dex Otaku

Read carefully: "its preamp is better than any of the previous MD equipment I've used, as is its AGC." To rephrase: Its mic preamp is better than that of any MD [not HiMD, since they have the same preamp is this one] I've used, as is its AGC. Notice that I made no mention in either case of it being better than the NH900 or NH1 [which should be exactly equivalents to the NH700 in this department].

It's also possible that I have no problems with it because I'm using a more recent version than most people seem to.

This would suggest that there is some difference between Hong Kong/Korean and Canadian/Australian. The interesting thing is that since CA/AU is a lower value, it might actually be slightly less restricted than HK/Korea - assuming there's some kind of linear relationship here. Perhaps setting this to '00' would completely uncap the amp. Not that I'm proposing anyone actually try this, I'm just saying - the higher the value, the lower the cap threshold [or ratio] is what appears to be going on. In any case, my silly Koss pseudo-canalphones are so sensitive that they are deafening with my unit at 13/30 with most music. My Sennheiser HD330s start to hurt my ears at about 19/30. edit: Whatever the case may be, it's somewhat important to note that this setting is bound to have at least a minor affect on battery life as well.

[pulling out spectrum analysis software] Expect some graphs of sweeps to show the differences [at least between an NH700 set as Canadian as hacked as "25"]. Soon. Not right away, but soon.

for who? and who? and what did who get the 1 for?

My apologies .. romance languages have much in common. Welcome to the forum, by the way.

"Upload" n'est pas possible avec les disques MD/MDLP/netMD, même avec les lecteurs HiMD. I'm guessing by your use of "traduction" that you might be French. If not, the simple answer is: no.

I am not counting on the 1st year's HiMDs being upgradeable. As to what year 2 will bring, we won't know until the news finally comes.

The ironic part to this whole policy is that .. Speaking specifically of home, not business, computers: I have serviced hundreds of computers made by the likes of Compaq, HP, Dell, Gateway, IBM .. you name it. By far, the most reliable computers have tended to be the homebuilt ones made with quality off-the-shelf parts, with no proprietary motherboards or BIOSes. Even cheap generic mobos with cheap no-name video and sound cards often work far more reliably than almost ANY home machine I've seen made by the likes of HP et al.

It's their way of saying, "Look buddy, we have no idea what hardware you have in your computer. You expect us to just take your word on its reliability? WHAT-EVerrrr." Just had to add the WHAT-EVerrrr. Trying to imagine a bespectacled Japanese Sony engineer saying that.

I have had no problems whatsoever with the 1GB disc that came with my NH700. I can't really express any more on this than the above line. 1GB discs are still not available where I live, so I constantly recycle MD80s, and only use the 1GB disc for longer PCM recordings. Only one user has reported botched tracks with SonicStage 2.3. I tested this myself with over 500 downloads one day and lost no tracks. I lost several tracks, including sections of important recordings, using SS 2.1 and 2.2. Incidentally, I was the one who started pushing the real-time backup idea here in the first place. While I have not lost tracks with v2.3, I still do it as a matter of course. Better safe than sorry. The only ways in which DRM affects me are those related to recording, and they do make certain things a hassle. If you're accustomed to following procedures like those of a broadcast environment, they don't really become an issue, though. Otherwise, you can't copy music downloaded from SonicStage. The DRM works in this regard, so far, though it's important to note that there are much more efficient [especially in terms of speed] ways to copy music from point A to point B than HiMD [even in data mode]. I have never had difficulty with this with any MD equipment, nor my HiMD recorder. Plug it in, set the levels, use it. There are hoops, but they're worth going through in terms of how inexpensive MD and HiMD are compared to the results you can get with your recordings. In terms of recording quality, my NH700 has consistently exceeded my expectations. Also - again, if you're used to following studio-type procedures of any kind, those hoops won't even seem like hoops. They're simply steps in the process. The extra 75 seconds it takes to open Wave Converter, select your tracks, and convert them to WAV files seems like a pretty small price to pay, IMO. PCM data transfers at between 2.5-3x real-time, so yes, this is accurate. Add more time if the recording is split up into a lot of tracks. Where the hell did you get this one from? 1GB HiMDs hold 94:55 of PCM audio. An MD80 formatted as HiMD holds about 28. Cheers.

Yes. It has a 9-segment, 2-channel meter with one mark at -12dBfs and another above the "top" mark at 0dBfs. As it uses a non-backlit LCD display, all of the pros and cons of LCD come into play, i.e. slow response when cold, difficulty seeing it in dim light, &c. Two answers to this: First, there is a mic sensitivity setting, either 'sens high' or 'sens low'. 'sens high' adds more gain, though to be honest I don't know what the actual gain of both are. In 'sens high' you can start to hear preamp hiss and it's quite easy to run out of [preamp] headroom if things get too loud. Second, there is a manual record level mode, which is adjustable on-the-fly while recording, though you have to [by menu options] enable this after every 'stop' while recording. The units have AGC built in with two settings, 'normal' or 'loud music'. The two do not measure significantly different; I suspect that 'loud music' has a longer sustain/release time. In my experience with MD and most other equipment, AGC tends to be a bad thing. The AGC on my NH700 sounds quite natural in most environments with an "average" average SPL [if that makes sense to you]. The combination of the sensitivity of my mics [sP-TFB-2 in-ear binaurals] and the AGC on the unit is such that I tend to use the AGC in most situations, which I never would have done with any of the previous MD equipment I'd used. This depends on what you mean by monitoring. The line/mic inputs get routed out the headphone amp, yes, and the amp's EQ is disabled when recording. So yes, you can hear what you're recording. Neither MD nor HiMD do actual confidence monitoring. I have had few few defects while recording, even with the unit in a loose shirt-pocket while walking around. It doesn't take too much of a bump to cause glitches, though. The worst I have experienced in terms of this were tiny clicks that sounded similar to a CD skipping, and a loss of <1sec of audio. Yes, this is exactly how I do things. HiMDs are powered by USB, so this is not an issue. TR has a timer mode that shuts the recording off and saves the file automatically, which is useful for this. There is no accurate way to answer this. Transfer times from the HiMD itself are lengthened by the number of tracks recorded, for instance. i.e. 90 tracks at 1-minute each will take a great deal longer than 1 track of 90 minutes to transfer. It also depends on what disc type you use. Legacy MDs in HiMD mode are slower than 1GB discs by almost half for read speeds. I do not recall how fast the average HiSP transfer goes, but if you do a search for this on the fora you are likely to find one of our old posts discussing it. Overall, I'd estimate that my own turnaround time for a 90-minute recording.. Noting that I never use the trackmarks as they were when recording and transferring - I always split things up in editing after.. From the beginning of transfer to writing a finished CD [with no editing other than marking tracks taking place] would be anywhere between 25 and 60 minutes, depending on how complicated the track marking is.

For people whose primary use of these units is location recording, this is a total non-issue. [unless, of course, they're using outboard A/D convertors, which is rare. People usually buy portables so they can carry -less- equipment, not more.]

HiMD in USB storage mode != HiMD audio. Rephrased: yes, you can put mp3s on your HiMD discs as files, but the player will not play them. You -can- play them on another computer. In this instance you're not using the audio features of HiMD at all. You're just using it for data storage. Assuming that's understood, yes, you can mix files of any type along with HiMD audio on a HiMD-formatted disc. i.e. the data portion and the audio portion do not interfere with each other.

This is a stab in the dark, but it's possible that your version of Installshield might need to be updated. Trying googling "installshield update". I have no other suggestions at the moment. Good luck.. and welcome to the board.

This is not accurate. ATRAC does not contain anything created by Dolby Labs. When Sony was working on ATRAC, they discovered that Dolby Labs had patents that covered certain things that they [sony] had already developed. Rather than start a patent litigation war, they contacted Dolby and arranged a licensing agreement with them. This is the extent of Dolby's connection to ATRAC.

Three ways: 1) With a version of OpenMG Jukebox or pre-2.0 SonicStage [anything before HiMD's release] you can use Realplayer with your netMD. 2) Convert the RA files to WAV and then import them to SonicStage [preferably the newest version] and download them to MD. 3) write the RA files to an audio CD and rip them with SS [this is definitely the simplest route].

You cannot copy from MDs to a computer digitally using SonicStage. netMD is limited to downloading only. There is [currently] no such thing as uploading from an MD. HiMD does support uploading, but only with tracks recorded on the units themselves. Tracks transferred to HiMD discs with SonicStage or Simple Burner cannot be uploaded.

The simplest way to do this is to import your mp3s, convert them and put them on your MD or HiMD, then go back to the library after and simply delete the tracks. SS will give you options on "how" to delete them. You want to tell it to "remove from your library" and also "remove the oma/omg files from the computer". Those aren't exact wording, but it should be clear enough to get things done. This will leave the mp3s alone but delete the SS versions, and remove the tracks from your library.

I tried to do a test with FFDSHOW vs. system codecs and got some very strange results. I know of very few applications that will tell you [honestly] what the active codecs in use are. I tend to look towards Media Player Classic [havnig disabled its internal decoders] and mplayer2.exe. If anyone has any suggestions on what to use to see what codecs are active, please make them. I'm gonig to go looking for such a tool after posting this. FFDSHOW has a control panel that lets you select whether it decodes what formats, and what of its available decoders to use, as well as their output bit depths and such. My presumption before this was that FFDSHOW's problems were caused by its defaulting to all output bit-depths being available [16, 24, and 32-bit integer as well as 32-bit floating point]. I'm not sure what to think now, to be honest. My "normal" sytem codec for mp3 is a version from FhG. FFDSHOW lists both libmad and mp3lib as available to it. Here's the weird part: [iMO] If I switch things so that FFDSHOW is not 'disabled' for mp3 and to use either of its decoders, MP Classic switches from the FhG codec to FFDSHOW. mplayer2, on the other hand, *always* uses the FhG codec. SS does not have a way to report what codec is active, therefore the following is unreliable until I remove the FhG codec completely and redo everything. Test conditions: * Using FFDSHOW version 2005-02-01 and SonicStage 2.3. * I made several test files, then encoded them to 320kbps mp3 using both lame 3.96.1 and a version of the FhG encoder. * I made multiple copies of the files, and put them in folders titled with the settings I would be using with FFDSHOW, i.e. "disabled", "all bit options on", "processing limited to 16-bit", "output limited to 16-bit" and so on, including the names of the two FFDSHOW codecs as well. * I shut down and restarted SS between each trancoding to try and ensure that the changes to FFDSHOW's settings would "take". There is no way of knowing which codec was actually in use, however. * The first test was with FFDSHOW disabled; presumably, SS would be using the FhG decoder. * Three basic tests were perfomed for both FFDSHOW decoders: 1) all bit-depth options on 2) processing depth limited to 16-bit 3) processing and output depth limited to 16-bit The Results: All files transcoded properly. FFDSHOW did not interfere with SonicStage's trancoding process in any way, regardless of whether it was set to be the active decoder or not. In all honesty, I was very surprised with these results. They were not what I was expecting. Tomorrow I will be removing the FhG codec and redoing this to see what the results are then.

I honestly don't know, because I'm not about to install other versions of SS on my machine. Other than the language differences, the only difference I knew of between the various regional SS versions was where Connect points to, if you're using the Connect version.

While this is really a total non-issue for me, I'm waiting and seeing. I can't see them writing off compatibility in HiMD's second year. There are too many people [most specifically, broadcast users] with existing equipment for them to just dump it this early in the life of HiMD. As an aside, the developments by Sharp for the hybrid optical systems might be a big clue as to whether compatibility will exist much longer.

Hey, you never know. I'm waiting for news of HiMD gen2.

There's a good reason for doing it this way: hopefully no users can get ahold of the firmware to hack it in any way. It's all about control. It's also about making sure that the upgrade is done properly; if something goes wrong when one of their techs is doing the job, they're more likely to be able to fix it than the average user who barely knows how to plug a USB device in.

You'd be surprised how many computer hardware makers specify in their fine print that they won't support the product if you use a homebuilt system, or basically anything other than exactly what you can purchase pre-assembled from a computer store.