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greenmachine

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Everything posted by greenmachine

  1. Could you upload a sample so that we can get an idea what kind of background noise we're talking about here?
  2. Electret mics usually consume only up to about 1mA. It shouldn't have a significant effect on the recorder's battery life. The capacitors, as long as their rating is greater than approx. 1uF, shouldn't have a significant influence on the sound character. All they do is to filter direct current from the battery (1st order high pass filter). You could use a somewhat lower value for the resistor, down to approx 1 kOhm. Why not just use a 9V battery? most electret mics can handle up to approx. 10V.
  3. Battery box to line-in without preamp is for loud sounds only, otherwise the recording levels will be too low.
  4. What you're measuring is mostly the freq response of your loudspeaker and room acoustics. At what kind of angle did you point the recorder's mics toward the loudspeaker and did you mix down both mics into one channel for the graph? The mics are most likely angled outwards at ca. 90-120° to create a stereo effect, so it is impossible to point them both directly towards a point source.
  5. When mics and headphones are connected and the unit set to rec or rec pause, you can monitor the signal in real time. A loud band practice may overshadow the faint sound coming through the headphones unless you have highly isolating headphones or monitor in a different room. In ear mics require you not to move if you want to want a steady recording. It represents a special way of recording which is better suited for earphone listening than playback through loudspeakers. Try googling "A-B stereo, Jecklin disk, baffled stereo, binaural, omnidirectional microphone techniques", etc. to get some ideas about possible mic setup. I would recommend setting the mics up in between the band, in about 1-2m height and separated about 20-30 cm (8-12") with or without some kind of baffle in between, depending on taste. Use the line-in with battery box for recording loud instruments like drums, amplified instruments like electric guitar/bass, etc. to avoid overload.
  6. There are several factors. The quality of the recording, the quality of your playback gear (headphones, loudspeakers), the playback environment as well as how critical you are listening will influence your minimum required quality. What sounds acceptable to you at the moment may not sound good enough with any of these factors changing.
  7. Since the lowest band of the EQ in Hi-MD units is set too high to be useful (100 Hz), you can't gain deep bass as in earlier units by raising that band. Instead, you have to use a trick and lower all bands by one or two notches and raise the overall volume to simulate the megabass of earlier units. See this thread for details: http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=13741
  8. Make a test recording at home without any vibrations and see if it skips.
  9. I don't think it would make a difference either. Why are there 5 pins in the first place since there are only four at the thicker PC end of the cable? Additional ground? Some weird processing inside the cable? Anyone got more insight on this?
  10. 2: yes, since MDs are stereo by nature, you would use left and right channel. Depending on the mics you may need adapters. 3-4: not without an external mixer, which would make the rig less portable and the end result less flexible. The Zoom H2 SD flash recorder can record in 2 or 4 channel mode from the internal cardioid mics, but they're built-in one-point mics and don't have that much separation. The external mic input is not that great. Ask yourself: Would a stereo recorder be sufficient, why would you need more than 2 channels? Instead of close miking you could move the stereo recorder farther from the sources. Today's recorders are sensitive enough and noise not a major problem like in the days when we used tape.
  11. When I look inside my NH700's jack, there are five pins. I'm using a generic 5 pin MiniB cable without any problems. Not sure which type originally came with the unit.
  12. It depends on difference between initial and final bitrate. 256 to 64 won't be much different from directly encoding to 64, but from 192 to 128 or 128 to 96 for example could be significantly inferior to directly encoding to the final bitrate. How noticeable these artifacts are, depends on your hearing. Why not give it a try with some test encodings?
  13. Mic to BB to mic-in is almost the same as mic to mic-in, only with a slightly higher voltage. The signal is preamplified, distortion is more likely to occur when recording loud sounds. There's a coupling capacitor between BB and mic-in, so there's no interaction regarding DC voltage. The mics would get the same voltage as if the BB was plugged into line-in or not plugged in at all.
  14. Why not try both and let your ears decide?
  15. A lower quality like LP2 will introduce even more artifacts.
  16. My NH700 has now seen a good amount of use including probably a couple of hundreds of inserts into the mic-in jack. No connection problems yet, but I'm afraid that it might wear out soon. Had any of you experienced problems with any of the jacks of any Hi-MD, Net-MD or MD model? Are they replaceable?
  17. What's so unbelievable about it and what kind of amp does the NH700 have?
  18. Do you have sufficient free hard disk space? If you can't get combining with SonicStage working, you could just use it for uploading and use a separate audio editor for combining. Or combine on the unit before uploading. The SonicStage combine can be slow.
  19. Independent channel equalizing won't create a very convincing illusion of stereo, it will just make the sound weird. Try working with delay based effects like Guitarfxr suggested if the material allows for it.
  20. Such high compression ratios are rare for me and happen only with some low level live recordings or similarly easy to encode material. More common ratios of commercial CDs are between approx. 50-60% of the original size (seechart). Very loud, high frequency rich content like modern rock/metal compresses even worse.
  21. On the unit combining is a bit fiddly but fast, whereas the SonicStage conversion is really slow for no obvious reason. It is possible though (mark tracks in library view, from the menu select edit - combine).
  22. Thanks for the participation so far. The current results indicate that we're not entirely happy with the 1 GB that Hi-MD offers, but don't really need more than 2 GB, which confirms my suspicion.
  23. Storage is getting larger and cheaper all the time. Sure, you can never have enough, but how much do we really need? This is a poll for the live recordists out there.
  24. PCM-D1: 4 AA nickel metal hydride rechargeable batteries and charger (supplied, battery life at 96kHz of approximately 4.0 hours with rechargeable AA batteries) PCM-D50: Operates on 4 x AA Alkaline Batteries: Providing 14 hours of record operation @ 44.1kHz 16 bit OK, the PCM-D50's battery life is not bad at all, but still needs four AA batteries instead of one in my NH700, where I get about 8 hours recording time in PCM or 16h in Hi-SP from a 2300 mAh Ni-MH cell. I don't like a lot of batteries in a row. If one is bad, the whole chain is.
  25. PCM-D1 & D50 take Sony's Memory Stick up to 8GB. They may have typical Sony high quality I/O stages, but can't really compete in physical size, price and battery life. They're getting closer though.
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