Sparky191

Dunno much about it myself. Theres loads of sites with infomation though. http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom...factories.shtml

My mistake, I thought you were equating the sound of LP and MD. You now seem to equating the physicality (if that makes sense) of disk swapping. I can understand why you like that but thats one thing I really dislike. Each to their own. I can agree with the size though. One of the reasons I never really liked portable CD players was because I found them too big to carry around. MD are the perfect size. I wish they had a better screen and GUI on the units though. I've seen '80s portable LP getto blasters. But you can't escape the size of a LP.

I've a Sony deck with Dolby S but don't use that feature. I would think a lot of pro's use MD because its a great convenient format for recording. Not because it has better dynamic range and other sound attributes to other formats. At the end of the day ATRAC is primarily a digital, lossy compressed format. It can't escape that limitation.

I don't have young ears either. However with a good bitrate mp3 192~320 kps properly encoded I can't hear a difference between that and ATRAC at 256/292kps. Perhaps I can hear a difference between that and PCM but I'm not sure I do on my low end portable set up. Probably with better portable phones, and player I'd hear it. If its played though my low end Arcam HiFi, then a good CD sounds better to me than the portable formats via line in. I actually have a low end Sony Dolby S cassette deck, but I'm not a big fan of dolby and I never actively used that feature. I might use the MPX filter to clean up an older cassette but in general I can ignore the noise and hiss of a cassette and enjoy the analog recording. Quite often I prefer the cassette to the digital formats, ATRAC, MP3 or even CD. But that said most of my cassettes are not the best quality so it might be nostalgia for the music rather than actually SQ that I'm enjoying. I no new cassettes to really listen to the quality of the deck, and don't really intend buying any. I bought it mainly to archive my favorite old cassettes, which are decaying. I've never really had a access to a good turntable, though its something I'd like to acquire one day. I've quite a few LP's around that I can't play. A lot of my cassettes are lots LP's that friends put on to cassette for me back in the day. The LP's recordings onto cassettes seem to have a more natural quality than CD's. I like ATRAC, perhaps its the most natural sounding codec.

Perhaps in theory or dry technical specs, LP > HiMD is superior to CD, even to the rebook recording on a hybrid SACD for example. However for you to hear it, or to record that difference, I think your vinyl would be better than HiMD, and possibly the SCAD/CD would be better than HiMD. It would be intetestng to run a ABX test on this. As most people get fooled with medium bitrates MP3's never mind anything else.

I don't understand how you can equate LP's and MD's. MD's and ATRAC has much in common with CD's and MP3's than they do LP's. Analog vs digital.

Do you mean Vinyl>HiMD(PCM) is better than CD? The quality of mastering of albums seems to vary a lot. Regardless of format. You need to dig out the best recording from places like this. http://store.acousticsounds.com/

Do they all have RH10's? A quick search seemed to show a lot of RH10's with this error. http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showt...0Error&st=0 If its changed I suspect its just a happy convergence of software. But maybe I'm wrong and they've intentionally fixed it. Perhaps someone looking through the code to make it vista compliant saw the poor coding that caused this and corrected the logic.

Regardless of how good quality you are happy with, a good backup has more than one copy of a file, for redundancy. You can't easily, or quickly do this with HiLP and no computer. I don't know what you mean directly playable. Its entirely practical to carry your entire MP3 library around in your pocket and be able to pick any track in it anywhere you go. Thats not going to practical with a large collection on HiMD. You can plug your entire MP3 collection into your HiFi and never have to change a CD/MD again. Directly playable isn't an issue. However if you want to use MD, then have at least have an ATRAC library on HD aswell. Then backup the ATRAC library across a few Hard Disks. Theres enough posts on this forum about errors with MD and bad discs not to have it as your only medium.

No basis other than thats all Sony say is different. http://www.sonydigital-link.com/DNA/sonics...age_dl.asp?l=en Though we know enough not to believe Sony, but what the community reports. So far people are saying its no different. I'm running the older version 4.2, and don't have any of the problems mentioned so far. CD swapping etc. BTW what causes an "access error", don't think I've ever had that. The only time I've had intermittent read failures is on a old MD unit on which the laser was failing.

Not aware of that myself. Would love to hear more about it. MD initially replaced my cassettes for recording. I love them for recording. I love the gadgetness of MD's and the MD hardware. But in terms of usuability HiMD is so much better I couldn't go back to MD. I don't use HiMD for playback. I prefer other formats/hardware usuability for playback.

The PMX100 go around the back of your neck not over your head. Hence neckband. The PX100 is the same earphone with a headband. I have the PMX100. I like the neck band but no so keen on the sound. Bass is a bit too much and a little muddy. I suspect the Ksc-35 and ksc-75 are the best you'll get at the price and probably a little more balanced than the PX100's. My favorite buds are the Sennheiser MX500's though I've a set Sennheiser CX300's and they sound great but only if you get them to fit right. I don't find them comfy though. The next phones I'd like to try are the Sony MDR-EX90's. They get decent reviews everywhere. http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showt...&pid=116033 More head phone info here... http://www.head-fi.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=2

I used MediaMonkey when I was playing around with FLAC.

My bad. I'm not seeing any new features. I don't think there are intentional bug fixes either. With every SS release, the new version works for some people, and doesn't work for other people. Seems to be related to random hardware/software config. Theres never any pattern to it. IMO. BTW Did 4.2 not work on Vista? Did anyone try?

So only talk about the bugs in 4.3 running on Vista and don't mention Vista. Since when did bugs become features?

Let me rephrase the question. So what new features are there in 4.3 on XP?

I thought Vista support was the only new feature. So if you don't need vista, you don't need 4.3 especially if 4.2 is more stable. What other new features are there?

..more importantly its not good enough quality for archival.

Meant to reply to this. I have Pioneer CD/MP3 in the other car and to be honest it leaves me cold. The EQ is either too bassy or two much treble and it just sounds clinical. Even with the custom EQ I struggle to get a decent sound out of it. Only Pop sounds decent on it. Classical is hopeless. Rock is just ok. The controls/ergonomics are a nightmare too. Whereas the cassette player has a much better sound all round and has a lovely EQ which I rarely use unless to remove some of the excess bass which you get on a lot of music these days.

I get on quite happily with XP. However I'm more attracted to Linux than I am to Vista or OSX for that matter. . But I don't need more than XP tbh. Vista seems to be little more than a tarted up XP, since they neutered it to release it now rather than in a couple of years. More fluff than real features.

I'm not advocating MP3's. I'm saying FLAC is the way go. I just use MP3's as they are perfect for my current needs. Which is a portable music library. I'm not building an archive library. I don't want the overhead of encoding on the fly either. Problem with MD, ATRAC and ATRAC Lossless is SonicStage is simply a pain to manage a large library. Especially if you have a portable version and a lossless archive. I'm not saying you can't do it. Theres just easier and more convenient ways. IMO. Theres also the problem of proprietary formats especially one where theres a decreasing amount of new hardware for the format. I have more than one brand of DAP and use my library across a few different PC's. Personally I hate juggling discs be they MD, 3.5" floppies, Zips, Jazz, tapes, CD's or even DVD's. Much more convenient to have a central store.

Lossless files are exact copies of the original. You can copy WAV to FLAC and back to WAV and you won't lose any quality. Some lossless files like WAV are uncompressed, and hence very large files sizes. You can't tag WAV's either. Whereas formats like FLAC are compressed, so much smaller and can be tagged.

I agree with greenmachine. For archiving, you need a lossless compressed open format. That would seem to be FLAC. Then back it up over a couple different type of media. Hard Disk, DVD and the original format. My own choice was that my tape collection is of poor quality so not worth preserving at that high level. I also don't have the space to store and back FLAC's up. So I'm encoding the best of them, and my favorites and dumping the rest. I'm encoding everything as high quality Lame MP3s varying between 192~320kps. Thats basically good enough for me for now. I realise its not HiFi, but I'm accepting that compromise. So I add these to my main library encoded from my CD's. Any music that I lose by dumping the tapes I intend to replace in the longterm with used CD's. So this MP3 library I have is now about 70GB's. Its backed up on 3 disks (one in the PC and 2 seperate external drives) and of course I've the original CD's. In the future I may build a FLAC library from the CD's. If I was rhagan I'd be using FLAC from the start though. I wouldn't use a propiertery format like ATRAC, or anything that relies on that hardware like MD. I just use HiMD for recording myself. Its much easier to manage other formats for backup and file management.

What you want is a lossless compressed format. Like Flac, Apple Lossless or ATRAC Lossless. Whereas ATRAC/MP3/WMA are Lossy and Compressed. I'd use FLAC myself if I was you. However... Original tape to HiSP is lower quality than Original tape to FLAC. Original tape to HiSP and then to FLAC is lower again but maybe acceptable so you don't have to digistise everything all over again. Original tape to HiSP and then to FLAC and then back to ATRAC/MP3 degrades it yet again. Basically everytime you encode something via a lossy encoder you are losing data. So you want to do that as little as possible. So you could digitise Original tape to Flac and then use a player that supports FLAC natively.