ATRAC3 Lossless to SP via Optical

[1kyle]

The Atrac3 Lossless format plays directly on the computer via SS 3.4 and produces an Optical Out signal with a decent sound card in the computer.

This of course can be connected to the Optical In on legacy units to ensure you get decent SP quality playback on your legacy gear (even if you have to do it realtime).

The advantage here is that you can make as many MD's as you like even if you haven't got the CD anymore and you've got all your music stored in lossless format which can be converted to WAV if ATRAC ever disappears.

It seems to work better than using the 2X dubbing you get on some shelf / bookshelf units for transferring directly CD's ===> MD's in SP mode.

Listening again to some SP mode stuff it definitely sounds better than LP2 (albeit not by much --and in a car LP2 is fine).

I'm not always at the computer so it's nice to be able to pop a disk into units I have around the house.

Incidentally SP playback on the RH10 is pretty good too.

Cheers

-K

[atheodo]

SS 4 will let you burn CDs using the lossless base, so no need for real time recording. The only platform that we are still stuck with real recording is MacOSX and Unix/Linux; hopefully Sony will be addressing the Mac community pretty soon.