Mr_Bass_Man

I think that is pretty normal, GtR. Firstly some discs are noisier than others. Secondly there is always some searching for the TOC (innermost track on the disc) at the start of playback, then the transport has to locate the selected track. Even if they are played in the "normal" sequence, (ie first to last) the tracks are not necessarily located on physically adjacent tracks on the disc, so the transport has to traverse the disc to pick up the next track wherever it is located. Also the I understand that the player "buffers" data, so it is usually is reading ahead by a few seconds - if left uninterrupted it will therefore seek the next track a few seconds before the previous track has finished playing. It is noticeable that the portables, which have to conserve power as much as possible seem to read their data in "bursts", ie the disc isn't constantly spinning. I guess this is true of the "G-protection" units which use this "read ahead" feature to cope with mechanical jolts, etc. This isn't particularly applicable to decks like the JB980, but decks often have other features such as "Time Machine Recording" which probably makes use of the same kind of buffered data. Hope this helps someone (assuming it is reasonably correct )

Well, for the benefit of those reading this forum to find out what all the hype about the PX100s is, I must say that I have simply been blown away on a "value for money" scale with my new Senns. For the size (they collapse down if you can figure out how to do it ... ) into a small carrying case, and when you wear them it is quite easy to forget you have them on. My other phones (The Technics) are also nice sounding phones - in fact there doesn't seem to be much of a difference - possibly the Technics have a bit more "bottom end" - but they are pretty bulky. According to the UK supplier I bought my PX100s from, Sennheiser are achieving unprecedented sales of these units as I had to wait over a month before they came into stock, but the wait was worthwhile, and I am "chuffed to bits" with their performance, and they didn't cost the earth either. No doubt the PX200s probably have the edge but if you remember over the head lightweight phones from the early days of the cassette Walkman, then forget it - these babies really do sound great [iMHO!!]

My decks have a feature called "Smart Space" which basically divides tracks up when the input signal is below a certain level. You can enable/disable this feature in the equipment menus. My only HiMD (NH900) unit _doesn't_ appear to have that feature. The "Sync_Rec" feature is intended for optical/digital recordings from sources such as CD players.

Well I have an N900, (amongst others ...) albeit a silver one, and for my money it is one of the nicest sounding of the lot! (Please don't ask my why!!!) BTW, I am new to the Sennheiser PX100 cans, and they _are_ every bit as good as they are reputed to be, IMHO ...

Ummmmm . . . . . . . . just look at the sig !

I presume pata2001 is talking about the program "Exact Audio Copy" which is a well known and respected application for ripping CD tracks to wav files. See Exact Audio Copy for more info Hope this is of some use to you

There is a resume of the various functions and compatabilities between remotes on this forum :- Guide to Sony Remotes This is a very useful resource, and may help you in your quest to find a new one. They crop up all the time on EBay Hope this helps

... and I think that one of _really_ smart features of HiMD is the ability to use existing "normal" MD media, and format it to HiMD standard with increased data capacity. That's very clever, IMHO!

I agree with that, on balance ... I have both the N10 and N910, they seem to be much the same thing, operationally, but with the N10 there is always the "worry" of the internal non-repaceable battery. Also the N10 uses a "special" USB lead (I have a spare ...) and needs to be on the stand in order to charge from its 6V power supply. The N910 can be charged independently with a 3V charger, uses easily replaceable gumstick batteries and uses the "standard" USB lead. I think the N10 is the "sexier" of the two, and is slimmer and lighter (remember it was advertised as "10th anniversary special"), but both have a great "quality" feel to them.

I installed iTunes for the purpose of playing PodCasts (I don't have, or ever intend to have an iPod ...) I thought it was a hideous piece of software, and it didn't stay long on my machine! Sonic Stage is also hideous, but I have (one or two ...) MD units, so it has to stay, warts and all. What the heck is wrong with using Windoze Explorer to drag tunes onto the device? Works with my CD burner!

I was interested to note that when I looked an an item (MZ-N510) being advertised in this forum, the item itself being on Ebay.au that there were some 80-odd items being listed on the Aussie Ebay site under the MD category. If you look at the corresponding EBay category in the UK, there are over 1000 items being listed at the moment, and some of the traders are in the Far East/ Australasia! (I have bought MD gear from both areas). (Incidentally I picked up a "Sony Refurbished" MZ-N510 from a UK trader for £10 plus carriage, which is as good as new, and has to be good value in anyone's book...) It would appear by that simple unscientific comparison that the Aussie market is a very small one. I wouldn't have said, if you'd stopped me in the street and asked me, that the UK MD market was a particularly big one, but then again I am not in retailing!

If Sony are serious about making an impact on the future, then they could do worse than have a whole department (maybe a small one ... !) studying this forum. Unlike many othe forums (fora ?) this one is generally used by true ENTHUSIASTS who love their audio, and who make sensible, considered, positive criticisms of all aspects of the medium (hardware, software, performance, reliability, ergonomics, value for money, etc etc). Pretty well the entire future, as viewed by those who have a user's interest is captured one way or another within this very forum. If however only "corporate vested interests" are all that matter, then the story may well be a different one. But Sony will then be exposed to the risk that one or other of their rivals, who, after all can read the same forum, will take a lead and "hijack" Sony's original idea, and possibly make an absolute killing. The only problem with that, as I see it is that the Apple IPod, for all its shortcomings, has already become the "definitive" Personal Audio machine, and that must be a very difficult hurdle for ANY rival company to overcome.

Of course you are correct, but I am suggesting (I may be wrong of course!) that the "obsession" with "managing digital rights" has resulted in software which falls way below the expectation of most users in terms of "user appeal". Even clunky old Real Player tries to give MD (unfortunately not HiMD) users a taste of "dragging and dropping" from their computers onto their mobile device (notwithstanding DRM issues of course!!) whilst the MP3-player fraternity have pretty well had that from Day One. But you encode those same files as ATRAC and convenience just flies out of the window, IMHO.

... unless of course it is an "ATRAC CD-Player" A short time ago, I bought, for a very reasonable price, off EBay a "Sony Refurbished" CD-Player with MP3 and ATRAC playback capability. Great! Sounds good, looks good, I'm a happy bunny. That is until I try to make an ATRAC CD. Whereas in "vanilla" CD mode, it makes a good job of playing CDs (Does CD-Text as well). It can read CD-RW, so I drag a few MP3's onto the CD-RW with Windows Explorer, and it plays those no problem (a very handy feature for me). Now, what do you do with ATRAC files, drag them onto the CD-RW with Windows Explorer? No sir. Use my already-installed Sonic Stage 3.2? No luck there, locks my PC up solid Install the supplied Simple Burner? Well this time I can't get the CD song titles from CDDB ... ... so I don't even try - it's all just too much like hard work! Forget ATRAC, forget all the debate about whether or not ATRAC sounds better than MP3, just give up and drag those MP3s with Windows Explorer ... Life is too short for DRM. And, it is crippling Sony's brilliant engineering, as someone else has so rightly said elsewhere in this thread

... and then they'll cripple it with DRM and Sonic Stage ... Game Set and Match to the "recording IPod" (bound to come!)

Can I say at the start that I am NOT the greatest fan of Real Player, nor Sonic Stage for that matter, as I detest the way Real Player has a "creeping, cancerous effect" on computers, wanting to do sneak into all kinds of hidden corners and bite you when you are not looking, and Sonic Stage is famously unfriendly. However, at least with Real Player up and running, and with the "NetMD plugin" installed, it is very straightforward dragging and dropping files onto the "Current Burner/Device". OK so there are some annoying issues with the titling/tagging of the file dropped, but that appears to me to be more intuitive than the performance you have to go through with Sonic Stage. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be any plugin for Hi-MD devices - does anyone know of any, or any that are in the pipeline?

Blondie - Parallel Lines Man, I'd forgotton what a great album that was - I have it on vinyl from the "first time round ..." Sounds great on MD LP2

Best of luck with using your Dell laptop mike input. A while back I had a little job to do for my company which involved recording some digital radio audio, and I was asked to use "official" equipment - ie my works-issue DAB receiver and my works-issue Dell D600 laptop, the latter only having a mike input. The quality of the recording I made by this method was absolutely dire. The software I was issued with was the well-known and respected LAME encoder, and that was NOT the prroblem. As a backup I used my own DAB tuner (optical output) to my own NH900 and (Hi-LP) and the results were infinitely better. I was able to transfer the recording via the USB to my own PC, edit the bits I needed using Audacity (thanks Low Volta!!) and present to "the management" what they wanted. Basically just a word of warning about relying on mike inputs on Dell laptops! For the future, a USB based "audio card" would appear to be a better option, if funds permit. Regards

Well thank you LV for that gem, and no, I hadn't spotted it. It's a pity it won't work on the remote device though! I still think a suite of "editing facilities" would be very useful. Thanks for the tip ... Regards

Well if you record something off DAB such as speech (eg sport) then LP4 is fine, otherwise for general purpose work, I find LP2 pretty decent. For instance I have made up a number of discs of "interval music" for dances which my band play at (the selections are called things like "Upbeat & Rocky", "Mellow", "Instrumental", etc depending on the kind of audience. Plug the MD unit (usually the N520) into the band's PA, select "Shuffle" and let it do its stuff. They sound pretty good in that context. I get somewhere around 40 tracks in LP2 mode on each one. Takes me _ages_ to make the compilations up though!

OK, so the latest version of SS is slightly better than previous ones, in most peoples' opinion, but what about all the other stuff you do with MDs apart from transferring files? I am thinking of (for example) track editing, splitting, combining, etc. It all seems kind of fundamental to me, so how come the software/hardware people haven't implemented it? After all, if you can do it from the buttons on the recorder, or from the remote control, in the case of the decks, then why on earth not from the PC via the USB? Back to what SS is supposed to do, today I had it fail to create a WAV file from one transferred from my NH900 to my PC (a track recorded via the analogue line in). I eventually had to record it again, the second transferred file worked fine. Grrrr ..... I'm pretty convinced that if Sony had come up with a better program, more MD units would have been sold, and I also very much doubt if they hadn't been so hung up about SCMS/DRM that not all that many fewer CDs would have been sold (but yet more MD units would have!)

Most Recent 3 MDs Beethoven 1st Symphony (from last June's mammoth "Beethoven Experience" on BBC Radio 3 Sonny Rollins "Saxophone Colossus" (as recommended in this forum - cool stuff!) "The Magic Numbers" by The Magic Numbers - currently up to track 9 All on my favourite N10 recorded at good old LP2

Is there any point comparing the serial numbers of "good" NH900s with "bad" ones? I have two, one with the "irritating dodgy stop button" fault, and one without it. The one which misbehaves (bought second hand via EBay, from a smoker judging by the smell) is S/N 5023736. The other one, bought new from Amazon (special offer ) is S/N 5040968. I'm a non-smoker, btw ... [just in case there is any significance in that ...]

Yeh! I'm looking out for one of these cuties coming up on EBay, but they're as scarce as hen's teeth ............... Go nicely with my N10 (and my silver E33 come to think of it!)

Yep, L7R you are right about Mr Peart. I've downloaded a couple of Porcupine Tree tracks from the web - "Lazarus" and "Collapse the light into Earth" and haven't really made the connection yet with Rush, but I'll persist. Rush to my ears are rather reminiscent of Yes, albeit with fewer synth layers. The Rush recordings are all good old SP, BTW (the E33 is SP only), now listening to "Retrospective" on my NH900 with the cans on as the rest of the family are asleep. Just got in from doing a gig with my band, letting the adrenalin subside before I hit the hay . . .