ZosoIV

I just picked up one of these on eBay for only $29! No, it doesn't have a line or mic in, but considering its extreme cheapness and use of one AA cell, it will make a nice companion for working out or being out in public, two places where I don't want to risk my more expensive (and arguably more fragile) HDD-based players. (I no longer do any live recording, anyhow).

AAC is NOT Apple's audio codec, as pointed out above. This seems to be a common error made on this board. "AAC" = Advanced Audio Codec, an international standard which is subset of MPEG-4, just like "MP3" = MPEG-1 Layer 3 audio.

Just a quick note: Musician's Friend still has these same 5-packs for $2.99 online, IIRC. So, Wal-Mart's aren't the cheapest, but it is nice to be able to pick them up at a regular neighborhood store.

Check out this puppy: a mint-condition, Marantz 1060b power amp from 1979. Can't wait to hear my Type-R discs through this thing. Although it's not a tube amp, it still has that warm, "tube-like" 70's sound. Ahh, analog

I still use my MDS-JB940 every day to listen to music, both over headphones and speakers. I do believe its days are numbered, though - music servers with Burr-Brown DACS, FLAC support, and Wi-Fi are just more appealing to me nowadays. Having all of my 500GB uncompressed music library all in one place, without having to swap discs is pretty incredible. No ATRAC compression and no limited-capacity disc swapping! I'll hold off for a while longer, though.

Seriously people, I don't see what all the paranoia is about. It's 2006 and there are still people collecting 8-tracks, wax cylinders, and wire recorders - and those all are between 25 and 120 years old. MD will likely still have a following long after it's left for dead by the consumer electronics industry - and people will still need a place to talk about it. The millions of recorders and players out there right now won't suddenly stop working if/when Sony announces that MD will no longer be produced. I do feel that the MD forum and Sony forum should be kept separate, though. MD is a unique format and IMO deserves a separate place to talk about it.

From my extensive listening experience (and double-blind ABX testing), I can say that neither are perfect, but suffer from different problems. For ATRAC3+ 352kbps, it is a grainy, electronic sound on wind and brass instruments, and occasionally percussion. I haven't tried, but I would assume that it wouldn't do well with pre-echo "torture tests" like harpsichord or castanet samples, either. ATRAC 292kbps (SP) smears sharp attacks (pre-echo), leading to things like cymbal taps and acoustic guitar sounding thicker and "stickier" than the CD. ATRAC SP also brings the soundstage forward; there's less space between you and the instruments compared to the CD (or even LAME –preset standard). Most annoyingly for a jazz listener like myself, ATRAC SP has an awful time with trumpets; try "Flamenco Sketches" off of Miles Davis' landmark "Kind of Blue" album. There's a nasty, electronic ringing artifact every time Miles blows hard into his horn. That being said, both are transparent 99% of the time – all lossy codecs have problem samples. 352kbps is kind of a ridiculous size, though, for lossy audio when codecs like Vorbis, MPEG-4 AAC, LAME MP3 and MPC (Musepack) hit transparency in the 160-220kbps range. I suspect that ATRAC3+ has the latent potential to be transparent in that range, too, but hasn’t been tweaked enough yet.

Scratch that - just bought a used one on eBay!

Actually, you CAN buy the battery for the AM-F70 still, believe it or not! The LIB-902 goes for about $55-$58 online, hardly worth it for me since I don't use MD (the Aiwa included) "portably" anymore.

250 pounds is a bit high - I was hoping for something more like 185.

It just depends on the device sometimes, and that's despite cost or brand name. For example, my old Aiwa AM-F70, which came out in 1998 or 1999, still works as new after all these years (though the battery doesn't hold a charge anymore). On the other hand, I bought an MZ-R500 back in '01 to replace the Aiwa, and it lasted maybe a month - the optical block had a "birth defect." Sure, I've had newer Sony recorders along the way, but guess which one has outlasted all of them? The AM-F70. Go figure!

It should work, as long as you format the disc as FAT32 and simply drop your MP3's onto it via Windows Explorer and not SonicStage.

Use --vbr-new. From the LAME 3.97 alphas onward, it's been shown to be of higher quality on most samples and twice as fast as compared to the old VBR algorithm. I'd also recommend using -V2 --vbr new as opposed to --preset insane (i.e., -b320). There's very few cases where forcing LAME to use all 320kbps frames yields better quality than -V2. If it does, it's only on problem samples, not on normal music, and most of the time, the problem samples can't even be fixed with 320kbps because of the inherent limitations of a transform coder (i.e., pre-echo, poor transient response, etc.) Thus, 320kbps CBR is waste of space for over 99% of samples, especially considering that -V2 usually ends up between 185 and 225kbps. There's more about this at that "Hydrogen Audio" website - somebody already linked to a relevant thread.

Let's just hope that Blu-Ray doesn't suffer a similar fate.

It's sort of funny that I stumbled across the $3.99 deal on the discs but as of yet cannot take advantage of it - I have no Hi-MD gear. Their prices on regular Sony color-series discs is also very cheap, as somebody already pointed out (5 for $3).

Not suprised in the least. While MD is often considered a "failure" but many know-it-all pundits, it at least did/does something novel. MD's are smaller than CD's but are also editable, protected in a cartridge, an offered consumers an easy way to make high-quality recordings. UMD on the other hand is basically a small, low-quality DVD format that is not recordable and does nothing that other formats out there right now cannot already do (and at a higher price to boot). Hence, it's already on its last gasps - you'd think they would learn.

Actually, for 80-minute discs, it's about 4.8 megaBITS per second (Mbps), not MB. The 1GB discs claim transfer rates of up to 9Mbps, but in reality it's probably closer to 6Mbps. In any case, the actual transfer rate is somewhere around 500KBps, not 4MBps. The new RH1 is supposed to have doubled this.

No, because each song is encoded at 256kbps CBR, meaning that any song of that exact length will come out to be the same size, no matter if you encode it with SS, SB, etc. If the encoder is really doing something different, however, the files will be different internally (i.e., have slightly different data values but the same overall size). You'd have to compare them with a bit-comparison program (there should be free ones available online) as stated earlier.

I think the real joke materializes upon the realization that this whole "is MD dead?" discussion has been going on for nearly the entire life of the format. I remember getting stern warnings from the shop where I bought my first deck that MD "wasn't long for this world," and that discs were supposedly "going to be discontinued," et al. And that was in the 90's! Of course, there really weren't any alternatives back then either - MP3 players and HDD recorders were still several years away. Flash still cost about $200 for a 32MB CF card, too. Ah, the good old days. MD'ers do seem to be a paranoid crowd, though

I'm thinking that a 3.7V lithium button cell (aka "watch battery"), along with a bigger RAM buffer, could probably give you enough time to swap out batteries. The bigger, dime-sized ones are rated up to 100mAh, surely enough to last a more than a few seconds under a light load (i.e., while the device is recording to RAM, not the disc). In fact, I've always wondered why manufacturers never did this. It's definitely more "do-able" than the 2F capacitor shown earlier!

Given such switches in other CD-ripping programs, I halfway wonder if the "high" and "normal" settings don't have anything to do with the encoder, but rather, with the ripping protocol. Since it is only offered for CD, it leads me to believe that it is controlling for drive speed and/or rip accuracy, perhaps using a slower or extra careful extraction process for the "high" switch. There is a way to settle this question: rip a track using Hi-SP with both the normal and high settings, and then encode the same track from a wav file ripped in another program. Do a bit-compare on the files. If they all match up, the "high" and "normal" switches probably have to do with the CD extraction process; if they do not match, it at least opens up the possibility that the encoder is acting differently. It would be especially interesting to compare the "high' rip with a wav-encoded file.

Having just purchased a JB940 deck, I was intrigued by the variable sound settings. Basically, these are a set of three different anti-aliasing filters, which push aliasing noise (mirrored representations of frequencies above the Nyquist limit) into the higher regions of the spectrum where humans cannot hear. The standard way of going about this is a brickwall filter, which attempts to quickly lowpass everything above the Nyquist limit (or half of the sampling rate, in this case 44100Hz/2 = 22050Hz). The other filters use noise shaping, apparently. Since playing around with these seems to have no effect whatsoever on sound quality, even through $300 headphones, I decided to "see" what the deck is actually doing with this noise. To accomplish this, I recorded the analog outs into a firewire soundcard (Behringer) at 96/24. (Remember, these filters don't apply when using the optical outputs). I've attached snapshots of the spectrograms for each filter, taken during the playback of an MD (Dire Straits Greatest Hits, recorded optically with the Type-R codec). Though taken at different points in the song, the point is not to illustrate what we can hear (i.e., below 20kHz), but the regions above (20-48kHz). I don't have any place to put the images up on the web, so they have been attached here as small jpeg files. To give the viewer some perspective, the frequency range shown is 0Hz-48000Hz, so the frequencies we can hear are represented by the lower "mountain" in each picture. The filters seem really change things above about 30000Hz. Conclusions? Basically, the filters are certainly doing something, though again, well above where humans can perceive. The standard "brickwall" filter and Filter 3 ("a smooth and resonant sound") seem to show the least ultrasonic noise, while filters 1 and especially 2 ("a well-placed sound" and "a sound that is fresh") seem to “create” a whole bunch of ultrasonic noise. The question remains; does this really affect the frequencies we hear? I’ve heard varying things about HF noise, since it is seen in the noise-shaped output of SACD’s as well. Some claim that this random noise, though unperceivable, causes recordings to feel “warmer” and more “analog-like,” while others contend that high levels of ultrasonics are bad for consumer-grade amps. I hope others with this deck (or other models with these filters) will find this somewhat interesting. In any case, at least we now know these filters ARE doing something, though I doubt that they make any big difference. The little green light on the filter switch is kind of neat, though

I keep hearing people repeat this statement, but alas, it is false. Sony did NOT intend to replace CD with MD; it even says so in their first press-release on the format (see the MDCF page). MD was intended to be a high-quality portable alternative to CD's and tapes; it was never intended to replace CD's. The reason why it never replaced tapes was because of the high cost of the discs and hardware. Even today, 15 years later, tapes are still far cheaper and more unbiquitous than MD's. THAT is where Sony failed, IMO - if they had made MD as cheap as tapes to begin with, they would have caught on almost overnight.

I caught on the the obvious April Fool flourishes right away, but sadly, the article is shockingly realistic! Let's savor the fact that we are still living in time where MD is alive rather than constantly worrying about when it might die.

Very nice! I, on the other hand, haven't an artistic bone in my body