Sound comparison between Hi-MD and MDLP2

[sknight]

I normally record in MDLP2 on my mzr 700 and I have a HI-MD 800 coming in tomorrow. I was wondering what setting is comparable in sound quality to MDLP2. I am going to reformat my old discs to the higher mode, but once this is done, I can only record in HI MD mode on them, correct?

Apologies, but the Hi-MD stuff is pretty confusing at first and the Sony site isn't much of a help, with sometimes absent specs.

[lacobo]

As far as I know the MD Simple Burner 2.0 can only record in Hi-MD mode (256 / 64 / 48). SonicStage 2.2 can record in Hi-MD but also in LP2 and LP4 mode on a formatted disc.

[sknight]

Ah, more confusion now. I was thinking I could make direct transfers from the optical output on my cd player and use the Hi MD modes to compress it. I really need to get up to speed fast on this because I'm obviously not truly understanding how HiMD works in conjunction with the software.

Where are the best resources to read up?

[lacobo]

Sure you can do so, but with Simple Burner you can do this at high speeds. Although many people are sure that the hardware of the MD is better capable of a quality compression then your PC.

Good resources? Try this site and forum. Tons of information! But also using the gear helps you to understand it more. So start using your Hi-MD gear and test things out.

[KJ_Palmer]

You can record directly (optically) to a Hi-MD recorder in LP2 mode if you like, as well as the other older formats (SP and LP4 and mono (?)). You can also record directly to the newer Hi-MD formats (Hi-LP/SP and PCM :smile:.

If you need any other info, you can try this Hi-MD FAQ, or try a search in the Hi-MD forum here. Or just ask, if you have specific questions...

[Qwakrz]

Ok, ill try and simplify things a bit

Hi-MD Native record modes (Using Line / Optical in etc)

Hi-MD formatted disc gives PCM, Hi-SP & Hi-LP

Standard MD Disc gives SP, LP2 & LP4

Hi-MD Using Sonic Stage (V2.1 or above)

Hi-MD disc gives PCM, Hi-SP, LP2 (2 flavours), Hi-LP(64k), LP4, Hi-LP(48k)

MD disc gives SP (fake as LP2 transcode), LP2, LP4

Hi-MD using Simple Burner

Hi-MD disc gives Hi-SP, Hi-LP(64) (Mine also gives me Hi-LP(48) but not mentioned in specs)

MD Disc gives LP2, LP4

Hope that clears things up

Basically if you have all your songs in sonic stage then re-format the disc & use your LP2 tracks, if not then you will need to transcode to the Hi-MD format you like

[skyther]

^ Thank you! A medal for you for your first sticky. :happy:

http://forums.minidisc.org/viewtopic.php?t...5c259b6f0ab7194

[dex Otaku]

Woohoo!

[sknight]

I'm also a bit confused about the software being used. Some people are using software that's not the one included? There are limitations to the bundled stuff?

[Jimmix]

I've always wondered how does Hi-LP@64 sound when using the optical/analog in compared to SonicStage.

Hasve any of you guys done the test already?

[dex Otaku]

I've always wondered how does Hi-LP@64 sound when using the optical/analog in compared to SonicStage.

Have any of you guys done the test already?

I've used it experimentally to record monaurally-broadcast radio stations.

For limited-bandwidth monaural recordings HiLP is actually decent. I can't imagine what I'd ever actually do with any [HiLP recordings] since their quality is too low to be editable, but if all you want is to record CBC or NPR or something, it works great.

Recording on the units themselves [this was by analogue line-in] gives significantly higher-quality results than encoding done by SonicStage.

sknight:

Some people are still using older versions of SonicStage, some [netMD users] are still using what came -before- SonicStage. Since none of them are in any way reliable, stable, or for that matter, truly usable, I take the updates as soon as they're released in the hopes that some improvements have been made over the previous release.