deafplayer

minidisc-canada.com looks like a good store i think i will buy my HI-MD from them (it is hard to find online canadian retailers.... and real-world stores just suck (i think its like that everywhere though)) the two reasons I want to save up and get the 900 are: size (its 1/3 thinner... and the 700/800 is THICK) and the line-out i figure the line-out will be useful if i want to transfer audio when there is no computer available.... does anyone know what kind of a difference would it make to sound quality, compared to a headphone-out?

hey, i know this has been discussed many times and ive read a lot of it, but im still a little unclear on one thing: can you upload PCM recordings too? sometimes ive heard you can upload everything BUT PCM, and sometimes that you can upload everything...

I dont know how Sony manages to do this... ive been looking into HI-MD since it was announced and was initially very excited but it seems every time i come to this site, especially since they hit stores, i find a new reason not to buy it

thanks guys... that kind of sucks

tomdigital, can you check a feature for me? ive seen a "built in alarm" listed as a feature of the 900.... but i didn't find anything about it in the manual is there an alarm? and if there is, is it a countdown timer or a real clock? thanks

www.av-land.co.uk says the MZH900 has a "Built in Alarm function" ive searched the 900's manual and didn't find anything about it, or any match for the word "alarm" so does it really have this feature? if it does.... is it a countdown-timer type alarm (ie you can set it to go off in 35 minutes) or like an alarm clock, where you can set a time of day (ie setting it to go off at 5:00 PM) thanks...

maybe they'll sell the 800's remote seperately in the future has sony ever sold radio remotes seperately before?

....what are the chances?!?

i know youre not supposed to be able to... is that because it always monitors what youre recording on the headphones? does the remote know the unit is recording and disables the radio? im wondering if there could be some way around it

would it be possible to connect the FM tuner remote's output to the mic/line-in to record the radio? i guess you would have to be able to turn off the record monitoring, right?

wont do for what? audiophile level listening? or for skyther? of course not, i wasn't trying to imply that but the headphone amp on an audigy 2s drive bay drives my headphones better, with sharper sound, than any portable ive used them with and consumers who want to spend more money on something more impressive than a soundblaster do buy low end cards from "pro" brands its not unheard of and most "pro features" on consumer cards not only mean not pro components but not really pro features anyway when you say clip do you actually mean clip, as in the signal from the cd is too high? or just that its brutally compressed? and just because the end product doesn't sound loud to you doesn't mean it wasn't engineered with the levels too high he told me what it was when he answered are you saying that when reviews compare equipment to other equipment, anything they refer to that i haven't personally heard is useless? thats ridiculous and besides there was a good chance that ive heard his soundcard or something similar enough as you pointed out, the earphones hes using are *NOT* cheap. i did *NOT* know at the time that he had integrated sound and even now that i *DO* its helpful i could personally listen to a VIAO that my friend has, it woudl be very easy to find out how simliar the soundcards are or, more to the point of why i wanted to know, and like ive said before, just getting an idea of how it compares to a range of products, some of which im more familiar with than others, is helpful thats why reviews compare it to other products authors dont expect you to own or have experience with everything they mention no, i know enough people, non-professionals, with professional sound cards and equipment if people know what they're looking for and have the money they wont limit themselves to "consumer" brands my point was that there are good quality sound cards, to counter when you implied that they all suck i thought it was quite possible that he had a good sound card i found out what it is. he told me. no thats *not* what i was *expecting* he could easily be a sound hobbyist, who knows? enough people on here probably are and i know enough people with pro sound equipment but like ive been saying it doesn't even need to be good to be a reference point.... yeah you kind of ignored that point but i didn't know how he'd compare them i didn't know how much detail he'd give, what factors hed consider and discuss i didn't know what equipment he had i took all those risks i live life on the edge... i took the risk of it being COMPLETELY USELESS ....most people i know who are interested in sound quality and listening to music critically use EQs what you would consider the 'proper' way its not that rare for people to "know what they're doing" with audio, and i assumed the people on this board, in a thread called HI-MD Sound Quality, are probably more likely than the average portable-using commuter so what if some people use it that way? and ive never encountered any basshead who claims to be talking about quality in the same way that pretentious messageboard aristocrats like you do their music sounds better to them and thats what they care about and usually all they claim to care about they dont claim it has better fidelity or imaging or presence... if they did use the word "quality", and i dont even remember that happening, i would know that they dont mean the same thing you do, and i dont take it to mean that your point was enjoyment=quality and is very very subjective........ seriously? then why are you judging how correct others' conception of quality is?

oops sorry for hte double post you certainly dont need something that expensive to get sound better than a consumer portable player also as im sure you know pro and consumer sound products are no longer neatly sperated into totally different price and performance ballparks what does using PCs have to do with the current trend of over-compressing music? digital equipment gives a shitty clipping sound compared to analogues saturation, which i can only guess might be what youre alluding to, but thats not why people are choosing to compress and raise levels uh.. yeah, exactly it makes sense to me........ im trying to get a better idea of how good the HI-MDs will sound and this gives another reference point... the more of which i have the better.... i haven't heard most of the reference points people use but that doesn't mean they dotn contribute to a better general idea of how good it will sound and i know computers have DSP.. depending on your computer and software you can bypass or turn off some of that processing its a good thing youre here to educate us about sound quality cus its not like thats a subjective matter of taste or anything... my ear canals may be the acoustic environment for the earphones, but it is hardly seperate from the outside environment in terms of external noise and that ambient noise tends to be far more intrusive interference than colouration from the acoustic properties of a room that you seemed to say EQ was exlusively made for just because the sound from your source isn't bouncing around the room doesn't mean that room's sound contitions aren't relevent if im riding a subway with a constant background noise that drowns out certain parts of the music that i particularly want to hear, and i use the EQ to boost those parts, allowing me to hear, say, a rhythm guitar that was previously impossible to follow.... i dont think im going to care if some detail is lost because, riding a subway, im not going to be looking for the decay of reverb on the cymbals, im going to be struggling to hear melodies in that context i would say tonal response gains importance in sound quality in the same way excellent high frequency response might let you hear a players fingers sliding on the strings at home youre now hearing something you didn't before, something you want to hear its just that in a subway car that happens in a very messy and imperfect setting, and in necessarily less refined ways the idea of getting better sound quality is to get more enjoyment out of your music, right? for some people that might mean practically being able to see the trumpet playing in that spot in your room, for others, riding subways with earbuds, they might be looking for something different, and detail and fidelity may not matter as much in that listening situation not to mention it also depends on what music youre listening too

stupid double post

thanks, thats good to know and your soundcard sucking helps, it says a lot more than if you told me your 1000$ setup sounded better than the NH1 HI MDs quality is looking worse and worse the more i read... this sucks

....wow im sorry if i offended your obviously impecible taste by mentioning PC sound cards, sir but the fact is not all of us have crappy, integrated sound cards and people with in-ear monitor earphones are probably... hm.. FAR less likely to have such a crappy card, or even use its headphone amp you might not have known that a huge amount of professionally produced (and well produced) music is actually made using PC sound cards ....sometimes they even use good sound cards! also, using something as a reference point for sound quality does not necessarily mean that you think its good.... you compared the sound quality to that of the N10, and i wanted to know how it compared to his sound card... i never implied that all PC sound cards are the gold standard for sound... hell i didn't even know what his soundcard was btw one reason i wanted to know how it compared is that coming from the PC the music wouldn't go through the NH1s DSP and since when does is tonal balance not an important part of sound quality? adjusting it with an EQ to compensate for environmental noise and conditions when youre out and about with a portable player doesn't seem that crazy to me... and depending on the music your listening to, and what aspect of the music youre listening to, it may be more or less important EQs arent exclusively for dealing with room acoustics that affect speakers but i dont mean to be an asshole... its really very generous of someone with such discriminating ears and impeccible taste in equipment as yours (btw your "rigs" are extremely impressive) to spend your time showing people how incompetent they are at listening to sound.... how else would we find out? so thank you for your advice, i will keep in mind that any HI-MD should be more than good enough for me

hey Seroka2 have you compared hte sound to your computer's headphone output? id be curious to know how different the same HI-SP file would sound coming from your computer id like to get a HI-MD to record and listen to audio, but i keep hearing that the headphone amp sucks...

Hi everyone, i finally registered for this very handy forum i have a question about something i haven't seen addressed here... in Sony Soundforge 7.0 you can save audio in a format called "Sony Perfect Clarity Audio", which makes files with a .pca extension Heres a little description from the Save As dialogue box: "Render Stereo, 44,100 Hz, 16 Bit Sony Perfect Clarity Audio (.pca) file. The compression ratio of this lossless format depends on the audio source." (btw you can also choose to render it in Mono) ive tested it out on a few files and here are the resulting file sizes compared to Soundforge-rendered .wav files: test song with length of 00:06:52 .wav - 69.3 MB .pca - 49.7 MB test album with length of 1:10:54, as one continous piece of audio .wav - 715 MB .pca - 357 MB the audio originated from CDs and never left a lossless format i haven't really compared the audio closely, but im assuming we can trust that theres no change in sound quality, and it does sound very good, i can say that much wouldn't it be great if HI-MD players supported this??? yes... yes it would do you think its possible the new players will gain this capability in the future? and does it show up at all in SonicStage?