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Newbie Question...

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lordnordeth

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While I've owned an MD in one form or another for quite some time now (my first was my F40 playback only portable back in 99), I've only recently started exploring the capabilities other than "basic usage".

I've recently started doing a lot of recording in SP, and got to wondering. I know that the only way really to copy the stuff done in SP is an analogue recording, and here's what I was wondering. My F40 still works like a dream, considering it has a 15mW output (as opposed to 5mW on any other unit I own) on the headphone port, would I get a better quality recording going from the F40 as my playback unit to Line In on my PC, or another MD recorder, or would it not make an appreciable difference?

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The most important factor in my opinion is to make sure you have a good impedance match between the output of your F40 and the input of the recording device. In the normal headphone output mode, it is probably in the range of 30 - 300 ohms with 250 millivolts peak to peak signal level, this will not give you a good sound when driving a line level input which expects to have 10,000 - 20,000 ohms at 1 volt peak to peak.

Even cranking the volume of the F40 way up will still produce less than optimal results. If the F40 has the ability to set its output to a line level out (my R50 has a dedicated line out port) you can set that to try to get the best impedance match possible. I have several units which have a setting in the menu to toggle the headphone jack between line level and headphone level output but most of them are newer than the F40.

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Right. I have lived in a world of digital output for so long I forgot the headphone output is even something I would mess with.

If the Sony MZ-F40 is anything to go by (the Aiwa isn't listed in the equipment browser), then there's no way to switch it to line out.

The unit is probably old enough to do a hardware mod for digital out, though.

If you want good fidelity and don't mind x1 uploading speed, by far the best is to get a deck that already has optical out, along with a USB sound card with optical in.

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You'd better speak to Avrin about bit-perfect copies. With optical that's not really true. But you will come very close if you don't scale the output (except by powers of 2). Never been an issue for me since I was always wanting to use MD to get from analogue into digital, and would be editing the result of the upload.

Certainly the biggest thing with most of this compressed stuff is leaving the bit patterns alone. If you got an LP2 recording, leave it as an LP2 recording, for example.

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