Avrin

Has the group, by any chance, tried uploading SP from other NetMD-compatible units? I'm somehow starting to think that if pure SP is uploaded, the whole upload problem is just a software limitation. Before that, I thought that SP is not uploadable "as is", but the RH1 has the circuitry to decode it to PCM before uploading, which makes it the only unit able to upload. But if pure SP is actually uploaded, then probably any NetMD unit can do it.

Try a clean install of this version: http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?s=&am...st&p=141995

The NH3D is actually the best sounding machine of all the units I have.

The device will be a real kick-ass if, and only if, it supports gapless MP3 playback using internal LAME or iTunes tags.

Welcome to the forums! A missing CD or DVD drive may indicate a failed PxEngine installation (PxEngine is a part of SonicStage and many other burning programs). Try installing the latest version of the engine from http://kb.roxio.com/content/000070GN

Nice little thingie. Hopefully it has good output circuitry and a decent battery life, and so may be used as a portable player (ya know, people are getting tired of carrying their PCM-D1's around).

The original "Invincible" CD sounds like absolute crap. Full of compression, resampling, and clipping distortion (see here). I wonder about the MD (and whether it really exists). Actually, the only two perfectly sounding MJ Epic albums were "Off The Wall" and "Thriller" (especially if you get their 1st Japanese issues with pre-emphasis). "Bad" is a bit compressed (though in no way to the extent modern CDs are), "Dangerous" is overcompressed to death, "HIStory" even more, and later stuff is simply unlistenable (including Special Editions of his earlier albums and "Thriller 25"). And I do remember the times when we were actually hunting for some tenth generation cassette copies of his albums here in the U.S.S.R.

MDLP Tracks transferred via Simple Burner have the same quality as those ripped to ATRAC3 in SonicStage with Normal (not High) quality. Whether High quality is actually better than Normal for ATRAC3 is still unknown (Normal LP2 is known to have a wider frequency response than High). Also, file conversions from WAV to ATRAC3 in SonicStage are only done in Normal, and not High quality. Another difference is that NetMD tracks transferred via Simple Burner may be uploaded back to the PC using the RH1 (SonicStage NetMD tracks are not uploadable).

Trouble is that simply deleting/movins/renaming files will lead to SonicStage errors caused by it not finding files registered in its database. So you have to manipulate tracks from its interface, for the database to be updated accordingly.

Most probably yes.

Or a cheap sound card with an optical in, that will easily demostrate that the signal transferred from a $50 CD player is bit-identical to the signal from a $500,000 set-up.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Optical outputs do differ. The simplest example is the optical output of a PC. It never outputs the actual signal read from the CD. Before being output, the signal passes through various circuitry, has its level changed, and probably gets resampled a couple of times. Remember that track marks for non-stop albums are always lost when recording via optical from a PC? That's because what is output is not the original CD signal. Other devices (PS3, Xbox, etc.) may also change the signal before output. Even some CD players actually do that. In any case, the presence of track mark information in the optical signal reliably indicates that a device outputs the original signal. Luckily for us, any MD recorder can be used to check that. And CD-TEXT is just an extension of the standard. Previously unused bits are employed to transfer text information from capable devices. This does not change the audio part of the signal at all.

It is not abandonware - you can still be prosecuted for distributing it. There are two versions available unofficially. One consists of three separate packages and text instructions on how to install them, and the other is just a big executable file doing everything automatically, and then displaying a text message in Russian asking you to restart your computer. The latter is preferred, since it is based on the full version, while the former is a "treated" demo. The program is really old, and installs an old version of PxEngine, which, in all probability, won't work at all, and won't allow other programs that use this engine to operate properly (this includes SonicStage). You'll need to update PxEngine again from http://kb.roxio.com/content/000070GN. A practical advice: always rip CDs to WAV (do not rip directly to MLP). This ensures that the resulting DVD-Audio is gapless.

The most importang thing to do before ripping is to set up the read offset. This may actually be done automatically using several genuine (or perfectly copied) CDs. The program connects to the Accurate Rip database, tries to find info on your drive there, and then tests the drive using the CDs to verify and set the actual offset value. Write offset is not used for creating images - it is for burning only. I'm using DigiOnAudio2. This program is no longer sold or supported, and when it did, it only existed in Japanese. I was fortunate enough to find a "non-official" copy, which includes the MLP plugin. The copy is also machine-translated into English (at least some parts of it).

MDs recorded in SP on modern machines (even portables) will definitely sound much better than the ones pressed when the format was introduced.

Don't forget that the only program that actually allows making bit-perfect copies of CDs is Exact Audio Copy (aka EAC). It is able to compensate read and write offsets of your drive, correctly detect gaps, indexes, etc. No other program does this. Also, it is fully aware of all possible CD flags, including pre-emphasis. And yes, it supports ripping to FLAC (single image or separate track files). But you need to configure the program properly to create absolutely bit-perfect copies. The configuration process is quite lengthy, and some parameters are not described in Help in an adequate way (e.g., write offset). As for me, I am using DVD-Audio to store my CD collections. Using the MLP compression provided by the standard, a single layer DVD blank can easily hold up to 9 full CDs in their native 44.1 kHz/16 bit format. Fully lossless. And perfectly playable in any DVD-Audio player.

Serious MD decks probably do the cut-off before A-D conversion. Seems quite natural.

Nope. Higher frequencies must be cut off before the signal is converted to digital. Otherwise the signal that doesn't conform to Nyquist requirements is further mangled by lossy compression. Even if you don't use any lossy compression, but apply a digital fequency filter to an already non-compliant signal, it will not improve it in any way. I.e., it will not make it compliant.

Did I ever mention that the original CDDA standard provides the means to increase the effective dynamic range of higher frequencies to almost 18 bits? This technology is long forgotten. It was called pre-emphasis. But any CDDA-compliant device must still support it. In ordinary music the amplitudes of various frequencies generally decrease progressively with the increase of the frequency value. This makes it possible to apply an analog filter (strictly defined by the standard) that increases amplitudes of higher frequencies, while still keeping them below the maximum allowed amplitude. After that, the signal is converted to digital. During playback, after digital-to-analog conversion, a reverse filter (again strictly defined by the standard) is applied, bringing higher frequencies back to their normal levels. This helps to minimize the effects of digital quantization noise, which mostly affects higher frequencies, effectively giving them 10 dB more in dynamic range. An example is Michael Jackson again, this time the first track of the first Japanese release of "Thriller". Red - pre-emphasized signal ripped directly from the CD. Green - de-emphasized signal. Actually, CDs with pre-emphasis are really rare, and those that exist, mostly come from Japan. When played on a computer by a non-pre-emphasis-aware software player, these CDs will have loud and ringing high frequencies, that are not very pleasant to listen to. Luckily, SonicStage is fully aware of pre-emphasis, and compensates for it when playing/ripping. The MD standard also provides a pre-emphasis flag bit on the disks. Whether it was actually used for production is not known. The requirements for presenting digital material to DADC state that pre-emphasized material is accepted, but:

This only means that the CD is incorrectly mastered. And this has nothing to do with 16 or more bits. To create a perfect CD (or any other digital media), the signal must be prepared according to the Nyquist theorem, which requires that the upper limit of its frequency response be strictly less than half the sampling frequency. Since the preparation takes place in the analog domain (before the analog-to-digital conversion), and no analog filter is able to cut frequencies steeply to zero, the entire 20 - 22.05 Khz area is used for frequency cut-off. That is, the filter starts decreasing frequencies from 20 kHz, and by 22.05 kHz they have zero level. Remember that even the most expensive CD players have their frequency response limited to 20 kHz. This filter is actually required by the standard (to make it possible to perfectly digitize the signal, and then perfectly restore it during playback). And CDs made in 1980s (and later, if we talk about Japanese issues), actually have their frequencies cut off after 20 kHz. Nowadays, noone cares about sound quality, so no filter is used, and we have CDs with ranges going all the way up to 22.05 kHz. These CDs do not comply with the requirements of the Nyquist theorem, thus noone guarantees that they play as they should. As an example of a properly mastered CD - look at the frequency response of the first track of the first Japanese release of Michael Jackson's "Bad" album:

Not really. Here 24-bit, 16-bit, and 1-bit are characteristics of absolutely different processes, and cannot be compared. The 16-bit stuff is clear - a sound sample taken every 1/44,100 of a second contains 16 bits of information per channel. During compression/decompression, a stream of these samples is processed according to a lossy algorithm, and 24-bit words are used for calculations, presumably giving more precision than 16-bit ones. Whether this actually affects sound quality is not quite clear, since the actual bitrate of compressed music is the same (292 kbit/s). What may actually be affected is the calculation speed. The 1-bit DAC concept is a bit more interesting, as it applies to various equipment. Imagine a good-old classic DAC, having digits at the input, and giving analog signal at the output. The input signal defines the level of the output signal 44,100 times per second. For 16 bits there are 2^16 = 65,536 possible levels. This means that you need 65,536 pairs of transistors and very precise resistors per channel to obtain the analog signal. And such DACs really did exist in early CD players, and still exist in relatively expensive equipment. For a "classic" 20-bit DAC the number of transistor/resistor pairs per channel increases to 1,048,576, making them prohibitively expensive for anything but the highest-level professional studio equipment. And "classic" 24-bit DACs with 16,777,216 transistor/resistor pairs simply do not exist because of current technology limitations. On the other hand, in a 1-bit "DAC" the signal is not actually converted to analog at all. The output signal still has only two levels: +MAX and -MAX, is output at a much higher frequency than 44,1 kHz (in the MHz range), but has the same instantaneous power as the analog signal. After passing through analog output filters (if any), amplifiers, speakers, and your ear canals, it creates an impression that you are listening to the musuc. And this technology is dirt cheap.

IIRC, all ATRAC processors since ~ 4.0 have 24-bit internal processing word lengths. But the decoded result is still 16-bit. And the output is 1-bit.

So that you still have your original files if something goes wrong during the process. After conversion, you may delete the files from SonicStage interface, though this is not a very pleasant process.

I'll see what I can do about it. But currently the entire topic may be summarized into a simple choice - either follow the instructions from the first post there, or install SonicStage 4.3.01 Ultimate from this post.

1. No, you don't need to run the Backup Tool to restore your keys. Just run the System Information Restore Tool (C:\Program Files\Sony\SonicStage\Ojbsir.exe). 2. Again, no. Although the Backup Tool was initially supposed have a function to backup/restore only the keys - you can still see this, if you open OjbSirRes.dll using a resource editor. 3. Well... it restores information. The music files are restored from the folder they were backed up to, and the keys are also restored from the backup folder, but the server is used in some way during the process. P.S. The Restore Tool on my machine is once again unable to connect to the server. Probably as a result of upgrading to 4.3.02. UPDATE: Restoring version 4.3.01 did not help. Is the server down again?