bug80

Qwakrz, you're not the first one to report this. It makes me worry and it looks like Sony has either made an error or degraded the decoder on purpose, in favor of their own ATRAC format. The latter case would be a really bad situation. link to topic where rubadubdub mentions bad MP3 playback quality link to central topic about MP3 vs ATRAC playback on 2nd gen units.

True. I've read some reports on Hydrogenaudio.org that there is a difference between Hi-SP and SP on killer samples (castanets, for example) and that Hi-SP performs really bad on them. But, for "normal" music, Hi-SP performs excellent, as is the case for SP.

Yes, thanks. The amplifier in your RH10 is most probably of higher quality than the one in your N1 (although I'm not sure).

DJ_the_crow, the general quality difference is not on question here, but differences between the hardware decoders in the 2nd generation units. By the way, I don't agree with you. MP3's encoded with LAME sound definitely better to my ears than the ATRAC encoded files at the same bitrate. And I'm sure I'm not deaf. I've done a lot of blind testing to prove my statements. Just like this test, where Atrac3 was the loser of 6 formats, even WMA. Finally, looking at the spectrum is not a measure for perceived audio quality. In fact, an audio file can be of very low quality in terms of mathematical quantities, but still be transparent, i.e. people won't hear the difference with the original.

Sorry, but I have to ask this: Is the unit connected to an USB port on your computer? Because a NetMD unit usually gives a PC<->MD message when it is connected. When that is the case, you can't control the player by its buttons (only through Sonicstage software).

Yeah me too. Like I said in an earlier post, I tried to ABX, but failed. Every time I thought I heard a difference, I was wrong. Still it's possible that other people really hear a difference on their system. I used simple Sennheiser headphones (not very expensive) that don't really excel in the high frequency area.

15-20 hours sounds good to me. The manual of the RH10 states the following playing times for the NH-14WM battery: True, re-encoding reduces the quality in general. It will only lead to higher quality if the ATRAC decoder is really better than the MP3 decoder.

Unfortunately not. For NetMD there is a plugin for RealPlayer, but for Hi-MD the only way is using Sonicstage.

Sonicstage, the program you have to use for transferring files to Hi-MD, doesn't support AAC. So, you have to convert to a usefull format first. The best choice is WAV, that way the number of transcoding steps (from one lossy format to the other) is the lowest. Programs that can do that are for example dbpoweramp, foobar2000 and possibly iTunes, as long as the files are not DRM-ed. If they are copy protected, you have to burn an audio CD first and after that rip the files back to your PC.

Good work. I think this should be in "Technical Topics", by the way. It would be really interesting to see if we can touch the "Dark side" in one way or another (nice name for this area by the way ). It seems that this is the part of Hi-MD that differs the most from the Sony HDD players, where the database with file information is accessible in conventional ways. If I ever buy a 2nd gen Hi-MD unit (likely for the moment, only the possibility that the hardware MP3 decoder is screwed may change my mind), I will start playing with the file system immediately (it's in my nature, can't help it).

Thanks for your info! Would you like to do another test? One user pointed out that the playback on the unit sounded better if the files were converted from MP3 to ATRAC before transferring. In other words, the ATRAC decoder maybe sounds better than the MP3 decoder. Can you test if you hear the same effect?

Anyone? I'm curious too.

Is it? Does it also work when the DVD only has a 5.1 or DTS track? EDIT: Oh, PaulV meant music cd's. Yes, that works, I've done it in the past.

I did an ABX test, but didn't succeed. So I voted for #3. * EDIT * I know the answer I'll stick to option #3, however. SP rules!

Downloading right now. Thanks!

Currently, I carry 3 MD's around with some CD's on it that I've just bought: Fireside - Get Shot (band from Sweden) Racoon - Another Day (Dutch band) The Bravery - s/t Kristofer Astrom & Hidden Truck - So much for staying alive (singer of Fireside) Interpol - Antics Ryan Adams - Cold roses Wilco - Yankee hotel foxtrot All in LP2 format, which is way against my principles, but I didn't have the time to record them all in real-time SP. These discs are meant for listening in noisy trains anyway, so the quality is not very annoying.

What encoder did you use (and frontend, if any)?

Being a MD user is a confusing experience. But that is part of the fun!

Yes, I guess so. I'm quite curious about what the owners of 2nd gen units opinions are on MP3 playback, before I buy one

Did you use an external (windows) program which calls lame.exe, or did you do it manually (i.e. running lame.exe from a DOS box)? I guess it depends on what frontend you use. For instance, when I use WinLAME as a frontend for LAME, the headers aren't written correctly. However if I use foobar2000 or EAC, this doesn't happen. I think most of the time, headers written by lame.exe (or lame.dll) are overwritten by the frontend program you use.

I'd suggest to do only one song first (one with high frequency content, for example the cymbals of a drum kit). When you think the difference is obvious, then you can decide to do the rest of the songs again at 44.1 kHz. What kind of music do you make? Maybe your bandmates are deaf anyway

Depends on what you want do do with it. If it is just "demo" material for your band members, the loss in quality will not be that important (you will most probably hear a difference on a good hi-fi system). At 32 kHz you'll miss all the frequency content above 16 kHz (and probably even above 15 kHz because of anti-aliasing filters). It's not that great parts of the music are gone, but you'll miss some clarity.

In my opinion, EAC + LAME is a winning team!

I think it was because of a google search, at a time when I was desperately searching for solutions to a Sonicstage freezing problem. This is really a great forum, with helpfull and friendly people! Actually, I think forum like this are helping to keep the MD format alive.

mrsoul, what version of Sonicstage are you using, 3.0 or 3.1? If playback of MP3 files is not possible through SS3.1 it would be really.. weird. I can't think of any reason to not implement this (though I have a hard time finding reasons for lots of other things Sony decides to not implement ).