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.)

Could this be interpreted as a sign that Sony is slowly starting to drop MD software support?

You'll be using your recordings in producing a professional end-product (I'm guessing you want to make CD's out of them), so I advise to get a HiMD recorder. This way you can upload your recordings directly to a PC over a USB connection, where you can do any necessary editing and cutting. This is not possible with the older NetMD or regular MD recorders. The MZ-RH1 has received many positive reviews and appears to be the ultimate portable MD recorder. (I say 'appears' because I don't own one myself, but I trust the opinions of most people who have lauded it.) It's price tag places it outside your budget, unfortunately. A very good, and cheaper, alternative would be the MZ-NH700. This will record in the same quality as the RH1, and uses a common AA battery. It may be a bit harder to locate a new one, however, because it is an older model (2004). I can't give you any advice on mic's, but there have been a lot of discussions on them, so I suggest to search through this forum a bit.

I see a future sale of a mint RH1 coming on.

What version of SonicStage are you using?

Have a look at this page. Atrac Advanced Lossless Basically, an AAL file consists of two parts. A lossy part, compressed at the chosen bitrate, and a part containing the residual information, which is used in conjunction with the lossy part to reconstruct the original sound.

After reading your explanation and thinking about it, I think your probably right. I apologise for the tone of my previous post, which was misplaced. As you say, the Dynamic Normalizer could only be a true normalizer, if the machine would analyse the complete track before playing it (which it doesn't do, otherwise it would take too long when you skip from one track to another), or if a peak value would be stored in the header of each track, which would mean each track would have to be analysed at the moment of recording. However, if storing a track's peak value was part of the (Hi)MD standard, they could have introduced such a feature easily on earlier machines, which hasn't been the case. So I repeat, you're right; I was wrong. It's most likely a compressor.

You keep talking about compression, but as I understand it, the Dynamic Normaliser on the RH1 is actually a normaliser, not a compressor. You're probably thinking of the volume limiter that is present on some (most/all?) European models, which IIRC works as a compressor, but not the Dynamic Normaliser on the RH1. (That's probably the reason they called it a Dynamic Normaliser, instead of a Dynamic Compressor. )

Thanks, Volta. That's a very clear explanation. In my head I know exactly how it works, but I have difficulties putting it into words when explaining it to someone else in a clear and organised manner.

Understandable. It's a confusing subject, and I'm terrible at explaining it. I started typing up a new explanation of what happens with SP transfers, but I just deleted it after reading it back, because it didn't seem any clearer than what I already wrote. I will try to find a thread where it gets explained better, and post a link here. No, I'm only talking about transfers in MD mode. When you're doing transfers in HiMD mode, you're getting what you're expecting.

If you can hear the difference between SP and LP2, going straight from MD to MD should give you a better sounding recording. When you go from PC to MD, the PCM doesn't get transcoded to SP directly. Rather, it gets transcoded to LP2 on the computer. This file then is sent to the MD via the USB connection, where the MD transcodes it to SP. So it looks like SP, but sounds like LP2. Do a search of the forums with the keywords 'true SP' and 'padded LP2', and you should find plenty of threads where this phenomenon is discussed.