greenmachine

http://www.epitonic.com/radio.jsp 'Math Rock' being by far my favorite. Songs are downloadable (mp3/wma).

I'd understand if they'd be slightly sacrificing the precision of hardware encoding in favor of battery life, but why should they be crippling software encoding? Makes no sense to me.

I've been wondering why we're not allowed to upload this file format to the live recordings gallery. It can save quite some upload time and space compared to plain pcm if losslessness is needed.

Hi-SP has been designed for transparency, which means it should be most of the time undistinguishable from the original for the vast majority of users although it's a lossy compression method. Welcome to the world of psychoacoustic codecs.

I'm not familiar with audacity, but in cooledit/audition there's a useful function called 'center channel extractor' which works very well for usual studio recordings where the voice has been placed more or less exactly into the center channel. Unfortunately it most propably won't work for any selfmade stereo/mono microphone live recordings. Playing with the EQ won't help you either because you'll increase the loudness of other instruments along with the vocals.

MD decks tend to have a significantly higher output than MD portables, which can improve the situation. Nevertheless, try to do it digitally if possible.

Nono, not through speakers, i mean outside in real life. I thought bats would call significantly above 20 kHz?

I don't think so, sounds more like a passing-by train from one mile distance. Propably it's only low frequency noise from the mics. http://forums.minidisc.org/gallery/1119229...3_60_219693.wav

On the other hand, i once imagined to hear bat calls

I wish i could hear that difference between a sample rate of 44.1 kHz (which highest theoretically possible upper frequency would be 22.05 kHz) and a higher sample rate, but most of the time i struggle even to detect a 17-18 kHz lowpass in real music. I don't think i can hear a difference between different bit depths either except for increased noise at lower bith depths. Maybe i'm just too old (or people suffer from the placebo effect).

The search function is always an option. There must be several discussions about these popular beginner's microphones in the live recording forum.

Thank you, mrsoul. Again, the BoB's noise sounds brighter and thus slightly louder in the upper frequency range than the iMP's noise. In the lower freq. range it's virtually the same. For direct comparison, i've boosted the iMP's recording by 2.3 dB and chose a suitable selection. Because of this difference, i'd be interested which one of these two preamps sounds more neutral. Does the BoB sound bright or does the RH10's iMP sound dull? Or is this difference only in the noise figure? In my test there was no such more or less significant difference. A short test with louder, treble-rich music would be helpful. Attachment: The short selection for direct comparison, 1st part BoB, 2nd part iMP: http://forums.minidisc.org/gallery/1119229...3_60_184127.wav *iMP=internal microphone preamplifier BTW, where does the low frequency rumble come from? Did you have a washing machine running in the next room?

Unfortunately small and little self noise are contradictions. Check out this link: http://www.dpamicrophones.com/page.php?PID=28 What's your priority?

Thank you for the translation

welcome 1) it works like a limiter 2) yes, indeed

Every time you transfer from MD to MD through analog cables, there's a Atrac decompression->DA-conversion->AD-conversion->Atrac compression process involved, which can amplify aritfacts badly if done too often. In the end you can't do much about it except for searching for the master tape and avoiding this kind of very lossy transfer in the future.

All i can suggest with your current method is to turn up the player's volume to the maximum and adjust the recording volume with the soundcard mixer. To completely avoid the possibility of additional noise being introduced in the transferring process, you need to do it digitally. If the recordings themselves are very quiet, you can't do much about noise though except for trying the various noise reduction features in cooledit/audition. If you use them wisely, maybe you can rid of some hiss without damaging the music too much. As always, exaggeration does more harm than good.

Small diaphragm microphones tend to have higher self noise than their larger brothers in general. Maybe you should consider larger diaphragm mics for recording quiet sounds if you can live with their other limitations. http://www.dpamicrophones.com/page.php?PID=28

01010000 01110010 01101111 01110000 01100001 01100010 01101100 01111001 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01101110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101101 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01101011 00101110

I doubt it'll have a significant effect, they're propably not worth the effort, but: http://www6.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=58157 I have the mx400 and without equalisation they sound pretty poor, honestly i don't understand the hype about these little sennheisers. It seems to be really worth to use larger headphones.

Thank you very much again. What i can hear is that the noise in high/low sensitivity mode seems to be approx. the same after amplifying, the BoB at zero gain seems to add lots of noise - unlike a 'real BaB' and the BoB at max. gain through line-in seems to have a 'brighter' sound than the internal preamp. It's really hard to compare the noise levels in these samples though because of the inconsistent, unpredictable soundsources: The birds don't sing equally loud all the time and there's quite some of (traffic-?) noise in the background. If you could reapeat the test in your living room with closed windows and doors, (re-)playing a specified music sample through your Hi-Fi system at a low volume, it would be wonderful. *BaB=Battery Box *BoB=Boost Box BTW, why can't we upload FLAC files?

I just did a comparison between the internal mic preamp of my mz-r909 and my self-made low noise preamp (which i originally built for my Creative Nomad Jukekox 3). I am amazed how similar they sound (except for a slight channel balance difference of approx. 1dB)! The noisefloor is virtually the same in this test, so i conclude it's the microphone's self-noise what we hear here. I've been careful not to introduce additional noise. Looks like you have to have microphones with much lower self-noise to be able to hear the noise generated by the preamp. How i did the test: Level 30/30 for both mic-in (low sens.) and line-in, recorded in SP (i'm not a 'HI-MDer' yet, heh). 1st part: mic->battery box->mic-in 2nd part:mic->external preamp->line-in. Transferred digitally. First part amplified by 18 dB, second part by 15 dB in Audition to roughly match loudness. I couldn't test the mics directly to mic-in, since they are modified and require a reversed voltage to operate. Test sample: http://forums.minidisc.org/gallery/1119229..._60_1503080.wav Nevertheless, i'd still like to see some tests with the popular 'boost box' or other external preamps.

I suggest this to be included in the test as well to see if there is any benefit of a higher bias voltage for low-level sounds: - mic->mic in

A good idea, but i think it's unfair to compare it when the mics are powered differently [9v from the boostbox vs. the low volta(ge) from the md preamp] - on the other hand, it seems not to make such a huge difference in the end.

Very interesting, thank you. Unfortunately you can't compare it directly in your provided sample. It's true that the noise is lower for the second part, but at the same time is the signal (birds). It shows that the boost box has less gain at the max. setting than the MD preamp at high sens. setting. If you boost the second part to a comparable volume via software, there is not much difference in the signal to noise ratio (as expected). The noise in the second part sounds somewhat brighter than the noise in the first part (almost like white noise to pink noise), but volumewise it's virtually the same in the end. If this difference in the noise characteristic comes from the preamp itself or the (under-)powering of the microphones is hard to tell. Here's an edited sample for direct comparison (boosted the second part by 8 dB in Audition): http://forums.minidisc.org/gallery/1119229..._60_3688677.wav