mandeep Posted June 28, 2004 Report Share Posted June 28, 2004 I am a MD user since 99, and the R50 is still the best unit out there. basically with all this new format stuff, i have dabbled with ipod and decided to stick with MD. my main problem is preserving my recordings long term 20yrs down the rd without loosing the quality initially i was considering do my live recordings in wav, keep the wavs in some lossless format and then another set in mp3/4 or whatevers the coolest out. however i just gone off the idea of having to carry my entire collection around with me, i prefer to actually physically hold my recordings irrespective of what im going to play them on. like i dont want a hdd player for the car, then the house then the office and manage keeping everything in sync! rather have a protable medium and players. <--------------> so now i solved that, i dont fancy storing recordings in Wav for obvious reasons. so im thinking is there a way to preserve the quality long term between formats. one day when i transfered a md to pc (digitally) and did my editing and then recorded it live back to MD (digitally) i did not notice any degredation in quality (source and destination was lp2 and stored on pc in wav) so im thinking MD records what it hears, so in theroy if we transfer our audios LINERARLY! (assuming same if not higher bitrates) we should not observe any degredation in quality??? so i propose somone record a track to pc and record back to md, all digitally. do this 15x and compare the quality to the origional track and lets see if the quality stays the same, so in a sense we have achicved lossless atrac in a sense after the initial compression it would also be interesting if somone compared this to recoring to pc and then actually encoding it into lp2 and using the checkout. record lineraly bak to pc and encode the wav again. do this 15x and let see the diffference. i suspect there will be no difference in quality on the linear one what so ever but the encoded one will be messed up. interesting implications if im correct! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tekdroid Posted June 28, 2004 Report Share Posted June 28, 2004 all I can say is thank goodness Sony finally got linear PCM on their feature list for Hi-MD. It's no longer a toy (I hope). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest NRen2k5 Posted June 30, 2004 Report Share Posted June 30, 2004 Mandeep, unfortunately you're wrong. ATRAC is just like MP3 and every other lossless codec, in the sense that it doesn't have any way to "know" what it is being told to encode. It looks at what is coming in, and tries as well as it can with its restrictions to faithfully reproduce that. The problem is that lossy files always contain some distortion resulting from their original encoding. And when you run that file through another lossy encoder, it tries to reproduce what it sees, including those distortions! And the result is more distortions, because the original distortions are difficult to encode. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mandeep Posted June 30, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 30, 2004 well hopefully when i get the time i try it out and see. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mat Posted July 17, 2004 Report Share Posted July 17, 2004 AFAIK, PCM cannot be recorded via sonicstage 2.0, and cannot be uploaded to the computer if recorded manually by the HI-MD unit. So you will have to rule out that option. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
highlandsun Posted July 18, 2004 Report Share Posted July 18, 2004 Mandeep, unfortunately you're wrong. ATRAC is just like MP3 and every other lossless codec, in the sense that it doesn't have any way to "know" what it is being told to encode. It looks at what is coming in, and tries as well as it can with its restrictions to faithfully reproduce that. The problem is that lossy files always contain some distortion resulting from their original encoding. And when you run that file through another lossy encoder, it tries to reproduce what it sees, including those distortions! And the result is more distortions, because the original distortions are difficult to encode.It all depends on the complexity of the incoming signal. You can create a bitstream that will compress and decompress perfectly, if you tailor it to the characteristics of the codec. Of course, I've only done this with synthesized music consisting of a small number of pure tones. Doing it for real vocals or analog instruments would be a real pain... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Solid Snake Posted July 18, 2004 Report Share Posted July 18, 2004 ATRAC, although arguably quite better than MP3 in terms of generative degradation, still suffers from it. I used to know about this website (Can't remember where it was) that showed what happens when you ATRAC files over and over again, and it had samples for the first 20 gen copies, and another sample of every 20 gens after that, up to about 200, I think it was. First 10 times really weren't that bad, 20 had noticeable degradation, 60 was horrid, and I don't even want to mention 100... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest NRen2k5 Posted July 26, 2004 Report Share Posted July 26, 2004 I've been thinking about that statement and I think that it isn't quite right. LP2 will suffer just as badly as MP3@128kbps. Over a short number of generations (<10), both MP3@256 and SP should fare pretty well, by sheer virtue of their high bitrate. I imagine SP would win out over a larger number of generations, because as far as I know it's a subband-only codec, and MP3 is a subband/transform hybrid codec. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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