QS940 vs QS980

[Hudson]

I live in the Uk and am about to buy a full sized minidisk recorder, i have been looking at the 980 but because i will never record in LP or anything else, then do i really need the ATRAC Type S chip ? I only ever record in SP for sound quality reasons, i will not ever download music from the PC/Net so will the 940 give me the same quality as the 980 ?

Also just as an extra, would the portable Sony MZ-RH1 Hi-MD player recorder just as good a discs as the full sized machines ? Not in PCM but in SP ?

Thanks

[sfbp]

i will never record in LP or anything else, then do i really need the ATRAC Type S chip ?

"never" is a very long time.

Let's get something straight. ALL digital sound is compressed (yes even 1411 Khz LPCM), it's a question of what formats work for what application.

Sony did some incredible ground-breaking stuff, first with SP then with MDLP, paving the way for some later codes such as AAC and WMA, no doubt.

Here's a philosophical question: do you *need* SP for a data stream that has been transmitted/mastered/recorded at MDLP or equivalent? And this is where I take issue with you "never" using the Net. Soon just about ALL sound will be digital. Why ship around 5x to 20x as much data if the result to the ears is equivalent? The major reason for using the highest data rate possible is simply to have the most data for the purposes of editing. For example if you need to magnify a quiet section, it will scale up much better if there were more data points to work with in the original.

Once a digital source has been properly edited and mastered, Sony shows us just how much data we really *need* for things to sound good... their term "psychoacoustic".

Lots of things recorded in LP2 (or, don't kick me too hard, LP4) can sound perfectly acceptable. Especially with the Type-S. But the part that really does the juice in the recording is the same in 940 and 980, namely the "Type-R" bit reallocation that is done during recording. This takes place at all data rates despite what you may have read. The big difference is that conversion (using PC) TO LP2 or LP4 is markedly inferior to real-time recording at these data rates.

The other problem with SP is that it has never been a "supported" codec, probably due to agreements between Sony and Dolby. However this may have changed forever in the next release of ffmpeg which is able to play SP.

I think there are some other reasons for liking the JB940 (ability to export the I2C bus as "PCLINK" which makes the unit able to talk to other Sony devices via M-Crew; and variable word length - some say that this feature is more trouble than it's worth though), but I am very happy with my 980. Both very solid decks. Don't buy the 980 for its NetMD feature - it's rather slow and not competitive with the later portables (eg RH1) which can download at screaming speeds.

Final comment about data rates: the biggest single thing that all this sound equipment does is record noise. If you have a sound source with no noise in it, there are lots more bits available to record what you want to hear instead. Sony's magic on the decks seems to be getting rid of that noise before the sounds are ever recorded in the first place. There's an interesting article about 24-bit processing on the MD side explaining how a 292kbps MD can beat a 1411kbps CD in certain situations.

Welcome to the forums!

[Hudson]

Thank you very much for the prompt reply, the reason i am looking at getting back into MD is the sound quality over MP3, I do have an Ipod and for bobbing around the town etc it's fine, but i listen to my MD portable player when relaxing in bed, going to sleep etc, so the portability of the music is not important. Having one CD on each MD disc is just fine, the swapping over of each album is again just fine. I had been thinking of getting the RH-1 for the recording duties but am unsure if the quality at standard SP will be the same as the full sized units like the 940.