Mr_Bass_Man

A whole bunch of albums by Rush. I bought an MD unit (I think it might have been the E33) off a guy on EBay, and loads of MDs came with it. He offered to erase them, I said "No thanks, I'll listen to some of your stuff". I don't really enjoy "Drum n' Bass" stuff, nor "Ibiza Anthems", but hey, the guy is a Rush fan, and they're pretty damn good. Possibly a little "clean" and "over produced" for my taste these days, but nevertheless they're a class act. My younger son plays the drums, and he is most impressed with their drummer ...

Here in the U.K. my ISP is providing an uncapped ASDL service for £25 (about $40 US) per month. It started out 2 years ago as a 512kB/s downstream 256kB/s upstream, upgraded about a year ago to 1MB/s down (still 256kB/s up) And is about to be upgraded to 2MB/s downstream (still 256kB upstream I think), all still for the same price. So value for money has increased here, hopefully India (and others) will do likewise ...

A possible word of caution ... I have been using SS with a combination of at least two NetMD portables (I think I may have even used a third once ...), a HiMD portable, and a NetMD deck, seemingly without problems. The other day the PC claimed that it had found a "New Device" and I had to reinstall the drivers again for my deck and a NetMD portable. All happily working again, but a nuisance in the meantime. I suspect a "Windows" rather than a SS issue, but the jury is out, as they say!

Maybe the solution to remove "soundcard issues" from the equation is to drop both files onto a CD-R or CD-RW or whatever your best CD player will read, then engineer a "blind test" somehow. If I get an opportunity, this is what I will do ... [Later] - I now have the ABX stuff to play with as well !

It looks like the site provider may have taken it down, possibly for "Rights Reasons". However if you have successfully used the site before, you may have a cached copy of the page in your "Temporary Internet Files" folder, and you may be able to extract the still-valid URLs from it. This is working for me at the moment .... I pasted the URL into FlashGet and hit "Download" Best of luck!

Could it be that you have used up all the space reserved for track titles? I did that once, and the results were unexpected, though I think it warns you in the manual. Try shortening some of the track titles (with SS) and see what happens ... Best of luck

Well I am English, white and from pretty well Anglo-Saxon stock, though I do have a strong blood-line to the Celts (Welsh and Scots), so you might say I'm a "mongrel" and I would regard that as a compliment! I work in the broadcasting industry, but at the "rough" end - RF, kilowatts, kilovolts, etc but I have also worked in and around studios. I am am a part-time musician, and have been for over 30 years since in my early teens. I've worked overseas (Middle East and southern Africa) and like an earlier poster, consider myself to be a citizen of the world. We are all different, and it is great that we are! Whilst in Africa, my great friend and neighbour was a Dutch missionary - he taught me a good line of "Belgian jokes"! Pity I have forgotten them ... I lurk in this forum most days, and must say how much I enjoy the "company". I really should seek help about my predeliction for collecting MD hardware!!

This is all very interesting, and possibly a good demonstration of the "Pscycho" bit of "Psycho Acoustic Modelling". I hope the spelling is close ... I expect that means (amongst other things) that the perception of sound differs somewhat between individuals. I set up a "blind" listening test of the two samples using good old Windows Media Player (WiMP ...) and got it to play the two randomly in an infinite loop/ Then you just set the thing going in an invisible window (my PC connected to my hi-fi and me using fairly decent cans to listen with). I just dipped in and out from time to time and tried to distinguish which version I was listening to (I got that right 90% of the time). I had already determined I "preferred" the sound of sample #1, and I based my vote on that. I must say however that the source material sounds "compressed" (in terms of amplitude compression) anyhow, I'd quite like to compare something more in the "orchestral" domain, where dynamic range is likely to be much larger. I accept that I could easily be wrong about identifying the samples, as, frankly, to my ears (47years old ...) there wasn't much to choose between them. I wouldn't buy the disc, though - not exactly my "cup of tea". As I said before, very interesting, nontheless ...

"We Are Povo" by Danish Jazz-Latin-Fusion (or whatever ...) band "Povo". Bought from Amazon.co.uk - ripped onto MD LP2. Sounds great!

Well things are still developing having only recently acquired Hi-MD (NH900). Also I have only just realised thanks to posts in this forum that Net-MD at "SP" is really only LP2 (I should have guessed anyway from the file sizes!) but I don't have any particular issues with sound quality of any of the formats at LP2 and above. I can do digital recordings from my CD player to my deck via coax, so if I really MUST have quality for archiving purposes from CD source then I guess I will use SP. If the source isn't of the highest quality anyway (eg MP3) then going to anything "higher" than LP2 is more than likely a waste of time (OK I understand about compressing-the-already-compressed!)

Well it is a nice deck, IMHO, and I paid about what you are quoting for a second hand one off EBay. Good as new, though. I had some fun and games with getting my PC to load the right NetMD driver, but that was because I didn't have the orignal older SonicStage + drivers CD. Someone in this community kindly forwarded the correct drivers and all was well in the end. It has two digital inputs, one optical, the other coax - this suits my set-up admirably. It's up to you whether you can afford it or not, and they don't come up all that often on EBay. Best of luck!

Interesting ... One of these lifetimes I will get round to trying the ruse with the DVD optical connections! I haven't worked out why you transfer via your HiMD unit, maybe I have missed something there? I must say the versatility of the 980 suits my setup perfectly (see the pic of my "stack" in the gallery). Presently the optical in goes to the CAV-U5 which lurks at the back and can produce digital sound from my PC, although I don't use it often, but occasionally I will record something streamed from the internet onto MD. The coax in is connected normally to the DAB tuner (let's not get into a "DAB vs FM quality" argument! and the Technics CD player has a coax output available too, if required. The analogue line in is connected to the record output of the amp, which has a nice array of inputs. The MZ-N10 and the JB980 both connect via the USB to the PC which although it is only an old Gateway Pentium II runing WinXP, all co-exist very nicely. I have recently picked up a Hi-MD unit (NH900) which also happily co-exists with the other MD units on the USB bus - all on a S-L-O-W computer AND a USB hub! I am well pleased with the whole lot. FM is noticeably better than DAB, btw - the comparison is rather like MP3 128K vs ATRAC3 - no contest!

Thank You ! ! ! You are right- the installer recognised the driver straight away, and I am now working fine! It seems that Sony forgot to include the deck on their later software release? I am in England, btw, and very happy! Thanks again Martin (Mr_Bass_Man)

Yes the deck appears as "Net MD" in the Device Manager, but with the dreaded yellow "?". It is in "Other Devices". I am 95% certain that the cable is OK. The drivers I installed (apart from the bundled ones with Sonic Stage) are indeed the ones in your link. It appears that the system is looking for a _different_ driver to the ones I have. If it isn't a straight hardware problem with the deck (difficult to prove or disprove) I have a sneaking suspicion that something in the registry is screwed up. Having used the computer with other NetMD devices before may have confused matters. Does anyone know if the software supplied with the JB980 is "special" in any way, as all I have used is the stuff which came with my portables, plus the stuff off the Sony site. The JB980 doesn't seem to exist as far as the "Support" part of the Sony site is concerned. Thanks for reading ...

All, I recently acquired a JB-980 deck on EBay with all accessories, but no software CD. I have software CDs for my other NetMD units, MZ-N10 and MZ-N510. (I have only ever used the MZ-N10 with my computer, the other is the machine I use in my car ...) Basically I am unable to get my PC (I have tried it on two) to recognise any of the drivers on either of my discs as the right one for the JB-980. I have tried a number of things :- Removing all previous NetMD software (Sonic Stage etc, deleting registry entries, etc) but I always end up with the problem of my PC recognising "new hardware" but being unable to locate an appropriate driver for it. I have tried the latest version of Sonic Stage (3.1) and the Sony drivers application from their web site, but without success. I would have thought the "standard NetMD drivers" would have worked OK, but they don't. Anyone think of anything I haven't tried. I get identical results on a Windows XP Pro machine, and a Win98SE machine. Always I can get my MZ-N10 working again as a NetMD device without any difficulty (thank goodness!) Regards Martin