ImageDrive/Simple Burner technique, which I tend to prefer (on the rare occasion I actually put my MP3 music on MD). Generally, I use MD Simple Burner direct from my CDs. It's fast and relatively easy compared to SonicStage. I usually have to pull up SonicStage to retitle tracks (especially those Japanese music CDs I listen to, US SonicStage titles them in unrecognizeable ASCII characters) but overall I prefer it to dealing with SonicStage for recording my CDs to MD. If you do not do any live recording or are not invested into MD in any way (like if you had close to the 100 or so blank MDs that I have) you should get an iPod. Hell, even I want an iPod. Maybe next year's tax return...