dex Otaku

The ECM717 features "dual-way powering' meaning it can be powered either by a battery on itself or from an external source with plug-in power. The MS907 does not have this feature [or at least, the several I've used in the past 4 years haven't had this feature, and yes, I've tried to power one externally]. A battery box will not work with this mic. It will in fact serve no function whatsoever. smith1076: with really loud sources, the MS907 might work through the line-in [same as any powered mic that uses a battery box]. I have doubts this would be very effective though, because of the MS907's low bias voltage [1.5V AA battery]. What you really need is a microphone preamp. Examples of this are linked below: http://www.reactivesounds.com/spa2.php https://www.soundprofessionals.com/cgi-bin/.../item/SP-PREAMP That said, chances are you would be much better off just getting an MD or HiMD recorder that already has its own mic preamp built in.

Poor computer sound is a good rationale for doing it that way, yes. As for splitting tracks, I'd just do what I always do - copy the whole thing in one go as one file, and add trackmarks later. Doing so with straight music albums or compilations usually takes a couple of minutes at most. It really depends on the content, though - speech is more difficult to split up, and music with a lot of segues can be more difficult as well. In any case, I'd choose that method over relying on my HiMD any day. I am a nitpicker, though.

Or, why not skip a step and save a crapload of time, and just copy the MDs to your computer, back them up on whatever inexpensive media you prefer, and then dupe them on whatever portable format you prefer as an afterthought. Every time someone mentions the "copy to your HiMD and upload" method, I cringe. It just seems like wasted time to me.

What's the difference in quality? The difference is this... Going digitally, an MD deck converts whichever lossily-compressed format your recording is in to PCM, and then whatever you're plugging into records that PCM stream [assuming it allows it, keeping in mind SCMS which not all sound cards respect or respect properly]. There's only one conversion done this way, and that's from ATRAC or ATRAC3 to PCM. There are no successive stages of D/A and A/D conversion, no relying on the cleanliness of every device's analogue stage, &c. Going the analogue route, you're depending on first that conversion to PCM, then the performance of the headphone/line-out amp of the player, then the input of your sound card being clean, and then the quality of the sound card's A/D conversion. There are at least three stages of conversion here, from ATRAC to PCM, then digital to analogue, then analogue to digital again. The weak points in this chain are: * the output of your player, which if it's a portable is likely to be less than actual "standard" line-level and depending on underpowered output amps * the input of your sound card, which may or may not be clean and quiet in its analogue stages * the A/D converter on your sound card, which may or may not be, well, crap The best route to go, quality-wise, is always the straight digital route. That said, even inexpensive sound cards have clean enough inputs and sufficiently adequate A/D conversion that the vast majority of users would never be able to notice any loss of quality in going this route, unless something is -seriously- wrong with your equipment. Please also keep in mind that copying from your old MDs means havign a copy that has already been through at least one generation of lossy compression. There is no such thing as a lossless copy of an MD when using SP/DIF.

Your HiMD has no optical output. It's in only. The only format support any of these devices has over SP/DIF [optical] is PCM; anything being played from MD [since there currently are no HiMD decks with optical outputs] over SP/DIF will be PCM. Basically it's like this: playback device -> PCM -> ATRAC/ATRAC3 -> record on MD play from MD -> ATRAC/ATRAC3 -> PCM -> other recorder or converter Some professional MD equipment allows copying of the actual ATRAC tracks off the discs. The software mentioned at the site you linked to is made for this. It's still not entirely useful though, unless you're copying straight back to MD again, because nothing else that I'm aware of supports ATRAC [sP mode]. Yes, though - over optical, the only format understood by these devices is PCM; while recording, it gets converted to whatever format you're recording in - unless you're recording on HiMD in PCM mode, in which case bit-perfect copies are still basically imossible as the entire stream in resampled. During playback, non-PCM recordings get converted back to PCM and then either sent over SP-DIF [in the case of MD decks] or converted to analogue [in the case of any deck or portable, whether MD or HiMD]. It's still not really clear to me exactly what you want to do, though. You started off talking about making bit-perfect copies of CDs, then went into talking about copying MDs losslessly [an entirely different process]. So really - what exactly is it that you need to do? Cheers.

Ahhh, see, you're talking about another something entirely different. Excepting the MD drive you're looking at, it's the same thing, though - you can't bit-perfectly copy an SP mode MD. Any playback means decoding the SP content to PCM, which means a generation loss is guaranteed. The MD drive you're looking at will, with the right software [presumably using their tools] allow direct extraction to ATRAC files, however, you still have the same problem - you can't write ATRAC SP to any other format and have it usable, so to write to any other format still means transcoding to PCM and then possibly to something else.

Decks with optical outputs are very much the only option for this. "Portable" is also debatible in some instances; for instance, some pro equipment is the same size as old cart machines [maybe 6*7" on the front], and some of the smallest non-handhelds were rack-mount units.

This is all sort of beside the point - if you're talking about recording to a lossily-compressed format [like SP mode on legacy MD] then there's no such thing as bit accuracy anyway, even if you knew that the stream reaching the encoder is exactly what leaves the player.

Likely not. You're the first person I've read anything by about any of the Marantz PMD series that had anything positive to say about its analogue stage. I keep reading that their mic preamps make Hi/MD portables' preamps look super-high quality by comparison.

Decks, yes. Portables, no. Go take a look at prices for A/D converters .. last time I looked around at this [about 12 months ago] 1-bit A/D converters [as are used in almost all consumer devices including 24-bit sound cards] for about $1.50USD .. true 24-bit linear PCM converters were somewhere around the $60USD mark for inexpensive ones. Both were in quantities of 10,000 if I remember correctly. Also, I'm willing to bet that the other 24-bit portables out there right now [such as the newer PMD model from Marantz, and the M-Audio Microtrack 24/96] also use 1-bit converters. From what I've seen, linear converters are a rarity outside of professional equipment. That doesn't mean that 1-bit converters suck, though.

The standard rates of 32kHz, 44.1kHz, and 48kHz are supported. It's possible that any rate in between can be converted automatically as well, they generally do clain 32-48kHz functionality. Even 44.1kHz streams are resampled. MD and HiMD record at 44.1kHz and use 16-bit converters. There are no other options with either format. Rather, portables use 16-bit converters. [Possible 1-bit delta/sigma PWM with conversion to 16-bit PCM, even, since these A/D converters are so much cheaper]

This howto isn't about ripping. It's about keeping your own recordings gapless when burning.

Call Sony's customer service department and dog them relentlessly. Perhaps they can remove the DRM if he sends a copy of the CD to them. Otherwise, I am not aware of any solution for this at this time. In the future, do not use OMA as a backup format.

There is no such thing as actual SP encoding from SonicStage, which uses LP2 padded out to fit SP's data rate. Restated: the highest quality NetMD mode encoding you can get from SS is LP2. Pseudo-SP encoding should occur at faster than realtime speeds, unless your computer is *really* slow. Also, neither HiMD nor NetMD work at greater than USB 1.1 speeds [in fact, only a fraction of 1.1's speed with legacy MDs in NetMD mode], again, unless your computer is *really* slow. My computer + RH10 transcode MP3 to pseudo-SP and writes to a NetMD-formatted MD80 at about 4x speed [which does seem very slow to me]. LP2 mode, by comparison, takes only a few seconds to transfer a single track. [i did a test listen and the two are definitely identical in terms of playback quality, so it's safe to assume they came from the same LP2-transcoded source.] My guess is that the recorder does the job of padding out the data for pseudo-SP. If the car deck supports MDLP modes, using LP2 mode will save you some time [especially considering the fact that the quality is identical either way]. In other words, LP2 from SS is the fastest transfer method available to you if it's usable. The 2x dub made with your hifi should be of higher quality than either LP2 or pseudo-SP [since they are the same] from SS.

Athlon 2500+ / 512MB / NForce2 mobo / 2 * 80GB hdd / DVD-RAM/-R/-RW combo drive + CD-RW / 2nd ATA133 controller so every drive connected is a primary device / M-Audio Revo 7.1 / Nvidia dual-head+VIVO video / 19" and 14" CRTs / trackball [i hate meeses] / Dvorak right-hand layout keyboard Logitech Z-680 speakers Technics SV-100 digital audio processor Realistic cassette deck [used for occasional playback only] Realistic bookshelf receiver [used for radio tuner] Sony SLV-676UC VHS HiFi VTR [connected bi-directionally via composite video; also used for RF tuner] Emerson 13" colour TV [connected via RF from VTR] Sony CCD-TRV75 Hi8 camcorder [connected via Y/C video with composite disconnected] Canon ZR MiniDV camcorder [connected via firewire] Canon EOS Elan II film camera user-modified Slik still photo tripod Peavey mid-priced diamond series stage mic; SP-TFB2 mics; various other mics available for use incl. AKG C1000s Sony NH700 and RH10 HiMD recorders [via USB] Other various analogue devices including turntable, 8-track player, &c. Sennheiser HD330 cans; Koss UR-29 over-ear cans for location/FOH monitoring [lightweight, foldable, inexpensive, easily replaceable with lifetime warranty and not too horrible sound]; various Sony earbuds; Koss "The Plug" pseudo-canalphones perfect for noisy location monitoring on a very low budget ADSL 3MBps down / 384kbps up via ethernet

We are talking about portables, because we're talking about HiMD. Sony themselves don't make any non-portable units, and it's already established that the midi systems available don't have either USB [if I remember correctly] or working SP/DIF outputs. Ideally, I feel that Sony should design and release at least one deck, whether rack-mount or consumer-cased. A deck with a faster, more robust interiour mechanism [less compromised for portability], USB support for use with SonicStage exactly as with the portables, and SP/DIF [toslink] in- and outputs.

Sidebar: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Legal_Sony_gra...tising_backlash

see also http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/ asof today, more about the suncomm DRM there.

How many portable consumer devices can you point to that have SP/DIF, whether coax or optical, outputs on them? Incidentally, the last consumer MD with a digital output on it [other than USB] was the very first MD model released. No portable since then has had an output on it. I would surmise that most companies focusing on consumer devices basically consider SP/DIF to be deprecated, especially since the only form of DRM supported by it [sCMS] is extremely weak, and easily bypassed with inexpensive equipment.

HiMD with bluetooth - great for player-only units, but since HiMD and MD recorders use unbalanced mic cables, they'd likely be completely useless for recording [due to electromagnetic/radio frequency interference] unless the bluetooth were disabled when doing so.

My best guess is that - the vast majority of users who come to most fora dedicated to a particular subject come in search of the answer to a particular question. Once they get the answer they need, they don't return unless they need another answer.

See here: A Guide To Hi-MD Uploading and here: Marc's Hi-MD Renderer -- Mature Conversion Tool for Self-Recorded Uploads Welcome to the forums.

I'm not aware of what the difference is between them, to be honest. Perhaps if you started a thread in the tech discussion forum, another user could answer as to the difference. Cheers.

I must say .. this has got to be one of my favourite threads since coming here. It's great to hear everyone's stories.

Actual read speeds are here: [write speeds are roughly half] http://www.minidisc.org/hi-md_faq.html#r_q104 Note that copying PCM from HiMD runs much slower than the stated 9Mbps peak read rate. What I'm theorising about is the fact that writingin audio mode [whether from an analogue source or from optical SP/DIF] is likely done differently than writing in mass-storage mode. Audio modes are specifically for audio, where the write-speed of a given bitrate is known beforehand, and the length of the recording buffer is a fixed amount of time. Neither can be known in mass-storage mode, since it's just data being sent to the unit. There's no knowing - without testing - whether mass-storage mode is buffered in any way similar to audio mode. Also, the external A/D + USB controller unit we're talking about here might do buffering of its own [highly likely, I'd say] which could overcome this problem in any case.