dex Otaku

Companies do not generally provide digital headphones because headphones require the amplification of an analogue signal in order to create sound. Digital headphones = including the power supply, amplifier, d/a converters et al INSIDE the headphones, which is pretty impractical compared to just having speakers inside them and depending on an external source, which will likely be a far higher .uality in terms of d/a and amplification than what they can fit inside a pair of cans.

Guilty pleasures.. mostly 80s stuff. i.e. Boomtown Rats, Level 42, OMD, older Depeche Mode.. I also have a largish Harry Connick Jr. collection [maybe 7-8 albums]. My vinyl collection is where most of my "you own THAT?" albums are. A lot of synthpop and industrial from the 80s.

A440: we should write a column together somewhere. We seem to do well at picking up with the stuff the other has left out unintentionally..

On HiMDs... some notes, not really in any particular order.. AGC "standard" and "loud music" share the same threshold, the same attack, same compression ratio, &c. The only difference is that "loud music" has a much longer hold/decay time. How it works really depends on the sensitivity of your microphone. [Assuming, of course, that you're using a mic and the HiMD's mic in.] If you have a really sensitive mic, AGC will totally foul your recordings. If you're recording speech, most mics will do a decent job using the AGC. If you're recording music, regardless of what mic you're using, go for manual levels. You will seriously regret the affect the AGC has. I have SP-TFB-2s, which are not super-sensitive; actually, they seem to sit right at the ideal threshold for the NH700's AGC, at least when I'm recording speech and "average" SPL sounds [i.e. 70-90dB SPL]. Louder sounds will foul up too often, though "loud music" can help that some. -------- Neither. Use manual levels. Unless you are stone cold deaf, you will regret using the AGC for amped music. You should only ever have to use high sens for recording very quiet sounds. Trying to record loud sounds with high sens will result in two things: clipping at the mic preamp, and a greatly increased noise floor in the recording.

I didn't even know they made commercials for MD or HiMD, but then, I don't watch telly so how would I know. Something tells me they wouldn't air them here anyway.

Something like the radio shack ehadphone volume control with a balance control or individual levels for each channel would work. I don't know where to find one of these, though. I would likely just make one myself with a box and 2 potentiometers.

It's inadvisable to split the mic signal itself. You would need an external preamp whose signal can be split to more than one recorder, or to daisy-chain the recorders, i.e. mic to recorder #1, 'phone output of recorder #1 to line input of recorder #2. Side-effects of the daisy-chaining process: * Levels from the 'phones output are not actually as high as line-level [the Nh1 and NH900 in line-out mode are exceptions to this] * The 'phones output [on other than the NH1 and NH900] is not flat, frequency-response wise, which will result in boosted bass. Too see proof of this with an NH700, see this thread. If you want identical levels on both recorders, splitting the output of an external preamp is basically the only way to go.

Thank you for the heads-up. Duly noted.

Not really, no. Such a thing has to be incorporated right from the design stage. It just seemed more polite saying it that way than simply "No."

The simple answer is no.

Hey all. Thought I'd throw in my $0.02 here - In Canada there are very few broadcasters using DAB, and these are only, to my knowledge, in major centres such as Toronto and Vancouver. I've been trying to find a directly of Canadian DAB broadcasters but so far haven't had any luck. Satellite radio is somewhat popular, but most people I know with satellite systems don't even use the free radio channels that are available. I have met very few people who use subscription satellite radio services. Where I live we've gone from having 4 FM stations c.1999, and this includes CBC radio 1 [mono], CBC radio 2 [stereo], and SRC [the French CBC, in mono], to having something like 7-8 in our area. That's still including the CBC and SRC stations, though we now have a college station that barely covers the city [pop. 38,000] as well as several commercial stations, most of which moved from AM to FM stereo. Our selection here is rather limited; the commercial stations are, without exception, pop radio and therefore do not interest me or any of the people I know. No one I know even listens to them in the car if they can help it. Most of the people I know are avid supporters of the CBC, the college station, and finally the newest offering that is moving to be province-wide [Manitoba is 2.5 times larger than the entire country of France in terms of land mass, with a population of only 1.5 million], which is totally run by aboriginal Canadians. They have the best programming of any of the commercial or semi-commercial stations. My biggest beef with the commercial stations is not with their programming [i'm simply not part of their demographic], but with their on-air broadcast quality. The CRTC basically legislates certain minimum-quality mandates for broadcasting. In recent years this must have changed to a lower minimum standard; all of the commercial stations here use music database systems that do their playlist logging automatically [logging being required by law to track content for royalties distribution]. All of this is done on computer, of course - the stations no longer use cart tapes, CDs, LPs or anything but what's on their hard discs, and basically don't even require mixers other than for turning the DJ mic on and off - not that the DJ is anything like a DJ any more. The quality issue comes into play with the database systems they're using. 5 seconds listening to any of these stations and you know right away that their databases are encoded using MP3 at no greater than 128kbps, or a similar low-bitrate, low-quality encoding method. I often ask people to turn their radios off because the artifacting, which plays perfectly clear as a bell over the air, is so completely awful. I don't know how anyone can stand listening to it, myself. Even AM stereo analogue sounds FAR better than this. ----------- DAB is totally nonexistent here. I have never seen a receiver for sale in this province, which makes sense as there is no programming available. Canada is generally regarding in tech and broadcast publications as a success story for Eureka, though I still know of no one, even in major centres, that even knows of DAB stations in their area let alone has a receiver. An interesting note is that the CRTC and Canadian broadcasters chose to adopt the same system as Europe and the UK [DAB / Eureka, using MP2], where the US's official system is IBOC [from iBiquity]. This is the only move the CRTC has ever made to deliberately distance Canada from the US in terms of broadcast signals; otherwise we share identical over-the-air systems with them in all regards [i.e. NTSC television, odd-carrier FM broadcast, &c.]. Note: CRTC = Canadian Radio Telecommunications Commission, our equivalent to the US's FCC.

Optical in = realtime copying; no one in their right mind is going to spend thousands of hours copying things by SP/DIF in order to pirate them, whereas they would spend the much shorter time required to rip+distribute with a computer. Basically, it doesn't prevent anything - it just makes the option far less attractive.

Let's see them make UMD random-access rewriteable first...

I've been trying to find a straightforward answer to this, and can't seem to. My real questions are as to how DRM works on netMD, which, for backward-compatibility reasons, can't alter the stored stream significantly. According to the IEEE paper on minidisc.org: <blockquote>"Variable size of the write data causes some difficulty in managing address control, therefore, we introduced the cluster unit, which constitutes the minimum unit of write or over-write of data to the disc. One cluster consists of 36 sectors. 32 sectors of one cluster are used for main data recording and 4 sectors are used for data linking or additional sub data.</blockquote> My previous thoughts on how netMD's protection works were that it simply used the subcode to mark the stream as an SCMS 'copy' and whatever needs to be changed for "TRPROT", which could be in both the written audio/subcode clusters and the UTOC. I can't be sure of this, of course, as I haven't found any material on exactly how netMD's DRM works. This way, no change to the actual format of the audio stream would be needed, and backward-compatibility is ensured while maintaining the weak version of DRM that is basically still just SCMS. Since Sony elected to not allow uploading/ripping, this is really the only form of copy protection they need with netMD, as digital copying can only be done using SP/DIF [which, as we all know, can be stripped of copy protection quite easily, but hey, it works to keep the majority of people from copying things until they come up with a completely new system - HiMD]. In any case, I don't think your method above is what's used, as the capacity hit would be taken regardless of what bitrate the audio is encoded in. In the end, to me it still appears that SP writing should be possible with both MD and HiMD. Also, with HiMD the conformance of blocks/cluster is no longer really necessary as HiMD uses a true filesystem, enabling true random access that is not limited by or dependent upon the physical layout of the disc as with MD; rather it's limited by HiMD's own indexing, done in the DRM table, track info table, and the audio "virtual partition" themselves, on top of a FAT filesystem. Editing to single-frame accuracy should be possible, though electing to use blocks conformant to the 32kB cluster size of the FAT partition format used by 1GB discs is also possible - though that would be a pretty coarse resolution, even with high bitrates. It seems to me that HiMD should be capable of writing any bitrate of any format as long as the hardware is aware, i.e. able to recognise, said format. The bitrate of the audio should be completely independent of the medium, unlike with MD. This is evidenced by HiMD's 2nd-gen being capable of playing both CBR and VBR MP3s. The more I think about this, the less I'm making sense to myself, but in the end this is what my thoughts boil down to: Writing SP from a computer to netMD should be possible, because DRM was not part of the system from the ground-up, and altering the bitstream significantly to take it into account would break compatibility with the discs on all non-netMD equipment. Writing SP on HiMD should be possible, because the use of separate DRM, track info, and audio portions on an actual filesystem [allowing true random access] means that the medium need not be physically tied to the bitrate of the audio on it [as with MD]. Basically, format and bitrate are arbitrary and not dependent on the physical disc structure any more; as long as the hardware's decoder can recognise whatever you throw at it, it should be playable at the very least, and given the proper processing and seeking logic, editable as well [potentially even with VBR streams]. Finally - my opinion of why Sony don't allow SP writing from computers: The quality was too high to risk using with a weak DRM system [sCMS at the least]. The same does not apply to HiMD with HiSP or PCM because HiMD is designed with stronger DRM from the ground up. The omission of SP mode from HiMD is probably just from a desire to move to the new atrac3plus format, which, with a higher-resolution transform, at least has the potential to be better than SP. Mind you, HiMD decks will likely have full optical I/O, defeating this once again. Gah. Theory as usual. If anyone can point me to more reading material on this, I'll be happy to prove myself wrong.

I tend to use my HiMD as a portable player when walking places. I have no vehicle and tend to avoid public transit, so my walks to friends' houses can take up to an hour or more, and it's nice to have accompaniment, so to speak. I also wear my NH700 and 'phones when cleaning house, because it's more convenient than turning the stereo up, which might bother my neighbours.

Bwaahahahahahahaha Glad to see things are working. Sorry to hear it took so much effort.

I just tested dividing and combining tracks, and both work fine for me. [for HiLP, HiSP, and PCM]. I can't begin to guess why we're not experiencing the same behaviour.

SSScsiSV = most likely a custom ASPI layer for SS, for CD burning. On my system, with SS not open et al, this process falls to about 320kB memory usage, so as long as your CD drives stay working in all other apps, this should be okay to leave running. If you have trouble burning from other apps, go to the services control panel and STOP this service and see if it fixes the problem. SSAAD = I don't know, but it puts itself in the startup, and SS works fine if you remove it. Best guess is that this is either a daemon to tell SS to start when you plug your netMD / HiMD in [which is in option in SS 3.0] or it's a daemon to preload SS's modules to decrease its loading time. ...note: SSAAD reinserts itself into your startup every time you run SS. doG I hate startup progs that do that. While SS works fine with it unloaded, it will load again after your next reboot. This is as bad as Realplayer's startup item that you can't get rid of. Either way, it doesn't appear to be doing my system harm other than consuming memory.

Correct. Output only. Most consumer sound cards do not have digital inputs; only outputs. If what you want is digital i/o, there are USB devices that do both directions with optical and coax for <$100USD, and usually have 24-bit stereo analogue in and out as well. That doesn't satisfy your 7.1 requirement, but add that <$20USD chaintech card and you're rockin'.

SP is an encoding format; OpenMG is a container format with DRM. Put SP into an OpenMG container, and you get SP with DRM. Just like how they can take an MP3 and wrap it in DRM with encryption, and allow Sony players [that support MP3 decoding] to play it. It's really not that hard to figure out. Whatever Sony's issue with SP is, it's not DRM.

LowMD - That your system is a VAIO is possibly the reason all this is happening. Previous versions of SS had slightly different functionality on VAIO systems. Perhaps there's a module incompatibility of some sort. My experience as a computer tech is that, generally speaking, factory-installed OS's and their accessories tend to be the cause of a great deal of [if not, in fact, most] problems. [This being my experience with Compaqs, Toshibas, Sonys, HPs, and virtually every popular brand brand PC and notebook between about 1994 and late 2003, when I left my job as a tech at a local shop.] My rule of thumb with basically all computers is that, right out of the box, the first thing one should do is wipe the hard disc and do a clean installation of your OS, free of all the crap, er, extras that the manufacturer provides, along with the most recent drivers for all your hardware. If you're running your machine with the factory-installed OS, that is probably the culprit right there. I hope you get the previous version running correctly again. Please let us know. Oh, and incidentally, ssaad is -not- in my startup; the first thing I do after installing any software is check for things it added to my startup and, usually, remove them. In the case of ssaad, I removed it from the startup immediately after installing SS 3.0, and everything is working fine here. Again, good luck. edit: Upon checking again - SSAAD reinserts itself into your startup every time you run SS. doG I hate startup progs that do that. While SS works fine with it unloaded, it will load again after your next reboot. This is as bad as Realplayer's startup item that you can't get rid of. Either way, it doesn't appear to be doing my system harm other than consuming memory.

The lines have shorted inside the cabling. You can achieve the same effect with any pair of headphones [or, in fact, anything that connects using a 3.5mm stereo jack] by inserting the plug most but not all the way into the headphone jack of whatever player you're using. What's happening is a phase-cancellation of everything that is the same on both channels. What you're listening to, in essence, is all the out-of-phase information. If you listened to something encoded for Dolby Surround you would hear the back channel loud and clear. I gave up buying expensive extension cords for headphones years ago. The dollar store here sells 3.5m extension cables [3.5mm stereo male to 3.5mm stereo female] for $2, and I buy them 3-4 at a time, and throw them out when they quit working. Many would balk at the fact that I use such cheap cabling, but my experience is generally that expensive cables don't last much longer than cheap ones in terms of durability when you're dragging them across floors and such. As for cable care.. All I can say is be careful. Don't tug on them, insert/remove plugs using the plug, not the cable, &c. This is mostly just common sense. Earphone and microphone cables are pretty fragile, really. The best solution I've ever found to making them last as long as possible is to be as careful as possible with them, including pinning them to your clothing when you're wearing a player and phones so the cables can't catch on anything and tug.

NH900 for the AA battery pack.

This is interesting, becaue both Nero imagedrive and VirtualCloneDrive work fine with SS and SB's drive check for me. Still, I've never seen anything bad happen if you just cancel the check. This depends on your drives, of course. Note that SS and SB will continue asking you to do the check if you cancel it, though.

On principle alone, I would avoid all Creative products. Try browsing sites like minidisc canada [http://www.minidisc-canada.com], minidisco, &c. They usually have sound cards and USB adapters listed with SP/DIF digital i/o [coax and/or optical]. kurisu recommends a chaintech card that retails in the US for around $15USD, has 8-channel output, stereo analogue and microphone input, 24-bit support, and an optical output. Search the fora for 'chaintech' and you'll come across the model number. I have an m-audio revolution 7.1 which is similar to the chaintech expect that it has a coax output rather than optical. It serves me quite well.