kino170878

I would record with the sony and play back on the sharp. Both sharp and sony employ their own proprietory atrac technologies for recording, but sony as the industry leader probably has the better one. I have always wondered about the sharp atrac though, but I have read reports that discs recorded on the sharp sometimes don't play back on other non-sharp players.

There is a company in the UK who can do this, even for NetMD discs I believe. Don't know how much they will charge though http://www.esdl.co.uk/index.htm Edit - just realized you are using an old version of sonicstage that may have had that dreaded 3 check in and out limit nonsense. Upgrade immediately.

You can't. You need to buy a Hi-MD portable by Sony. With 1gb discs, you can get up to 8 hours of cd quality on one disc.

Perhaps somebody could point him to this forum?

It is inevitable that the Hi-MD medium will be scrapped. The irony of it is that old MD (discs and equipment) will likely stay in production. This should not really be much of a concern to dedicated followers though, who as we speak are probably stocking up on supplies. Hopefully the community here will continue to support each other. Edit - I would almost kill to get one of the last M200s.....

Sounds like you have an older MD, not Hi-MD recorder there. You're gonna have to spend $$$ on an MZ-RH1 which can transfer the old recordings using sonicstage software.

It seems to suggest that the RH710 info is missing. Mine certainly doesn't sound very loud so I would suspect it is volume capped. Maybe I can dig up the manual and confirm. Edit - apparently a few people also had a Rh710 and the volume hack worked. But as there are huge risks involved I will think hard before I try this.

I would like to know the answer to this as well since I have the Rh-710. I remember a thread a while back which allowed SP recording on the RH-10, which also supposedly worked on the rest of the RH line. It scares me going into service mode in any case, maybe it's best just to leave it.

Sonicstage.....If veterans like yourself are even having problems with it, what chance have the rest of us got.....

I doubt very much this is possible. Sony atrac format is proprietory, has been for years. I think hi-md players can play back mp3, but there currently is no convenient way to copy atrac to mp3 except for real time recording.

My RH-710 makes all sorts of noises when accessing a disk. As long as it works I wouldn't worry.

Got a nice deal on a Aiwa XR-FD55 minidisc bookshelf system, with only one problem....when I complete one recording using the hi-speed 4x copying mode it says wait 70 minutes until the next time I can record! What the hell?? Why implement a feature and then attempt to discourage you from using it? Does anybody know if there is a way to access the service mode and reset the system so that I can continuously record at hi-speed (which is really why I got this sytem anyway, although it looks great I have to say)

I think that in about 5 years they will start to give us some car systems and home decks. Reason is, when Hi-MD comes out in that fashion, old MD will be obsolete. So they are waiting until the old MD market has well and truly dried up and have recouped enough by way of costs. Then they will introduce the new Hi-MD units.

I found this reply useful in determining my purchase..... Get yourself a quality turntable with a built-in A/D convertor and a S/PDIF output. This is a semi-pro digital audio format and is less prone to interrupted or "glitchy" data than USB. S/PDIF has its own clock and the streaming is very smooth. USB audio is prone to phase jitter and other ickyness. My personal choice of turntables is the Stanton ST-100, a heavy duty DJ-quality unit with a good pitch control, 3 speeds, and the all-important S/PDIF output. There are plenty of others out there from Denon, Numark, etc... with similar features. Just make sure you get a turntable with a long (should extend past the spindle) S-shaped tonearm. The models with little straight tonearms (used by scratch DJs) will tear up your records very quickly because the tonearm geometry is all wrong. The turntable should also be fully adjustable, with settings for tracking weight, tonearm height, anti-skate, cantilever, etc... Belt drive or direct? The Stanton is direct-drive, and will result in a little more rumble (vibration) in the final recording than a belt-drive unit. If you're a stickler for quiet, find a belt-drive model. I use direct-drive tables because they're practically indestructible and I use mine a LOT. I just slap a high-pass filter with a sharp roll-off around 30Hz, on the tracks to remove the subsonic junk. In addition to the turntable setup, you'll need an audio card which can handle S/PDIF inputs. I have a Creative Extigy. There are literally hundreds of options here, from $120 external USB boxes like mine to sky's-the-limit studio-grade PCI cards and firewire interfaces. You'll also need some kind of audio editing software. My choice is SONAR, but again, dozens of possibilities here. You'll have to edit your tracks since the recording from the record will be one long file, and I assume you'll want to be able to skip through the tracks like a "real" CD. So, you'll have to chop them up into a separated track for each song. I don't do much fancy processing on my tracks. I cut them up, remove the spaces from the beginning and end of each song, and then add very short, steep fade-ins and fade-outs. That way there is actual silence between songs instead of snap-crackle-pop. I apply a little EQ, mostly high-pass to remove subsonic garbage and sometimes a notch at 60Hz if there's AC hum in the original recording. If a record sounds bad I'll mess around with the frequency response to taste. I don't usually do any noise removal, but it's always an option if you have the software for it. Again, there are literally thousands of digital audio processing and mastering plug-ins out there. This part is like seasoning stew - to each his own. I also occasionally apply a little gentle compression to make a track warmer and fuller. Then, all that's left to do is normalize the tracks and export them. Normalization locates the "loudest" sample (highest voltage) in the track and brings it up to 0dB, and brings up all the other samples by the same amount. If you do this to all the tracks, they will be consistently loud and "CD-like". Then export them to a folder and burn them to CD. Stay organized here - export them with file names including track number and song name, and put each album in its own subfolder. Oh, yes - make sure you clean your records VERY well before recording. The classic Discwasher D-4 system is still the best. And make sure that the recording level NEVER peaks about 0dB during the digitizing process. If it does, do the track over. This is another reason I use S/PDIF outputs - they cannot peak over 0dB since they're already digital. If you're digitizing an analog signal, you have to watch the levels like a hawk and may need to use a limiter if the song has a lot of dynamic (volume) changes.

MD decks are going for high prices on ebay now so you are unlikely to find anyone who will give you one for cheap.

Probably true, but only so far. I think if you keep going the analogue route the sound eventually degrades unless you have a studio quality setup. I would use digital just for convenience, automatic track marks and no clipping above 0db, etc. But the SCMS is so annoying, wish I could hunt down one of those SCMS strippers. For sound, the first generation copy might sound best in analogue - has anyone tested this?

As long as MD works, people will still find uses for it. The rest of the world may get drawn into new technologies, and the latest 'in-thing', but I like older more down to earth products that do their job just fine. Of course no format is perfect though so maybe find what works best for you.

I guess I should have made it clearer. What I really wish for is that we had the ability to transfer audio but to keep the raw atrac data intact somehow. So that, we could have a base codec with all the necessary information and convert as we wished, even from different bit rates and across different codecs. I don't want to lose bits of data through the transfer (as it currently operates) from SP to Hi-SP and back and forth. That is why I hope someone can come up with a suitable procedure one day.

....and back again if need be. There is a lot of legacy hi-fi gear out there, and lots of hi-md portables. I plan to use legacy sp for my home listening and hi-md for on the move listening.

I see. This is what I was fearing. Of couse we should be grateful that sony finally allowed the transfers but if only they could go the extra yard. I would have thought that the ability to convert from SP to Hi-SP and back again would increase their profit margins substantially.

I have a bunch of old minidiscs in SP format and I am looking at getting the RH-1 for the purpose of uploading to the new Hi-SP format. However, will the uploads be converted straight to Hi-SP, or will they be re-recorded again in Hi-SP? If it is the former, then I will not experience that much quality loss, but if it is the latter, then I am in effect doing a lossy recording of a lossy recording - which does not sound too good!

Can anyone please tell me what version ATRAC the Technics SJ-HD501 uses? Is it type R or 4.5? I can't seem to find information on this, thanks for any help.

Will this SP trick work with my RH-710 or is it only for the RH-10?

Let's suppose I had my laptop with an audio interface that had spdif optical or coaxial digital connectors. Suppose also that I had the RH-1 with the ability to upload either hi-sp or old sp. My question is, can I get Sonicstage to play my RH-1, via communication through usb cable, and while monitoring through my laptop audio interface at the same time send the optical out signal to another recorder? In other words I record what I play thereby preserving a true digital signal. Is it possible? Thanks.

What you are saying is, that the highest quality possible, besides having pcm (WAV) recording, is recording in Hi-SP at 256kps via the optical connection in real-time? Is this statement correct? This would then imply, logically, that there would be little if any point in uploading the pcm file, downconverting to 352kps, and finally transferring the file to the minidisc player with our lovely sonicstage software.... If so, I am recording real-time from now on.