ozpeter

I've been using a very costly pair of Sennheiser MKH series mics via a Sennheiser mic PSU/preamp into my NH900 and the results are superb. These mics are about the quietest (noise-free) you can buy, and digitally amplifying sections of concert hall silence shows the NH900 is adding no audible noise at all. Trouble is this makes the automatic track-adding happen rather more often than one would wish.... There should be nothing special about the output from the phantom power unit - it will either be at line or mic level (connect it to line input first unless sure), but your biggest problem will be that it will probably have XLR outputs which need to be adapted to the little stereo miniplug. Soldering onto those miniplugs can be tricky, but XLR's are pretty chunky so they are easier. You may even be able to find solder-free XLR connectors. What I do is to buy a stereo miniplug > 2x RCA lead ready made up, chop off the RCAs and replace with XLRs. But make sure that it's the kind of lead that can be separated into its left and right halves easily - some have a lump of plastic part way down to prevent that and you may need more separation than originally provided to get the XLR connectors on. I have an 2xXLR female to stereo miniplug adaptor ready made up to convert any XLR source to my MD. I don't think you'll easily find them in the shops.

CDs playable on normal CD players have to accord with the "Red Book" standards - stereo, 44.1kHz, 16 bits. There's plenty of lossless compression schemes out there which would enable you to burn about twice as much as normal onto a CD as data not music, then play it back on a PC, but as far as I am aware there is no such thing as a lossless hardware player for replaying them. You can burn about 7 hours of uncompressed PCM audio onto a DVD ("Audio DVD Creator" does this for instance) so if your car has a DVD player, there's your solution.

Exactly what I did in a jazz club the other night. Well, on a table. I used one with three white LEDs which gives a nice hard white well-focussed light - looks quite hi-tech.

I also get an error message every time after deleting tracks from the MD and it does its check of whether the rights on the PC should therefore be updated. I'm wondering whether I should reinstall the program to see if that sorts it, just in case something goes wrong later that might actually matter to me.

There's a pinned headphone thread here somewhere.... I bought a pair of right-in-the-ear phones today, Sony MDR-EX51LP - they seem fine to me, and when I wear them I can't hear my wife..... I wouldn't wear them anytime I needed to hear, though, eg when driving. But I think these are the bud-type ones you don't like? I've also recently purchased some behind-the-head with over-the-earibits phones, Sony MDR-G54LP, which were a rush buy, but I have been pleasantly surprised by their sound especially at the bottom end - they didn't look like they would have it in them. They're an open type. And pretty cheap. Probably not answering your actual question really.

Good points - sync does not seem to be a problem with material processed just with SS3 - there was no drift in the tests I just did with music files (I'm a dab hand at aligning them though I say so myself!) - but indeed, comparing SS3 with the MD hardware could be a different kettle of fish - though even that point would be interesting (ie amount of sync difference). I'll try it later if only for the academic interest. And yes, you've caught me out over mp3Pro - "mp3Pro VBR at 100Kbps averages about 130Kbps and is the highest quality sounding mp3Pro available" it says, now that I look harder at the encoder settings. So my test was using the mp3Pro encoder in non-mp3Pro mode. Still leaves atrac looking good. I have to say that comparing either format with the original CD using HD580 cans, I'm too deaf to hear the differences which my tests indicate do exist. But the whole point of these encoding schemes is to trick the ear, of course.

I ran my test right now, btw, rather than relying on memory/assumption - which doesn't of course preclude the possibility of differences between machine versions - we may end up having to compare serial numbers! I used an FM radio headphone output as a line source, simply turning the volume to zero and up again after 5 secs to provide the silence trigger. I guess we should at least be grateful that it doesn't take upon itself to delete the silence....

Here with a NH900, if you record line in with auto track marking on set to either 5 mins or 60 mins, you still get track marks added after the end of a few seconds of silence, in addition to ones which would no doubt be added after x minutes of non-silence by the auto track mark function. In other words, you can't effectively "turn off" marking of the end of silence by setting auto track mark to say 60 mins. Pity.

I perhaps wrongly assumed the question related to a wave format capture/rip - indeed, if atrac is involved, it could be another whole story. Incidentally, I've just been testing atrac3plus/256 vs mp3Pro/256, inverting each against a wave rip of a CD track. In this test, the atrac version had an average difference of -52.85dB and the mp3 version a greater difference of -48.03dB. Peak difference was -24.21dB and -20.3dB respectively. Listening to the difference files generated by each encoder, with the mp3Pro file you could clearly "hear the music", which is not good IMHO because what you are hearing is what has been 'thrown away' by the encoding. With atrac the difference was more "mushy", more of a pulsing white noise effect. Frequency analysis showed bigger differences in mp3pro above 16kHz, while the atrac difference file had a reasonably flat profile with a curious 6dB difference between left and right in the higher frequencies. I guess I could similarly test the difference between the Hi-SP encoding in the MD recorder and the Hi-SP encoding in SS3 - would that be useful or is this ground well covered?

Ripping from a PC or recording from a player's optical out are both digital transfers so there should be no difference. It's not impossible that a CD player might process audio in some way before it reaches the optical out connector so if anything I'd lean towards the PC transfer route - which of course is somewhat faster too. If really worried I guess you could rip using "EAC (Exact Audio Copy)" freeware, then using SonicStage for the transfer, but the chances of any significant difference via that route would IMHO be zero.

Heh, neat trick. I've modified it to run Adobe Audition direct from SonicStage (no disrespect to this forum...) - I have to click through an "are you sure message" - when I exit, there's a "try again" option which takes me to the Connect store still. Clicking on the "Home" key in the Connect page runs Audition again. Not a lot of actual use but kinda fun.

XLR adapters quite often, to convert from a Sony 979 (yup I mean that) mic, or sometimes even from a Sennheiser MKH-series MS stereo mic system that cost about 12x the cost of the MD recorder. I make these quite readily using a stereo miniplug to rca x 2 lead, chop off the rca's and substitute XLR female connectors. That way you don't have to do brain-surgery-type soldering on the miniplug.

Anyone else getting this bug in SS3.0 when dividing tracks? (Well, seems like a bug to me).

I'm encountering this error message every time I divide a track (in Hi-SP mode) using SS3.0 - the track was recorded via line in analogue and has been deleted from the MD. It does the divide, but still gives me the error message, which is disquieting. I don't think I actually want to use this facility (I use and recommend Adobe Audition) but it still seems a bit odd.

Is this link any different from the above for downloading?

I've just been testing Total Recorder transfers using the USB connection from an NH900, simply playing back an MD in SonicStage 2.3 - if you set Total Recorder to be your default "soundcard" in the relevant windows control panel, then in Total Recorder set the recording source to be "Software" with "convert using Recording parameters specified below" ticked, and choose the format as PCM/44.1/16 bit, and recording level set to 100%, you will get a bit-for-bit identical transfer compared with using SonicStage to copy the file to your PC, then using WaveConverter to convert it. I've tested that by phase inverting the result of one transfer method against the other, resulting in silence. When SonicStage plays back, you get a short section of silence between each MD track. If in Total Recorder you also tick "Remove Silence", those gaps will be removed. Also, when the playback finishes, Total Recorder will stop (well, pause indefinitely) so you don't have to mess around with its timer facility. However, you will lose a tiny bit of audio at the track breaks - in my short test, .043 of a second at the first break and .013 at the second (I experimented with three tracks). Under many circumstances this will not be significant. If you are dealing with PCM files from the MD, in my experience transfer seems to take place at about double speed overall. If the material is crucial and you are worried about SonicStage eating your file, and time is not important, Total Recorder does offer a 100% accurate transfer, and you can leave your disc in record-disabled mode for peace of mind. I'd just suggest doing your own tests of whether using Total Recorder also to remove gaps between tracks causes you no problems with your own material - otherwise you'll have to use an audio editor to remove the gaps after transfer, and you'll have to use the Total Recorder timer to terminate the recording if you don't want to sit and watch it.

Here in Australia they are under £2 (equivalent) each at JB Hi-Fi.

If you want to play the resulting CD in a normal CD player, wave format (44.1kHz, 16 bit, stereo) is the required ("Red book") format.

I'm coming into this without having fully followed the past history, but from what I've read above, there's a "3rd party" program for converting to wave format, and now there's a Sony program - to see whether the two are arriving at the same result, someone with Cool Edit or other reasonable audio program should be able to invert the phase of files obtained from each method, and if they are identical, you'll get silence. If not, you'll get the difference between them. You'll need to line them up (timewise) precisely, but that shouldn't be too hard with suitable test material.

I wonder whether the "TotalRecorder" program would come to the rescue here, at least to some extent? It looks to your PC like a soundcard, placing itself between other programs and your real soundcard, then it tees off a copy of the audio to a file at whatever spec you specify. It has a 'high speed silent' mode which can suck the audio data out of the audio-producing application as fast as that app can send it. So, you'd play the uncompressed file which had been transferred via USB using the Sony software, and record it using TotalRecorder, possibly at faster than realtime. The advantage as compared with recording "what you hear" or routing your soundcard's output to its input is that TotalRecorder works in the digital domain - it records before the D > A stage of the soundcard. Something worth trying with an evaluation copy of TotalRecorder, perhaps, by someone who has actually got one of these units. [by way of introduction, as I'm new here - I went on record in the UK pro audio press within a week of the very first portable MD machine becoming available, pointing out the potential for professional use. That machine is still in the cupboard somewhere! The last machine I bought was an MDS-PC2. I used mindisc for many years as a backup medium in classical music recording, and quite a few classical CDs of mine out there have little bits of MD in with the DAT-originated material, covering defects in the DAT media, or bits missing because of unexpected starts covered by the 'time machine' mode of MD machines. I even made a Jazz big-band CD entirely on a Yamaha MD8! ("Down On Your Knees - Mike Garrick Big Band). Latterly the fast upload of CDR to PC lead me to abandon MD for most purposes, but I'd been hoping the new Hi-MD machines would enable me to return to the MD fold. The limitations above however make it look like Sony have hobbled the new baby at birth. But I wonder whether HHB will bring out a properly implemented Hi-MD version of their excellent field recorder? That would sell truckloads in the professional market, largely in radio.]