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ZosoIV

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Everything posted by ZosoIV

  1. I'm not aware of any limitations on the upload of LP4 audio, so long as it wasn't transferred via OpenMG jukebox (which, as your post demonstrates, is not the case). I've never tried it myself, as I never used LP4 mode for anything.
  2. Sounds promising, and it's still cheaper than the RH1 to boot. Does it accept 8GB SDHC cards?
  3. Boy, those 132kbps ATRAC3 files are gonna sound great once transcoded to WMA or MP3.....
  4. Looks kind of chunky...is it really as big as it looks?
  5. Oh, how I envy you........
  6. The problem is that the concept of a "format" is passe - newer devices are media agnostic, and so just create files that can be stored on any old digital medium, like flash, HDD, DVD+R, et al. Part of the coolness about MD was the actual format itself, those neat little shiny discs that looked so futuristic back in the mid 90s. A MiniDisc also contains files but in a sense, IS the music, whereas "music" post-CD/MD is now a transient, formless entity, shifting electronically between hard disks and flash chips. Since no physical/disc-based medium will replace MD, a discussion of post-MD recording devices loses its common denominator and becomes about anything and everything that records PCM audio - and that's a lot of different devices nowadays. At least with MD you could compare x unit to y unit.....with other types of recorders, that's less straightforward.
  7. Honestly, when using PCM or lossless and no EQ, the difference between my 5.5G iPod video and RH1 are rather negligible over Grado SR-80 headphones. The RH1 might have a slight edge in the bass department, and the iPod's high frequencies are more shrill/pronounced, but that's about it. Any differences (imagined or otherwise) probably aren't large enough in everyday listening/everyday phones/everyday environments to warrant considering one over the other. Not on the basis of sound quality alone, anyway. My iPod and Hi-MD have happily co-existed for a long time because they are two different things - one is a small capacity audio recorder, and the other is a large capacity video/audio player. If I want high sound quality, I don't use either - I go over to my Marantz digital amp.
  8. That sounds normal to me - in fact, some of my older, non Hi-MD units (R900, for example) were even louder upon spin-up. That's one of the trade-offs you make by using a mechanical device like MiniDisc over solid state.
  9. While I completely agree that MiniDisc "should have" won, I'm not sure how much of an effect it would have had on how many of us still use the format as of this late date. Even in places where it was popular (Asia, for example), MD is now on its way out. I think what you would have seen if MD caught on big in the mid 90s was either a delay (or non-uptake) of small capacity flash units from 2001 onward until high-capacity flash players (4GB-8GB+) became practical (which happened about 2005). I'm not sure MD would have made a difference in the uptake of HDD units like iPods or Zens or Zunes, since a hard-disk based player is obviously for storing huge amounts of compressed music (even whole libraries) on a single device - and appeals to people for different reasons than a small flash-based or MD-based player would. That's why comparing an MD recorder and a player-only HDD unit never made sense to me. The article is also a bit wrong on 8-tracks: they didn't lose, they simply became obsolete. By the early 1980s, cassettes had become good enough, cheap enough, and plentiful enough to render the larger and more finicky 8-track tapes useless. 8-track recorders and Dolby-B equipped units DID exist, but the bulkiness of the huge tapes, combined with the lack of a rewind (some later players did fast-forward) and rather poor quality due to wow, flutter, and sub-standard tape heads couldn't match the compact cassette. At least here in the US, 8-tracks were THE tape format from about 1968-1981, and were found everywhere - especially in autos. Hardly what I would call a loser! While I wouldn't necessarily call MD "obsolete" at this point, it is obvious that time has moved on and it's strengths aren't as compelling as they were even five years ago - five years ago, there was hardly anything else on the market like MiniDisc. If Sony had done thing differently in the early 90s, MD would have been very popular then, but I'm not sure things would have been much different by 2007.
  10. DCC, in my opinion, far outclassed MD in terms of sound quality when they were introduced. DCC used a variant of MPEG-1 Layer 1 called PASC at 384kbps, which is a very simple compression scheme and didn't suffer from the same sort of artifacts that plagued early ATRAC (15kHz lowpass, ringing, metallic sound, pre-echo, etc). As time went on, ATRAC got better and Type-R/S probably isn't much different than PASC. If ATRAC had reached Type-R levels right away (and hardware/blanks had been a little cheaper), I don't think DCC would have been around for even as long as it was (discontinued: 1996).
  11. I remember drooling over these when they came out about 2003 or so - but 512MB and having to use SonicStage and ATRAC is a deal-breaker for me. Some people collect these, however, and I think you would fetch a good price on eBay for it.
  12. I think some people do record still, and there will always be a need to capture audio for various reasons (voice recording, audio off the radio, TV or DVDs, concerts, band practice, etc). The way that we accomplish this has changed to become (more) media agnostic. The MP3 file you record on one device will easily upload and can be played in your car, your clock radio, your DVD player, a portable HDD player, or even your RH1. People aren't as concerned with the media itself as much as the ability to play what's on it wherever they want to. That's the reason why compressed audio players and recorders have caught on, because it's certainly not a result of higher quality. (I've found that many cheap MP3 players/recorders build and component quality can't hold a candle to MD/Hi-MD, even though I find ATRAC as a codec to be lacking in quality and interoperability). That's why I don't see another physical "media" format for music like MD or Hi-MD. Music on MD's was locked inside the disc; the disc WAS the music. Even though Hi-MD will record and upload PCM for conversion/playback on universal devices, for me it relegated (more like, demoted) MD to a temporary repository for recordings until I could shift them to another more universal medium (i.e., freeing the data from the disc and onto my computer and DVD+R discs). The last thing consumers want is another proprietary media, and you KNOW that Sony would love to unleash another dead-end format that requires special software, hard-to-find media, and draconian DRM. We don't need another MD - we need flash/HDD recorders that offer the quality and build of MD with the portability, interoperability, and convenience of high-res PCM or DSD recorders. I hope that Sony will take what they know about MD recorders and marry those features to something a little less proprietary and more user-friendly....but I'm not holding my breath.
  13. Depends on the encoder. Most MP3 encoders don't sound very good at 128kbps CBR, but one outshines them all: LAME 3.97. LAME is an open-source encoder that is constantly being tweaked and improved. Using the -V5 --vbr-new preset (which gives about 130kbps VBR), listening tests have found it to be on par with MPEG-4 AAC at 128kbps - or transparent on many samples. Tests done around 192kbps (using -V2 --vbr-new) show it to be transparent on almost anything. I actually find ATRAC3 132 sounds grainy or watery with a lot of music, something that a properly-encoded (i.e., with LAME) MP3 around that bitrate won't suffer from. I never use ATRAC with my RH1, only MP3 or PCM.
  14. To each their own, I guess - I jettisoned the few pre-recorded MDs I owned a while back because I couldn't stand how they sounded. They do seem oddly collectible nowadays, if only for their rarity.
  15. Be careful with pre-recorded MDs - some of the older ones sounded pretty metallic and unpleasant as they were pressed with the first versions of ATRAC.
  16. It depends on the type of music being encoded, too. With a lot of the crap kids listen to these days (all words and no instruments, compressed as to be very LOUD), I wouldn't be surprised if 64k sounded passable. On the other hand, take a good classic rock recording or some acoustic jazz from the 50s or 60s and even LP2 sounds like ass.
  17. That data has always been there - even on the old, 128kbps DRM'ed tracks. Since it has been verified by several sites that the audio data itself is not watermarked, stripping the MP4 tag away will get rid of any identifiable information.
  18. Hi-SP isn't "bad" in that it sounds pretty much like any other lossy codec at 256kbps (MPEG-4 AAC, LAME-encoded MP3, or Ogg), and is probably indistinguishable from PCM the majority of the time. I would shy away from using it for live recordings if you are going to do any sort of editing, though. Once you load lossy audio into en editor and try to do anything with it, you will quickly induce artifacts. Lossy codecs work by coding signals below a certain point (hearing threshold) either very inefficiently (i.e., by adding noise/error) or will simply "throw away" the audio if it is completely masked by a louder sound. Once you amplify a lossy signal, change the stereo width, etc., you are changing the point at which your ears would normally not hear any of that masked "garbage" below the threshold of hearing - often rasing it to a point where you can. So, if you do plan on editing your recordings, it's probably safer to stick with PCM and just carry some extra batteries.
  19. I'd like to think that perhaps sony is moving Hi-MD towards the pro market, but I'm not sure that any "pro" I know would even take the RH1 seriously. Why? For one, it has consumer-level 1/8" inputs and outputs, not XLR or even 1/4". Secondly, upload (at least on the PC) requires use of consumer-grade "jukebox software" as opposed to allowing one to drag-and drop audio right from the unit (or upload directly into audio editing software packages). Third, the world has been moving away from 16/44 PCM for a while now - 16/48 was standard when DAT was around, and now portable recorders are beginning to have the ability to record in 24/96, 24/192 or even 1-bit, 2.8MHz DSD I suppose how one defines a "professional" is important here - maybe I'm over-defining the term? Still, I just don't get the impression that the RH1/MZ-M200 is truly a "professional" level recorder. It's great for people wanting to record thier gigs, lectures, recitals, etc - but not quite suited to what a lot of "pros" would want to use it for in 2007.
  20. I think that Sony will probably keep the RH1 going for a while in lieu of introducing new units - it already does most of what people who would be interested in it need it to. Plus, the market for new recorders has been shifting to HDD and flash for a few years now, and no doubt Sony will be devoting more resources to those categories as well. Then again, who knows?
  21. In the old days, CD players use to compress PCM into ADPCM when using skip protection to allow for more audio to be stored on (what at the time were) expensive memory chips. Nowadays, RAM is so cheap that I doubt any Hi-MD player has less than a 16Mbit buffer, which itself would store about 12 seconds of 16-bit PCM. I noticed that when using PCM, the recorder would spin up 3 or 4 times per minute, which would support a 16Mbit buffer. In contrast, HDD players usually have 32 to 64 megabytes of RAM, which is easily enough to cache a handful of songs (or 3-6 minutes of PCM) at once.
  22. I've easily induced errors on MD's by simply rubbing a strong magnet over them - without any heat. MDs are not as resilient to magnetic fields as we'd like to think.
  23. The 500 uses a very old version of ATRAC (4.0, I think), so in terms of encoding quality when using SP mode, the 480 will always be much better. The decoders should yield similar results on both units, but given that ADC/DAC technology gets better every year, the circa-1996 decoder chips in the 500 probably aren't as good as the more recent ones on the 480.
  24. Really? I've yet to see one properly conducted double-blind test between CD-R blanks - the vast majority of differences people claim to hear are probably imagined. For Hi-MD to sound different than MD discs due to error correction would imply that one or the other gives back a lot of faulty/spurious data, which I also have seen no evidence for. When error correction steps in, it's a nasty thing - not a subtle one. I once had a badly burnt CD where it was obvious that error correction was being called upon, and there were dropouts and pops on loud peaks. But it's not like the vocals or cymbals sounded less "warm" or "crisp" or anything that would imply a difference in subjective quality.
  25. Absolutely disgusting. With that unfortunate goat Sony has also sacrificed their remaining shreds of dignity (though that's not saying much, really).
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