thepootleflump

Yeah report him to ebay, what a tosser, insist that he is band. Good condition would mean 100% operatoinal but may show signs of light use. What was his rating? never buy off anyone with a very low rating. People setup multiple accounts to shift shite. Also did you pay through paypal? You might be able to talk to your credit card company if it was billed through that via paypal. Most credit card companies claim to protect you on line, so this could be argued to be an online transaction. Prob, won't work, they are very slippery but worth a try. Email him telling him he has 7 days to contact you and refund your money otherwise you will be persuing him through the courts. Small claims are very easy to do and should cost you nothing.

why is it funny, I know what my ears tell me. I'm not really that bothered by masking principles. On my hi-fisit just doesn't sound very good and wouldn't want to listen to it for that long. Sounds ok on the computer. Don't bother slating my hi-fi it's pretty good. Fortunately I do know better since I used MD for years and hi-md since it came out. I don't worry about bit rates and stuff like that or spend time comparing to Mp3 although I have compared to CD out of interest. You are totally correct. I don't mind the quality so it doesn't bother me. I have happily listened to 48kbps, although that level really is pushing it a bit far, but has suited me on a couple of occasions. I use it to download whatever I want to listen to off the computer onto MD. The higher bitrate means that I can have more music with a minor drop in quality which doesn't bother me because I'm not worried about it, don't listen for it and just enjoy the music. I will happily listen to the radio so why wouldn't I happily listen to a compressed audio track. Don't let it annoy you, try to forget it and ignore the compression, don't analyse it. Put another way a few years ago I was listening to tapes recorded on a £400 sony hi-fi from LPs (not good), didn't bother me then and hi-md sounds much better than that. What is a shame is that in this day and age why do we even need to compress audio? A bit like landing a man on the moon in 1969, and putting concorde out of service. We are going backward not forward.

To me HI-LP sounds just fine for what it is. I wouldn't run it through my hi-fi. I don't know why half the people on this forum buy MD when it gets nothing but complaints about sound quality. :rasp:

Hi-LP (64kbps) doesn't suck its great for portable music, all you really need and in my opinion better than MP3 128bit.

Blacebo effect is that a take on placebo effect where you blag it and hope to hit the nail on the head? :smile: You might be able to tell the difference between the two on a setup you are familiar with and with a source you know well due to the different qualities of the MD and CD sources; you'd know which one was which one by virtue of familiarity. Put you in a setup you are not familiar with and you couldn't tell the difference. Its fairly easy to tell the difference with the 64kbps quality due to the metallic sound on percussion but not Hi-SP. Just had a little compare and frankly there ain't no difference between original and Hi-SP compressed. What a shame that 16bit CD audio is so shite anyway.

I don't understand how anyone can say that 64kbps is shit, sounds perfectly fine on the move, certainly atleast equal to 128bit MP3 to me. Yeah put it through a decent hi-fi and it sounds pretty pants. 256kbps sounds pretty close to the the original to me. PCM is certainly overkill for a portable storage solution. I'm sitting at my PC with a £150 speaker/sub/creative audigy setup 64kbps is fine to me for everyday listening. Transfer to the original MDSP and it sounds crap on my £1k hifi. With the ability to get many albums onto a standard MD the 64 format it great, haven't got any 1GB disks yet but will probably switch to 256 when I do.

This is one of my first posts but I am a long term MD user. I've just bought myself a MZ-NH600 as a casual mobile user. Cheap but adequate I've recently started to use the ATRAC3+ 64kbps format and I'm very impressed with the quality. Side by Side to the CD you can tell the difference being less open and more compressed (makes sense) but for the everyday user the quality is more than adequate. I have made use of the 48kbps format but the extra 16kbps makes a world of difference and is worthwhile. I've found 256kbps very good quality but on the move 64kbps is the daddy offering excellent quality with stacks of storage. As for PCM fine for CD format on a good quality hi-fi but on the move it is a joke and not worth the effort. I'd buy a cd walkman if I wanted PCM for listening to audio. I use Sonicstage, works alright for me. What other alternatives are there?