eriktous

I got a JB940 earlier this year, which on occasion exhibited this problem of not ejecting the disc. Usually it would work fine, but if it had been turned off for a while with a disc inside, after turning it on the eject mechanism would make a slipping sound and the disc wouldn't come out until after several tries. I guess the slightly lower temperature inside when it had been turned off for a while had something to do with it. I replaced the belt just now. I was a bit hesitant to do it, because the deck would mostly function fine, but It is indeed dead simple. After removing the mechanism, the belt is easily accessible from the front and can be replaced with a little help from a highly specialized tool. P.s.: I just noticed I took the picture of the mechanism after I had already removed the belt. It goes around the two white wheels you can see on the front left.

Noticed this auction on eBay which has a clear picture of the backside of some sealed discs with Shock Absorbing Mechanism and the picture shows the black liner I mentioned in my previous post as (part of) this mechanism.

Hey friends, after not using it for a couple of years, I pulled my minidisc gear out of storage again. I found out, of course, that most of the gumsticks don't really work well any more, so I ordered some from eBay. I just want to let you know my experience with two of the NH-14WM replacements that are available now. The Vapex 1450mAh was received pretty quickly, since it came from the UK. It seems to work perfectly so far, so I'm happy with that one. I also bought a pair of the unbranded green ones, with the following text on them: 'Leasong NI-MH H1200mAh 7/5F6 1.2v'. I have just received them, after about three weeks, since they come from Honk Kong, but they don't fit in my portables; they are slightly too long. I guess they are the same that I can just about get them in my NH900, but I have to put some stress on the battery door to get it to close, which I'm not comfortable with. They don't fit at all in my other machines. So just a word of warning: don't buy these as replacements for the Sony NH-14WM.

I thought it was that black liner you can see along the edge of the housing. I think it's intended to keep it seated firmer inside the machine and reduce outside vibrations being transmitted to the disc.

You could burn one yourself.

My guess is the different options for ripping speed in SonicStage may have to do with error correction. I would have to search around for the specifics, but from memory this is how I understand it. The red book standard for audio cd's has less inherent error correction information than e.g. data cd's. That's why a ripped cd above a certain length can not be burned back to a cdr as a data file (.wav). The cd data format uses more room for error correction (digital data has to be read back bit perfect, obviously), so the usable size is less. A cd player during playback will usually misread some samples, but a single wrong sample (or even a few close together) will hardly be audible once converted to the analog signal. (The error rate during reading may be one of the differences between high and low quality cd players, although laser technology is now so evolved that even cheap players should do pretty good.) When ripping a cd on the computer, you can do this high speed, i.e. read just once and don't care about the misread samples, or you can do this more accurate, e.g. by reading twice and comparing the two data streams, or computing a checksum and comparing this to a database (AccurateRip).

That detachable front panel sure looks funky. Interesting way of implementing a remote.

But where would one find a HiMD player nowadays?

I've been playing around for the past couple of days with the Nyquist plug-in language that's supported in Audacity. It's pretty powerful and straightforward to use once you get the hang of it. A center cancel plug-in is pretty easy to write. In Audacity's nyquist mailing list archive there's a post from someone who wrote a simple 'vocal remover' plugin. It basically separates the audio in a mid and a side channel, and then cuts out the frequency band from the mid channel that contains most of the vocals. The lower and upper limit of that band are user selectable.

You mean you can't imagine 'lugging around' one HiMD disc?

Part of the thrill of using eBay. I hope everything goes well for you. I own an SJ-MJ50 and had a look through the manual. Apparantly, the speakers run from the internal battery just fine. It's even possible to connect the seperate AA battery attachment to the side of the speaker cradle for longer play time. Good luck with this fine little player.

They're cheap, alright, and there has been some debate as to whether they're fake, as in not made by Sony. I don't think anyone can do more than guess if they're either made by some generic battery factory with a Sony label put on it, or are original Sony produced batteries, which somehow found their way out of the factory through 'unofficial distribution chains'. Fact is, though, that quite a number of people have reported on this and other forums that they work fine.

[Off topic] So, that would make you one of the numbskulls? [/Off topic]

I'm guessing it works the same way as your discman, but is, as you put it, extremely smooth spinning a disk. The rapid spinning you notice after inserting a new disk is probably needed to quickly fill up the play back buffer completely. After that it only has to refill the buffer partly, so it doesn't need to read in as big a burst.

Pay no attention to it. It's simply a mistake in the product description. (This might give you a clue why Sony has had a hard time selling minidiscs, if even their marketing department don't understand (or don't care about) the features of the machines they make.)