Hi David,
"David W. Tamkin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Joost van de Griek wrote,
>
> | The fact that you have to set the MD deck to Record for it to pass through
> | the signal makes me suspect that the signal goes through an ATRAC
> | encoding/decoding cycle. In other words, it's passing through the signal
> | that would come from the MD, not the original PCM signal from the CD (record
> | monitoring, not signal pass-through). Probably an improvement over bad DACs,
> | but not quite the best possible signal.
>
> That was argued greatly to no conclusion in alt.audio.minidisc.
Really!?
> The situa- tion was one of daisy-chaining the optical connectors of
> Sony MD decks. One faction held that, as Francisco Montilla has
> said, the ATRAC chip could not both encode and decode simultaneously
> in real time;
They can assure themselves of this just by looking at the ATRAC chip
pinouts, see http://www.minidisc.org/je520_service/73.html. There is
an input signal line (RECP) controlling whether the chip is in RECORD
or PLAYBACK mode. Yes, I know this input is driven by the RECORDING
LASER POWER signal from the system control chip, nonetheless, the
ATRAC chip has no use for knowing the RECORD POWER state other than to
set its direction of operation.
> the other side held that since daisy-chained recordings didn't add
> SCMS generations and one SCMS-pen- ultimate source could be recorded
> to any number of daisy-chained recorders, all producing SCMS-final
> copies but none refusing to record, Sony would not pass up a chance
> to discourage the practice by spoiling the results with ad- ditional
> ATRACking.
They say "pass up the chance" as if Sony Electronics 1) likes SCMS and
2) could arrange it by adding a few wires. Surely such folks must
realize that running an ATRAC chip in "Full Duplex" mode wherein it
compresses and decompresses simultaneously requires quite a bit more
thought (not to mention gates, design resources, and time to market)
than running it as either a decoder or encoder only. And for what? So
that Sony doesn't have to worry about a possible SCMS nit that can be
circumvented with something as sophisticated as an optical Y adaptor?
If it was something they *had* to fix, they could as well have simply
changed the carried through signal's SCMS status to "uncopyable" (now
*that* might take just a few wires). Please ... ask those alt.a.m-ers
to be serious!
> I suggested that people do listening tests; nobody did
> except me, and with my tin ears I couldn't tell the difference.
Congratulations for making the effort David. You see though, nobody
wants to leave their desk :-), fortunately you can check the
schematics from your browser.
Rick
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