greenmachine

he wants to

iron maiden - powerslave

MD's output even at max vol isn't usually that great, i have other portable gear which might not sound as detailed, but can be much louder. Some headphones require a relatively high setting even with perfectly intact hearing [also depends on the material you listen to: squashed to the wall, as loud as possible pop/rock/metal with virtually no dynamics for example doesn't require a relatively high setting as music with intact dynamics, for example classical, field recordings, some world music, etc. do]. I'd still rather use less efficient but nice sounding headphones than their loud but awful counterparts.

Odd enough the highest band [10kHz] seems quite usable. It doesn't raise just 10k, but higher frequencies as well. Will we ever understand Sony's thinking?

A great recorder, which looks like a cheap plastic toy at a first glance [might be a plus for stealth recording!], but records in [almost] professional quality - a real wolf in sheep's clothing. Has served me well over time. The replaceable AA battery is a big plus in my opinion.

miles davis - bitches brew

Metal/Rock/Pop/Electro is also often highly compressed [dynamically, not psychoacoustically], often with a good amount of distortion, thus harder to compress further. I encode a lot [VBR mp3 most of the time] and can confirm Avrin's observations. The resulting bitrates when encoding in VBR are usually the highest with highly [dynamically] compressed metal [containing lots of high frequencies and distortion], while [usually relatively quiet and clean with occasional peaks] classical music seems the easiest to encode [resulting in relatively low bitrates while maintaining sound quality]. Microphone placement will also play a major role. A recording, which is close to mono, will be easier to encode [the benefits of joint stereo encoding].

SQ is subjective.

The meter will go down during power consumption peaks, like display on, using the camera, jumping between tracks, fast forwarding, etc. It should go back to normal when in normal use.

NH700 -> vol 20-30 -> low sensitive full sized headphones [for home use]. I couldn't find any earbuds/light headphones yet that sound significantly better than awful, so i don't listen much on the move.

Nice, i've once built the 30V version of that preamp before the 12V version appeared. I've used three 9V batteries for the preamp itself and an additional 9V batt for plug in power. It worked quite well but was not really portable. How did you get it to work with just a single batt for both preamp and plug in power?

I like the Monacor MCE-2000 (google it) as well, but don't know if they're available outside of europe. They're also more expensive. A resistor color chart like this might be helpful to choose suitable resistors: [attachmentid=2030]

Try discharging it completely before fully recharging from now on. If you're lucky, it just suffers from the memory effect and will recover by itself. If this was your common practice already, the battery propably suffers from age/too many cycles and needs to be replaced.

I thought Hi-MD, like CD, was a 44.1kHz/16 bit format? I agree that a high defitition digital section isn't worth much if you don't feed it with a high quality analog signal.

Sony calls it 'plug in power'. It is a small voltage of approx. 2.5 volts to power pre-polarized condenser (electret) microphones, not quite sufficient for full sized (non pre-polarized) condenser mics. Although not beneficial when using dynamic mics, it shouldn't cause damage.

You can order the parts online there, they will ship it home to you. Or you could disassemble some defective electronic devices in your home and see if you can get the parts from there. Good luck with it and let us know if you succeed.

updated, thanks vergergc, did you consider to use the equalizer to compensate for the lack of high frequencies, for example 4khz [+1], 10kHz [+2]?

Most electronic parts stores, like digi-key in the usa or conrad electronics in germany. If you can't answer this question for yourself and have no experience with electronics/soldering, this propably isn't the right project for you.

[list could be incomplete or contain errors, feel free to correct] 1st gen [2004] [no direct mp3 playback, transcoding to atrac required]: - NH600[D] - NH700 - NHF800 - NH900 - NH1 - NH3D - EH1 - EH930 - EH50 - EH70 2nd gen [2005] [lowpassed mp3 playback]: - RH710/DH710 - RH910/M10 - RH10/M100 - DH10P 3rd gen [2006] [proper mp3 playback]: - RH1

An EH1 maybe?

"It is said that one million monkeys hitting on one million typewriters would eventually reproduce the works of Shakespeare. The internet is the proof that this is not true."

Check this one out, took me a while to figure out how it works. Don't repeat too often if you don't want to destroy the illusion: The Flash Mind Reader

Both encoding and decoding (as well as AD & DA conversion) will determine the resulting quality. A chain is only as strong as its weakest part. There's no need for realtime recording anymore unless you don't want to use a PC, want to record in old SP and/or for live recording. Software transfer should be as good or better (no forced resampling, latest codecs) and faster in theory.

I don't think using an external amp will result in significantly increased fidelity (if at all, a chain is only as strong as its weakest part), but give you a higher output, which is useful for not so sensitive headphones. What kind of headphones are you using?

PCM will work only on Hi-MD units. Transferring in SP via software will result in sub-LP2 quality. What (Hi-)MD model(s) do you use?