[EMAIL PROTECTED] asked,
| Question: if I make a copy from MD to MD using optical cable, how
| good will the copy be from the original.
The second MD will be closer to the first MD than the first MD is to its own
source.
When you copy a recording from MD to MD over an analog link or over a digital
connection, the ATRAC data on the source disc are decoded and then re-encoded
on the target disc. So yes, there is another round of lossy compression, and
technically the result is even more different from the original recording
than the first MD is.
But while the infidelity increased, it did not double. Most of the damage
done by ATRACking was done in recording the first MD, and pretty much what-
ever decoded signal comes out of it consists of the components that ATRAC
preserved plus whatever the decoder extrapolated, so re-encoding it will
change very little. It's extremely unlikely that anybody could tell, just by
listening with human ears, the difference caused by a second ATRACking.
Eventually the artifacts will build up, even with digital transfers, and
around the 100th layer of ATRACking it will be very noticeable (except to
the leaden-eared like me); but a single generation of additional ATRACking
does very, very little to already ATRACked material.
| I've already tried it, I'm just not sure if I can tell whether there's a
| difference in the quality or not.
It should be too slight to notice. If you insisted that you could hear a
clear difference between twice-ATRACked recordings and singly-ATRACked re-
cordings, I'd answer that it was mostly psychological and that you couldn't
reproduce those results in a double-blind test.
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