----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles Redell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, August 18, 2000 8:23 PM
Subject: Re: MD: sound quality difference in blanks?
> I don't understand why there isn't a differnece in sound quality between
> blanks (If that is really the case)? I mean, why are some more expensive
tha
> others? Are some not made better/easier for the laser to read/smoother
> inoperation or something akin to all of that?
Yes ... Smoother in operation means better for your MiniDisc player - I
guess a cheap badly-made MiniDisc could present unnecessary resistance to
the motor or cause the head to scrape or scratch on something and your
MiniDisc player to break down. Easier for the laser to read simply means the
laser won't 'fail' to read the disk as often
The laser failing to read the disc is simply a bit error which the ECC
(error correcting code) used by the
MiniDisc can recover. I can't remember the exact figures but the ECC used
can allow something like 1 bit out of
every 200 to be corrupted with no (literally ZERO) difference in audio
quality
So - if you ARE hearing differences in audio quality between two different
makes of MD blanks then the worse sounding one must have a SHOCKINGLY high
bit error rate ... as a simple analogy, imagine buying a batch of 1.44MB
Floppy Disks and formatting them in your PC and subsequently discovering
that they give you 7.5KB worth of bad sectors... FAULTY DISK!
> Cassettes definitely have higher qualities amongst them... Why not MDs?
Cassettes are analogue in that they record music as patterns of waves
(literally encoding the pressure waves as patterns of magnetic fields on the
tape). The sound waves can be measured to any arbitrary accuracy, and it is
the ability of the tape recorder to coax the magnetic tape into storing
sufficiently accurate patterns of magnetic fields that determines the
resulting sound quality.
In MiniDisc and other digital media, the patterns recorded are (essentially)
far more simple. The recording device simply needs to only store a 'zero'
pattern or a 'one' pattern at a time. Just like a hard drive.
Analogy - imagine recording a .WAV file using Sound Recorder on your PC and
then saving the file to the hard drive. You don't worry about the .WAV file
stored on your hard drive sounding muffled and dull because you have a
low-quality generic hard drive instead of a Seagate Barracuda do you? You
don't think about upgrading your hard drive to the latest IBM 14,000 rpm
model because it will make all your .GIFs and .JPEGs sharper and improve the
color contrast of web pages?
It's more or less exactly the same with MiniDisc.
As long as the media is usable and not faulty, then any data - the actual
sound or music stored on the disk - will always be the same recorded on any
two pieces of working media.
> Thanks,
> c
Dave
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