Top Cat

Seems like you're right on with the speed concerns. Remember their advertised "40 sec CD to MD transfer"? Also it might be some differences in algorithms, like joint-stereo in HW and dual-mono in SW or something

Or if you don't want music try mixing in some lesser noticeable sound like 19kHz sine wave

The best workaround in my experience is to remove track marks right after stopping the recording. The procedure: 1. Play the last "track" and put the unit into Pause 2. Then repeatedly alternately press two buttons: REW, REC. Make the pace of about 1 mark-off in 1 second (half-second between button presses) - the unit doesn't like faster speeds. That's better done with two fingers from two hands so that you dont hassle swapping one finger over two buttons. 3. Don't worry about mispresses. If you accidentally skip some marks or add new ones you can correct them in another run (presumably containing much smaller number of track marks) 4. As you see, couple minutes of this hard labour can deliver very professional result from a crippled device. 5. You don't have to look at the display all the time, engage in your normal activity You can even do it while JOGGING as mark removal doesn't make any writing on the MD immediately. Only stand still when you finally press Stop and the system file goes to get updated. 6. Use newer SonicStage for uploading your recording. Version 3.3 works fine with removed track marks, 3.0 (which came with the unit) refuses to upload such material. Enjoy your work!

In my estimation the next best recording solution in today's MD's price range will be available in 5-6 years and it's gonna be a CF recorder, something like Sony PCM-D1 offered now for $2k

Me too. Sometimes I don't replace the disc in the unit and make multiple sessions during a day, so this feature seems kinda handy.

Or, may be they've stuck to CBR because of a marketing custom - "medium has to have this specific number of minutes of capacity"

22 kHz sampling rate is not supported by MD hardware IMO. Pretty annoing, as I have to transcode from 32kbps 22kHz mp3 to 48kbps 44kHz Atrac3+ every time I want to listen something from my huge collection on the go..

Make the disc fragmented. It'll seek for free space during recording. To fragment - record lots of small files and then delete every other file.

This would really be a great feature for those making lots of recordings in Hi-SP. The archival process would get largerly streamlined whereas with OMA restrictions the material needs to be recomressed to some lossless or to hi-bitrate lossy format.

Back in 1999 I had a top-line feature-packed compact-cassette stereo-radio-corder ($170) which was Made in Japan. And the mechanics simply stopped rolling the right way a month before the end of the warranty. Repaired for free and it broke again just after warranty ended completely...

BTW does anyone know if Hi-LP is joint-stereo? I've heard Atrac3plus 48kbps is, but is the 64kbps too?

Got 1 Hi-MD & 10 80's I usually record continuously for around 2 hrs, so I'm out of luck with PCM anyway. Sometimes my sessions run for 5 hrs uninterrupted, then I use my only 1GB disc. PS Looks like I'm too the only buyer of Hi-MD media in my area - they had a box of discs unopened for some 2 months until I acquired a recorder and made them break the pack. The price is $9 for Hi-MD's and there are absolutely no 80 min discs available in outlets. (Oh, and to a great surprise - found a huge number of legacy MD makes in the so-called "Radio-bazaar", our local open-air marketplace for all sorts of electronics)

"Binaural" recordings are known to sound best when played through headphones, but what do you think about other playback setups?

Cool! So, anyway, are really most recordists here record for playback via headphones?

May be that's because of portability differences. I've seen on some blog an opinion that ipods are recording-disabled or limited to 8kHz just to make sure users won't record concerts and such... Sorta "gun control"

Blacks (translucent) from the Sony's "color mix" are similarly cool. I use them for movies (with video stripped)

Hi Just wanted to share how I made my first live recording yesterday with the mics made by myself.. First of, the recording came out simply amazing even before post-processing (NR'ing & EQ'ing) Take a "hear": Wedding Song #3 Keep in mind, the whole mic setup cost me less than $2 (including 2 capsules of $.25 each) The pecularity about cheap mic capsules is that they usually have very low sensitivity while at the same time exposing a decent frequency responce, so hopefully you won't need a battery module for loud settings. Concerning levels.. Headphones are unreliable for that anyway. You gotta find the best levels by trial & error. (And afterwards it's fairly easy to select the levels blindly) It is even easier to choose the right level when you regard the fact that an average mic's useful dynamic range is some 20dB narrower than that of the MD system - you really just need to make sure you don't clip. Don't worry if you later find out your recording's peak is -10dBFS, better be on the safe side 'cause clip restoration is a painful task

If the variance is only in the repeated sections lengths - that's not a problem. Probably a simple Perl script will do (is there a Perl WAV module out there?) Do you think the actual audio samples are repeated exactly bit-to-bit?

Hi maia, as an owner of JE480 could you please make some thing clear to me - What is on the Line-out of the deck when it is in the Recording state receiving the input signal on the Line-in (analog)? Looks like rec.level control on the deck affects the Line-out level, but what about other aspects of signal processing? Does it go through ADC/DAC? Atrac?

Interesting to note - being on recording site I was asked for a spare MD. I popped one I thought was blank in their JE480 and it showed 2 tracks on the disc, something like 323 minutes. JE480 refused to erase the disc (we didn't try to play, were in a hurry.) Apparently the MD was an 80 min MD in Hi-MD format full of MP3 tracks...

So what do we do with the repeats? Not a problem to manually edit out when the number of splits is moderate, but what if it's a few hundreds? Any ideas on automation?

Well, deleting auto T marks directly on the MD unit has yet another potential difficulty - there may be quite a few of them. For e.g. my recordings of sermons usually get some 100-200 T marks per recording (couople hrs) But then, how do you eliminate the small repeated tails of each track duplicated in the beginning of the following track after transferring tracks individually? Looks like some sort of editing automation needs to be implemented...

Have anybody observed the difference in mechanical noise between RH10 & RH910? RH10 is slightly heavier and a bit smaller than RH910, so even if they had identical mechanisms they could have different acoustic models of the casing...

Ok, guys, my RH910 also produces similar sounds, but it also has another feature sound. It does fool-seeks quite often. You know, similar to those older CD players fed with a damaged CD - they mislead the track, try to seek it locally a few times and failing to do that they return the pick-up to it's initial position (disc start) and then move it back to the playing track. So does my MD unit, few times a minute every now and then, especially when uploading small recordings via SS. What do you think? (Note: the Hi-MD is almost new and probably not very much fragmented, having undergone only couple of deletes of selected files)