Recording vinyl on the mzm-200

[pathguy]

Hi all!

New to this forum, and really enjoying learning about one of my favorite formats!

As my ipod recently bit the dust (and I've consequently lost a bunch of music I can never get back), I am determined to get back to physical media--and I have quite a few MD's, plus a bunch of sealed blanks. I have an old MZ-R700 (that I bought refurbished from crutchfield back in 2001) that still works, but I'd really like to have something new. From what I see, the MZM-200 is the only portable unit here in the U.S. My question for the group is: does anyone have experience recording vinyl on the MZM? This may be a dumb question, but is it possible to record in PCM via analog input? If not, in terms of pure quality (as opposed to quantity), what bitrate combination would you use?

Thanks all!

[KJ_Palmer]

You can indeed record to PCM on the MZM-200. Use a line-level output from your turntable (if it has one) or your amp. You need to experiment a bit to get the best manual rec level on the recorder. If you have enough discs, it's probably best go with PCM. 256kbps HiSP would also give good results, as would SP (on 80/74 min discs), but you'll probably not want to lose too much quality.

Besides, you'll almost certainly want to edit and clean up the results on your computer, so recording to PCM will allow you upload and export to Wav format and a suitable editor without any (further) loss.

If you can use Sonicstage, you can import the cleaned wav files to the SS Library, export them to an MD in whichever bitrate suits you, and keep the wav files for archiving. If you have a 64 bit Windows 7 machine you're a bit stuck at the moment with Sonicstage, but there are other ways round this, but otherwise I still find SS a useful too for creating MDs.

[pathguy]

You can indeed record to PCM on the MZM-200. Use a line-level output from your turntable (if it has one) or your amp. You need to experiment a bit to get the best manual rec level on the recorder. If you have enough discs, it's probably best go with PCM. 256kbps HiSP would also give good results, as would SP (on 80/74 min discs), but you'll probably not want to lose too much quality.

Besides, you'll almost certainly want to edit and clean up the results on your computer, so recording to PCM will allow you upload and export to Wav format and a suitable editor without any (further) loss.

If you can use Sonicstage, you can import the cleaned wav files to the SS Library, export them to an MD in whichever bitrate suits you, and keep the wav files for archiving. If you have a 64 bit Windows 7 machine you're a bit stuck at the moment with Sonicstage, but there are other ways round this, but otherwise I still find SS a useful too for creating MDs.

Thanks, Barock1 for the reply!

I use a Mac, and I've been reading about some issues with the software. Guess I'll just have to play with it and see what works.

[KJ_Palmer]

You're welcome. Not sure how well/badly it works with the Mac, but there were (are?) problems enough with Windows versions, until we finally reached a reliable release for 32 bit installations. Let us know how you get on with it!

[Hungerdunger]

If you have a 64 bit Windows 7 machine you're a bit stuck at the moment with Sonicstage

Not necessarily. I bought a new PC in October running W7Pro 64 bit, and for the first few weeks SonicStage ran faultlessly. It has now developed a problem which I described here, but fortunately with the Pro and ultimate editions you can install and run XP as a virtual machine, so I'm up and running again with that and although I haven't tried it yet should also be able to run Simple Burner.

[pathguy]

So, while waiting for Santa to *hopefully* put an MZ-M200 under my tree, I recently recorded some vinyl with my trusty MZ-R700 in SP via the analog input. Sooooooo warm and full. I'm kind of glad my i**d died.

Another interesting observation (that I'm sure others are all too familar with): I listened to some CD's I recorded via the optical out on my CD player to MD in LP2 mode (I used this a lot back in the day). I honestly love the sound.

I hope Sony will at least keep making ONE MD unit for awhile.

[THIS SUCKS]

lp2 does not sound good compared to the original cd or atrac sp....

[sfbp]

lp2 does not sound good compared to the original cd or atrac sp....

Everything depends on how it was mastered.....

[NickyJay]

I doubt Hi-SP at 256 is better than SP at 292. There was some frequency analysis stuff which confirmed it a while back, but I think more to the point the SP format uses the full Dolby stereo field while Atrac3plus is joint stereo.

[sfbp]

the SP format uses the full Dolby stereo field while Atrac3plus is joint stereo.

Where's your reference for that? It's the first I've heard of it, and I would be significantly surprised to see confirmation (I've been wrong many times about many things in my life). The LP4 is the only one that I am aware of that uses Joint Stereo and its behaviour under poor signal conditions is quite characteristic - it will audibly drop to mono, which I have never ever heard on any other ATRAC version. I can't really speak for Hi-LP as I haven't used it much.

[pathguy]

Everything depends on how it was mastered.....

Yeah, I agree. I tried to record vinyl using LP2, but couldn't really listen to it (I find SP to be much better, and I'm looking forward to trying PCM). However, with a decent CD via optical in, LP2 really isn't all that bad (to my ears). I put a bunch of Christmas music on 2 MD's using LP2, and they more than suffice for me.

[sfbp]

Here's the (my) theory. If you start with with any sort of background noise (FM, recording hiss, turntable rumble), it takes a lot more bits to encode than a nice quiet signal from digital (internet or ??) radio, or from CD. ATRAC encodes noise-free sounds very well indeed.

I made a bit of a thing of this this year, trying to convince myself why some things sounded great at LP4 and others did not, whereas LP2 was basically good enough for most sources. By "good enough" I mean that a musician wanting to hear <whatever> detail can hear it, without distortion (at least that wasn't in the original playback source). I iterated over a wide range of combinations before realising that the context was more important than the content.

Add to this that the MD decks (much less convinced about the portables) have some nice circuitry that filter (digitally) the signal in all the right places after A->D conversion on their analogue inputs, and one starts to appreciate the "magic" of MD. Actually it's just hard work and good solid engineering by Sony.

I used SP from the beginning for vinyl and had very good luck making CD's with it. Took me a while to realise that recording direct to LP2 and LP4 work well too - but only if the source is clean. LP2 copes better than LP4, of course.

One of the crucial observations by me and others was that SPEECH came out with horrible sibilants from certain sources. Aha, thinks I - must be something in the encoding itself or trying to encode something which basically isn't there. High frequencies presumably. Cut 'em out, and away to the races.

(Oh yes there's one more thing - if you rip a CD to WAV using a fast ripper like the one in SonicStage, it sounds fine UNTIL you try to compress it. Then all hell breaks loose, and most people myself included, decide that LP modes are not for them. Turns out the ripped WAV file has faults which don't matter at uncompressed playback speeds).

[NickyJay]

Where's your reference for that? It's the first I've heard of it, and I would be significantly surprised to see confirmation (I've been wrong many times about many things in my life). The LP4 is the only one that I am aware of that uses Joint Stereo and its behaviour under poor signal conditions is quite characteristic - it will audibly drop to mono, which I have never ever heard on any other ATRAC version. I can't really speak for Hi-LP as I haven't used it much.

Looks like you are right about LP4 being joint stereo. SP allows for full stereo independent channels - I wonder if the same is true for Atrac3plus? The information is very hard to get on the codec as it is proprietary.

http://en.wikipedia....Acoustic_Coding

[NickyJay]

Try cymbals, trumpet & that kind of sound from an acoustic instrument & you'll hear artefacts with SP. Hi-SP doesn't have them. But since I upgraded my speakers, & have been auditioning more audiophile headphones, I'm no longer going to use lossy anyhow, that's for sure; at least CD quality has more depth & soundstage, a fuller, richer sound.

Hi-SP does indeed beat SP for portable use.

However I believe that SP beats Hi-SP (and can even approach PCM) due to the 24 bit D/A converters. The trick is to use the Sony MDS-JB930 which is one of the best MD decks ever made. The post below has more information on how to achieve it -

"Also, there is a good trick you can do with a 930. say you connect it to a cd player with a coaxial cable. You connect one end of the cable into the cd player and the other into a digital resolution converter (I think Audio Alchemy had some and they can be found cheap online) that converts 16bit into 24bit resolution. Then you connect the output of the converter into the coaxial input on the 930. You get 24bit all the way without the signal ever becoming analog during recording. Then you can use an external d/a converter alos. Using the resolution converter is the only better thing than analog converter

as the results don't depend on cd player+s analog stage, only it's transport is used."

http://www.tapeheads.net/archive/index.php/t-550.html