Breepee2

SP sounds best.

Hmm, they've been around for at least two years. That's no reason not to buy a HiMD.

Disc usage would be less (about half) of PCM, since the files average out at 55%. FLAC for example has been written so that decoding takes little cpu-time (it uses less than mp3). There are already mp3players which support FLAC, and it's very power friendly (it's of course not as friendly as HiLP, but hey, I don't care as long it's reasonable). So decoding would probably be less than PCM, or on-par tops, and I have absolutely no problem with that. Take Apples iPod. It supports Apple Lossless, which is a slightly heavier codec. And we all know that iPods CPU isn't all that fast, so I think I can rule any technical difficulties out. And of course nothing stops Sony from developing a custom format, which is more power-friendly. Although I think it's going to be hard to beat FLAC, it's just a real good codec and was made with DAP's in mind.

It would be nice, but it would also render older discs completely incomaptible. Or Sony must stick 2 laser in, but that's gonna be expensive and slightly more heavy.

http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=9021

True, but FLAC would kick even more ass

You can get one from me and it will cost you 1500 pounds. It'll cost me a ticket and maybe a few bribes here and there, but! You'll have one ASAP, at least before the other guy does!

Sounds like Sonicstage is stupid (hey, what's new?). Are those mp3 by any chance 22Khz, or at least non-44.1? I've got some audiobooks which are 22Khz.

Anything 's possible, but its useless to stress things that are not going to happen. The chance of a black hole eating up the Earth within 10 seconds is also not zero, but you don't stress it every time you talk about the Earth. Compressed Lossless = a Good Thing

Those are pounds, so multiply by 1.45 to get euros. Still cheap indeed. It's stupid it's only delivered inside the UK and Ireland, I think I would have bought one (I'm in the Netherlands and the're only 100 euro!).

Someone doubted if the theory of compressed lossless could ever get practical. I just pointed out it can and has been for a long time.

ZIP is NOT a general purpose format (although Niko Mak is trying to convince you otherwise). It was originally created for text and optimized for text and it still is. That's why 7zip and RAR do the job so much better in general purpose tests (because they are optimized in a different way). FLAC, and other compressed lossless formats like Apple Lossless, Monkey's Audio or WMA Lossless, are optimized for raw audio. Bitstreams of text have certain caracteristics, as does raw audio. Altough they're both ordinairy bitstreams, they show patterns against which you can optimize a compression scheme. That aside, what you say is indeed theoretical. Although it's indeed fun to think about it, the technology is available, it's been done tens of times and it's smart. Good encoders use multiple passes to filter out bad segments that don't compress but inflate for example. That, even theoreticly, almost never happens anymore, so it's not an issue. If you wanna talk about it's theory, fine, but not in this thread. The technology is done (FLAC being open source even) and reaches an avarage compression rate of 55%. That's what counts.

Here in the Netherlands the RH910 and RH10 are only €30 apart, so don´t expect huge pricegaps.

True. Since my purpose is all-round high-quality sound (whether I'm on the move or listening to my hifi at home) I'd pretty much require a deck. And of course sound-quality seems to be less imprtant when biking than listening at home, I don't want to worry about it. I do not want the hassle of using CD's at home and MD's on the move. MD's are perfect, only a tad too expensive when using PCM, that's why I'd like a compressed lossless format that would allow about 60 minutes of CD-quality (as in bitperfect) on an old MD (reformatted). That would be bliss in my opinion

Nope, I'm not. Some form of compressed lossless is what I want (or 1GB discs at the price of old discs so that I can afford to utilize PCM). So until either happens, I'll stick with my old, but sturdy MT190 Oh, and I might add I consider HiMD not serious enough until there's a full size deck available.

Nonsense. There is no way a lossless format could be bigger than it's raw equivalent. Your comparison with zip is faulty. They're just totally uncomparable formats. Zip is a text compression algoritm (it's stupid to use it for data, go with RAR or 7-zip if you want to save bits) and FLAC (or take any other compressed lossless format) is optimized for music. Comparing compressed lossless with zip is like trying to compress your data into an mp3, it just won't work Of course, some pieces of sound can be compressed better than others, but since I've got about 500CD's here on my drive, in FLAC, and none of them are bigger than 85% of a wav file, and average at about 55%, I've pretty good evicende against those rediculous claims. Using PCM in favor of a compressed lossless format is like throwing 45% of your discs away, plain stupid. It's not the 80ies anymore, the technology is here (it's opensource even!), and there is just no good reason not to support it. It's 2005, I want to use 2005 technology! PCM was nice in the 80ies, lossy compression was fun in the 90ies, now it's the time of compressed lossless! And about power usage: FLAC for example uses less computing power than wav, so this should save power. Add up that the discs would have to spin 45% less, it's a great improvement over PCM.

For most European countries it is in fact perfectly legal. Not really fair to the artists though. On the other hand, artists can be financially supported in other ways. At least you know your not funding a sick music industry by purchasing via allofmp3.

Errrr.... there's plenty of units out there who support lossless format's (most of em do FLAC). Rio Karma, Cowon M3 and a few iRivers to name a few.

But (of course) it isn't.

I concur with all of the above and would like to add a killing feature: A compressed lossless format.

Adding one single codec won't increase it's size, but adding the features you want will definitely affect size. And adding of kind of codec not there yet seems more functional to me than putting lots of energy in looks.

There is a differnce between the codecs. Quality is not directly analogous to the bitrate, but practically it always is. Atrac3 is better at higher bitrates, Atrac3plus on the lower ones. Atrac3 132kbps is (much) better than Atrac3plus 64kbps.

Like I said, FLAC recording is probably a bridge too far for the time being but FLAC playback is very easy. And about the power: FLAC is already power-friendly. Apple made Apple Lossless to be resource-friendly. I'm sure Sony has enough manpower to come up with something smart to cope with more power consumtion. I don't consider that an issue.

*Walking slowly through the room looking for stuff to steel ....* *What's that soft music getting louder?* *Fieeeuww... Plonk, Auch!!!* *It's a frickin HD3!!!!*

And that's precisily why the low-price mp3players don't support the kind of codec I want and why it would look so good on high quality units like MD-players/recorders. Supporting a codec doesn't use power, only playing it, and true, FLAC-like codec would eat more motor-power (between HiSP and PCM I estimate) but chip-power would be about the same (just a matter of good programming). Only a few kb's extra are needed to store th codecs data, and maybe a bit larger buffer (RAM) memory to do the calculations in. Nothing spectacular. I do, but I must add that adding I codec isn't really all that difficult. Of Sony was to adopt FLAC, the hard work is already done. Complete source, written specific for portables is freely available. But I'll admit its an issue (marketing related perhaps), but nothing very complex or difficult to overcome. Of course not, but I don't see how sound quality is degraded by adding a new codec. In fact, it's supposed to be better, considering is bit-perfect. I'm perfectly aware of that, but I don't see the relevance?