Recording from a mic in Hi-MD vs. "old MD"

[digs5446]

Howdy,

I have been a long-time MD user and my primary interest is recording live music, dictations/audio journals, and environmental field rec's (thunderstorms, cars driving by, crickets etc). I still use an "old-school" Sharp unit (md-mt877, ATRAC v.6 i think) and record in 292 kb "SP" mode.

My question is: is it worth it for me to upgrde to Hi-MD based on the ability to record in Linear PCM 1.4 Mkbps? I mean, can you really hear an audible difference in a microphone recording betwen my old unit and the new Hi-MD units? I'm a bit of an audiophile and I love the audio quality of MD live recordings...if the PCM recordings are noticeable better, I might consider upgrading. Otherwise, my trusty unit has treated me fine and I don't want to shell out another $200...

[LupinIV]

Howdy,

I'm a bit of an audiophile and I love the audio quality of MD live recordings...if the PCM recordings are noticeable better, I might consider upgrading. 

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Though good, MD sp is still lossy. Depending on the application of your recordings, lossless PCM might serve you way better.

Also, what kind of microphone are you using? If you're using a $0.50 micro then might as well forget about quality. But if you are using a $500.0 audiophile micro then you will definetly ear the difference.

Again, it's all UP TO YOUR EAR AND APPLICATION

Cheers

[digs5446]

I use a Sony ECM-907 for louder live music and the Sound Professionals binaural omnis for environmental field recordings. I'm thinking it would be pretty tough to hear a difference between uncompressed PCM 1411 kbps and the "classic" SP 292 kbps. I know it sounds like a big difference on paper...I was just wondering if anyone had done side by side comparisons with their mic recordings.

[greenmachine]

Not with my own mic recordings, but with prerecorded music - i couldn't hear a difference with Sony's Atrac Type R - it had been designed for transparency, even a lot of audiophiles failed to abx it. Quality should be very close to uncompressed. I don't know about Sharp's Atrac though. How do you transfer your recordings? The analog method could lower the quality additionally depending on the quality of your equipment.

[MichaelBeardy]

The cool thing with recording in PCM using HiMD, though, is that you can upload microphone recordings to a PC, save as a WAV file and then burn onto a CD which you can play on a top-end CD player, so you can take advantage of high spec error-correction, DA converters, power supplies. And you can produce as many CDs as you want.

I've started doing this with recordings of me playing my mandolins - just wish my playing was as good as the recording quality...

Peace,

Michael

[tommypeters]

...or if you have a DVD-Audio player you could store a lot more of those 16/44,1 on one DVD using this free program:

http://dvd-audio.sourceforge.net/

(could of course also be used for 24-bit recordings)

[greenmachine]

You can perform exactly the same procedures with non-Hi-MD machines as soon as the material is 'uploaded' to your computer with the only difference of using a (de-)compressed source.

[LupinIV]

I remember reading some forum discussions about the use of lossy format for environmental recordings (birds, wind, etc). On a theoretical point of view you are NOT recording everything when you use SP, just what your ears "are able" to ear during a music playback.

MD were designed to play and record music. If you want to record environmental sounds, you should use PCM which preserves the highest information. Once back to the lab you can observe the difference both with a oscilloscope and "by ear".

The fact that you believe that you do not ear a difference, it doesn't mean that there isn't.

These are my $0.02: If you are a professional, you should use PCM. Then, you can always compress later. Remember the GIGO rule: Garbage in - Garbage out.

Cheers

Edited August 8, 2005 by LupinIV

[greenmachine]

This is exactly the job of lossy codecs - to discard 'irrelevant' information. As long as you don't hear it, what's the use of any measurement? Your ears are the one and only judge in the end.

[LupinIV]

This is exactly the job of lossy codecs - to discard 'irrelevant' information. As long as you don't hear it, what's the use of any measurement? Your ears are the one and only judge in the end.

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Greenmachine,

the point is that when you record environmental sounds, you might want to preserve all possible details so you can analyze it later.

Birds, for example, modulate sound differently than us and if you record PCM, you might analyze the recording and find portion of the spectrum tha you cannot direcly perceive. While this is not relevant with music (though some audiophiles may argue it is), it is relevant for scientific recordings.

So the whole point is: if you care about saving this extra info, YES you need PCM, if you don't care, then this thread is meaningless.

Digs5446 said: "...and environmental field rec's (thunderstorms, cars driving by, crickets etc..."

And I replyed: "it depends on your application"

Digs5446 also asked: "...a bit of an audiophile and I love the audio quality of MD live recordings...if the PCM recordings are noticeable better, I might consider upgrading ..."

And I say: "Yes there is a difference in term of quality and information" if this info is not relevant for Digs5446, then there is no need for PCM.

Also, read the many articles and discussions about it.

Fer examples: "...For nature sound recording, a DAT machine likely is preferable over a mini-disc machine, because DAT recording loses, or "drops," less sound information than does mini-disc recording..."

http://www.naturesounds.org/questionbird.html

Good luck

[greenmachine]

I see, you're talking about analysing waveforms, therefor PCM is the only way to go. But i thought the original question was if you can hear an audible difference...

[digs5446]

But i thought the original question was if you can hear an audible difference...

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You are correct greenmachine, that was the main question I had. I realize what the technical advantages of Hi-MD are, but I was mainly concerned with "actual", real-world differences. I have a pretty keen ear and cannot tell a difference audibly between an uncompressed music CD and it's 292 kbps ATRAC offspring. I just wasn't sure about the whole microphone/analog thing.

I should have mentioned before that another HUGE reason I am hesitant to go Hi-MD is that I cannot stand the fact that Sony units don't allow you to manually adjust recording levels on the fly. Or is this no longer the case? Pray tell!

I've always loved Sharp MD products...much more flexible in my opinion. I refuse to use AGC, and the inability to adjust on the fly would aggravate me to no end.

Edited August 8, 2005 by digs5446

[greenmachine]

It's no longer the case.

[digs5446]

It's no longer the case. 

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Holy moly, there is good in this world. Thank you. I can't believe out of all the reviews and FAQ's I've read about Hi-MD, as well as minidisco.com's product pages, I've never seen that fact pointed out. Seems like it would be pretty huge news...it's always been the single biggest drawback of Sony's units in my mind, and now it's been cured!

[Sparky191]

It's no longer the case. 

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Does this mean it is the case on the 1st gen but not the 2nd gen?

[KJ_Palmer]

That's old history. The ability to adjust recording levels on the fly has actually been with all Sony MD (and Hi-MD) recorders since the MZ-R909 ...

[Roamer]

No, there is actually some time that Sony MDs can be set to manual recording. This includes all HiMD (with recording capabilities) and newer NetMD units. Still, you have to enter the menu in pause mode and select Manual in the Recording option ... Sony could make this easier... But it's there, and back to subject, HiMD let's you record in PCM if you want, have bigger capacity and you can upload records afterwards, enough improvements worth the upgrade IMO.

Edit : KJ Palmer has been quicker ...

Edited August 9, 2005 by Roamer

[Christopher]

You did make an important point, Roamer. You still must go into the menu and adjust it accordingly, but that really isn't too cumbersome of a process once you get it down.

[Roamer]

If you're prepared in advance, it's ok, but if you want to start immediatly, that's still a few seconds lost fiddling with the menu. It shouldn't be that difficult to store the prefered option (auto/manual) or the last one used (certainly easier that making a larger HiMD format for instance). And if Sony want to replace DAT and target semi-pro/pro users, they should think about this kind of feature for the next generation HiMD. Just my 0.02 $ ...

[A440]

I believe Sony considers its users utterly stupid. It's not as if people haven't been asking for Manual as a possible default setting for every generation of MD.

Sony must be afraid that if you could make Manual the default, or have the recorder start in its previous state of Manual or AGC, that it would get complaints that the recorder wasn't working properly: too low, too high, whatever. Because of course we're too stupid to realize that we had the recorder on Manual.

But then we're supposed to be smart enough to deal with an entirely non-intuitive program like SonicStage. And we're supposed to be such dedicated hackers that Sony spent more brains on encryption than on enabling simple things like uploading a group as a group. Go figure.

Sony is actually short for: SOftware? No waY!

[Snuffy]

for live recording, I think Hi-MD, PCM recording is much better than an old SP mode. I've tried both ways and PCM recording made me happy specially, if you are planing to record hard rock type of music, you can see the difference between PCM and SP.

[tekdroid]

So the whole point is: if you care about saving this extra info, YES you need PCM, if you don't care, then this thread is meaningless.

There is also the (unproven) theories that having dynamically-thrown-out information (essentially doing the filtering our brains do before it reaches our ears) has health effects on hearing other things in the human body, which I happen to be a firm believer in. Too much lossy music (Dolby AC-3, ATRAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, etc) will have health effects we don't know about just yet.

Regardless, I think the tonal information present in our recordings (both "heard" and "unnoticed") shouldn't be butchered for the sake of some limited storage space constraints, I reckon. I just can't accept that it needs to. There are alternatives.

[lwsmit02]

There is also the (unproven) theories that having dynamically-thrown-out information (essentially doing the filtering our brains do before it reaches our ears) has health effects on hearing other things in the human body, which I happen to be a firm believer in. Too much lossy music (Dolby AC-3, ATRAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, etc) will have health effects we don't know about just yet.

Regardless, I think the tonal information present in our recordings (both "heard" and "unnoticed") shouldn't be butchered for the sake of some limited storage space constraints, I reckon. I just can't accept that it needs to. There are alternatives.

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i'd be interested in reading some of these theories, where can i find some published?

[tekdroid]

i'd be interested in reading some of these theories, where can i find some published?

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http://users.informatik.haw-hamburg.de/~wi...r/MP3-risk.html

Some discussion here. I stress, all unproven. But then again things like this take ages to prove.

I have been interested in the effects of sound ever since finding out that CDs came out with a harsh cut-off at 20KHz years ago. Even though we cannot hear above these frequencies we can 'feel' them and they aid in 'relaxing' the brain. Pioneer even came out with Legato Link conversion in their CD players in order to recreate what wasn't encoded (with many asking how can they do that if it wasn't encoded to start with...). But yeh, they attempted it.

Of course, data-reduction like it's being used today almost everywhere on almost every device (and broadcast standards) is far more complex than simply not encoding beyond a certain frequency. I just think the human ear has evolved over millions of years on natural sounds and flooding it with data-reduced sounds (not simply a sharp cut-off of some frequencies) is very bad.

Same can be said for many other things in modern society that's contributing to modern problems (air, artificial lighting, traffic noise, etc). I don't view it as any different. In fact, I view it as worse because data-reduced music has no physical basis in nature. The way the sounds reach us is continuously optimised for space-savings and the brain's perception only. If we 'saw' the actual sound reaching our ears, a completely different picture would emerge.

Hate to know what damage is being done to the ear itself from the 'unnatural' information hitting it. Just because our brains perceive it to be 'identical' it doesn't mean damage is not being done. Again, a theory.. no concrete stuff. I'd imagine it would be years before any conclusive evidence comes out, let alone being commonly accepted as true by Average Joe (much like smoking, mobile phones, etc).

There's a LOT of important non-perceived data (masked, etc) not hitting our ears that's important for the proper functioning of the ears, is the theory, basically.

I try to minimise the amount of lossy stuff I expose myself to. I love lossless codecs like FLAC, for instance.

*Dreaming*

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If only Sony would wake up and realise this would make their little 1GB machines doubly useful with no absolutely no quality loss and the admiration of many who already use this format to archive their recordings (average 12 albums per DVD).

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*Wakes from dream*