RE: MD: JE-510 grinding.
The good news is I've convinced my girlfriend that it's broken and we'll just have to buy a new deck. :) So your probably asking .. why bother fixing the JE-510? Well, I'd like to try and fix it first. Nah, buy the new deck first and try to fix the old one second. Possession is nine tenths of the law... ;-) S. - To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: MD: Memorex and Verbatim MD's
Does anyone have any experience with these types of MD's? I'm sure I remember seeing somewhere that Memorex weren't that great, but it might have been Maxell ones (plastic shutters). I haven't seen anything about Verbs though, whats the verdict? I've used various Sony, TDK and Maxell blanks. The only ones that I've had any problems with have been the plastic shuttered Maxells, which occasionally suffer drop-outs. S. - To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: MD: which MD car deck to buy?
I don't know if it is available in Canada but I really like my Blaupunkt Dallas MD deck. (The US site shows the stateside equivalent my model - the first link below - and the new, 'improved' version): http://www.blaupunktusa.com/receivers/receivers_00_dallas.htm http://www.blaupunktusa.com/receivers/receivers_01_neworleans.html The reason I bought it was that my Sony unit was stolen and, of course, the face-plate was in the glove box. This made me realise that a removable face-plate is no deterrent to the scum that break in to cars. Blaupunkt units have a smart card the size of a credit card, which slides into the back of the hinged face-plate so it's easy to take with you and easy to see that it's been removed. I will never buy a face-off unit again. Anyway, compared to my Sony unit, I would say that sound quality through the mediocre standard speakers in my car is similar for MD and better for the radio. The other area where the Dallas wins is the user interface. It is simple and uncluttered, using 8 soft keys for all the peripheral functions, rather than the plethora of tiny buttons that you normally get, and a simple, easy to read display, rather than the mobile disco that you usually get. It is changer compatible, though whether they do a MD changer, I don't know. Regards, S. - To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: MD: Cheap Minidiscs in the UK?
Just bought my first deck yesterday, and now I need some disks. So can anyone in the UK point me in the direction of the cheapest place to buy, mail order or otherwise? Thanks, Nick. I would recommend Richer Sounds. TDK discs are £1 a piece, with Hi-space about 80p each. S. - To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: MD: sonymz-e500
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] does anyone know if the sony mz-e500 comes witha backlit remote? No, it does not. However, I've had one for a few months, in fact I'm listening to it right now, and I reckon that it's a great little player. S. - To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: MD: Cheap minidiscs in Croydon
I was in the Croydon Dixons today and bought a five-pack of Sharp *80* minute MDs for eight quid (7.99). That's £1.60 each, the cheapest brand name 80 min discs I've seen so far, especially in those quantities. If you don't need the 80 minute capacity, Richer Sounds are selling TDK at 99p each for any number you want. If you don't want a 'respected' brand name I think that they are selling Hi Space for 79p, though I'm not sure if there is a minimum number with those. Also, on their website, they have 5 packs of Hi Space 80-minute discs for £5.95 - Dunno if that's available in store, though. A friend bought 50 Hi Space 80-minute discs and has had no problems so they may be worth a shot at that price. S. - To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: MD: Which is the best dual Mini Disc / CD Player
Also thinking of replacing my SONY MZR50, whats the best portable at present? I guess that depends on your criteria but, of the people that I know, all have either stayed with or moved to Sony portables. Assuming - given the virgin.net address - that you're from the UK, I bought the MZ-E500 for £132, which is a great playback only deck that takes a chewing gum cell so no power-bulge for the AA cell. The only downside is the plastic case if it may need to take a few knocks. If you need to record as well, a friend waxes lyrical about his MZ-R900, about £200 on-line, which is the only Sony recorder without a power-bulge, I believe, and has a metal case. Both are MDLP compatible. - To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: MD: MDLP Question
Is it possible to play back MD's that were recorded in MDLP on an older, non MDLP player ? No. IIRC, the tracks will play as a silence half as long as the track that was recorded and, unless it was turned off on the recording deck, the track title will be prefixed with LP:. Of course, tracks recorded in SP mode will play on all MD players regardless of which recorder was used. S. - To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: MD: DCC?
=== = NB: Over 50% of this message is QUOTED, please = = be more selective when quoting text = === From: Stainless Steel Rat [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] * Steve Hill [EMAIL PROTECTED] on Wed, 06 Jun 2001 | On a CD the laser is reflected off the disc, onto a photodiode which | produces four analogue voltages. These are then used to perform tracking | and linear speed adjustments, and are also processed to produce the | digital data. The signals could just as easily be used to produce an | analogue audio signal. Could, but they are not. And though what is there could be interpreted as an analog signal, it really isn't. Consider this: I whisper one. I shout one. Has the value of one changed? My voice is analog, but the spoken signal is still digital. If it wasn't really an analogue signal, there would be no need for error correction coding. In practise, the analogue signal is converted into soft decisions which vary from zero, through zero-ish, one-ish, to one. These are then fed into the error corrector, which uses the redundancy introduced into the data to estimate the most likely sequence of data bits. Continuing your analogy, if you whisper 'one' but I can't hear what you say, I have to make a guess on whether you said 'one' or 'zero'. The source data is digital, but the signal after the effects of the channel are considered is analogue, and must be converted back into a digital representation. [...] | No. The advantage of CD and MD against vinyl and tape is that they do not | wear out. The fact that the former are digital and the latter analogue is | co-incidental. DCC and DAT both wear out yet are digital. And are insignificant to consumers. | Laser discs were entirely analogue and do not. Actually, they do. And the format is (was) insignificant to consumers, too. My point was not what was significant to consumers but rather that it is a property medium, and not the format of the data stored on it, that determines whether wear occurs. | Admittedly, due to the error correction, digital recordings will handle | wear better for a while before failing completely where as analogue | recordings deteriorate more gradually, but it is the medium that | determines whether wear occurs. Well, if you want to insist on picking nits, then consider this: microphone in to a solid state deck, real-time conversion to MPEG-1 Layer III audio, and stored on compact flash cards. No analog storage involved anywhere. The bits are stored by tunnelling electrons through the oxide layer, generating a potential on the floating gate. That potential is analogue - though, if you want to get pedantic, quantised. The real world is analogue and, hence, all data stored in the real world is stored in an analogue form. It's all a bit academic, though. [...] | I'm not sure that I understand the point that you are trying to make here. My point is that the original post making the claim that, paraphrased, digital takes more space to store than analog because square waves take up more space, is wrong. I can't argue with that being faulty logic. In the general case, uncompressed digital signals take more space to store than the analogue signal that they represent. However, if you just wanted to store square(ish) waves, it would require much more bandwidth to store them in an analogue manner than digitally. The key is that it is wrong to think of digital as storing things as square waves. S. - To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: MD: DCC?
* Peter Jaques [EMAIL PROTECTED] on Tue, 05 Jun 2001 | for uncompressed 16 bit stereo pcm, you're essentially dealing with a | square wave of 16 bits/channel * 2 channels * 44100 Hz = 1411200 Hz. | that's extremely high to just spit onto what is mechanically no different | from a metal cassette. The highest frequency that 16-bit PCM can achieve is 22.01kHz, and is represented by 16 on bits plus the frame. Those 16 on bits take up exactly the same ammount of space as one frame of dead silence, 16 off bits. Frequency has no direct relevance to how much space is required to store the signal, only resolution of the sampling. I have a been lurking on this list for a while, but I feel that I must correct something that is just, plain wrong. The value of one sample gives only amplitude information, and no frequency information. For that you need multiple samples as it is the differences between samples that contains the frequency information. If each sample is treated as signed number, the sequence of samples ..., +n, -n, +n, -n, ... represents a sine wave at half the sample frequency, i.e. 22.01kHz for a 44.1kHz sample rate. The value of n determines the amplitude, i.e. volume, of the sound. Secondly, the frequency DOES have a very definite relevance to the space required to store the signal, though, as the original poster was saying, it is the sample frequency that matters, not the signal frequency. Having said that, the bandwidth required to store the signal is actually determined by the symbol rate, and not the bit rate, per se. So, 1.4Mb/s could be stored with 0.7Mhz bandwidth if two bits were stored per symbol. The problem with the calculation in the original post was that you can't store the raw data without some kind of error correction because digital distortion - i.e. bit errors - sounds BAAAD, and this adds an overhead. However, although the bandwidth required is much higher than analogue sources - even when compression is used, the signal-to-noise ratio of CD/MD (caused by quantisation noise) is so high that the limit is usually in the analogue stages used to reproduce it. The wow, flutter, hiss, popping, cracks, etc. of the various analogue systems is often easily perceptible on even modest systems. OK, I'll get off my high horse now, Steve. - To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: MD: DCC?
Saying that digital recordings require more space than analog is just plain wrong. The two are totally different. Comparing the two is like comparing a really nice cheese omlette and a Shelby Cobra GT350. I see no reason why you cannot compare the bandwidth and/or space requirements of digital and analogue recordings. Given that all recordings are ultimately stored as an analogue form, someone must have compared the possibilities for using that form to store the recording in an analogue manner against adding the complexity of a digital system. Of course, the advantage of digital audio is that it is more easily possible to remove the noise introduced by the medium - albeit at the expense of adding redundancy and the introduction of quantisation noise - and the ability to process, e.g. compress, the sound allowing trade-offs between the different aspects of the recording - signal-to-noise, non-harmonic distortions and various psycho-acoustic aspects of the recording. The real issue is how you compare the quality of a recording - as the quality needs to be the same to compare the bandwidth requirements - but I am given to understand that, to achieve recording of the same perceived quality, PCM - whether linear or non-linear - will require a greater bandwidth than to record directly in analogue. It's just a lot easier to improve the perceived quality of the digital recording if you are able to throw more bandwidth at the problem or use a whizzy compression algorithm. However, also as I understand it, even with the work that has been done in the field of compression, it is only codecs that make assumptions about the source, e.g. speech codecs, that can better the bandwidth required by analogue. Given that both medium and sensor (our ears) are analogue, I guess that this should not be a surprise. Steve. - To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: MD: DCC?
From: Stainless Steel Rat [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] * Steve Hill [EMAIL PROTECTED] on Wed, 06 Jun 2001 | I see no reason why you cannot compare the bandwidth and/or space | requirements of digital and analogue recordings. Given that all recordings | are ultimately stored as an analogue form, You are assuming that digital signals are modulated into analog signals for recording, like on your old C64 (which ammounts to recording the noises a telephone modem makes and playing them back later). There is no such modulation involved with digital audio storage. No, I merely refer to the fact that the real world is analogue and that the digital data, though not used to modulate a carrier, are stored as an analogue waveform, which approximates those data. On a CD the laser is reflected off the disc, onto a photodiode which produces four analogue voltages. These are then used to perform tracking and linear speed adjustments, and are also processed to produce the digital data. The signals could just as easily be used to produce an analogue audio signal. [snip] | Of course, the advantage of digital audio is that it is more easily | possible to remove the noise introduced by the medium - albeit at the | expense of adding redundancy and the introduction of quantisation noise - [snip] The advantage of digital audio is that as far as consumers are concerned it does not wear out. No. The advantage of CD and MD against vinyl and tape is that they do not wear out. The fact that the former are digital and the latter analogue is co-incidental. DCC and DAT both wear out yet are digital. Laser discs were entirely analogue and do not. Admittedly, due to the error correction, digital recordings will handle wear better for a while before failing completely where as analogue recordings deteriorate more gradually, but it is the medium that determines whether wear occurs. | - but I am given to understand that, to achieve recording of the same | perceived quality, PCM - whether linear or non-linear | - will require a greater bandwidth than to record directly in analogue. And yet, the fact remains that when analog recordings are made on digital media like Compact Discs, the effective capacity of the media is significantly reduced compared to its equivalent digital counterparts. I'm not sure that I understand the point that you are trying to make here. I've not heard of anyone storing an analogue signal on a CD but, given that a CD provides 74mins of bandwidth at several MHz and you only need 44.1kHz (2 * 22.05kHz channels) to store the analogue signal held on it, you could store around 100 digital CDs on one analogue CD. However, it would be a pig to produce and the play back equipment would be more complex. It would still not wear out, though. Steve. - To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
