Mr GG - love the BBC minidisc article.
Re my earlier comments on digital and maintaining quality, it is of course possible to get paranoid about this. For example, the recordings I made recently have, with all due respect, flaws which have nothing to do with the recording, or the recordist, or the equipment used. I don't want to degrade the audio quality further if I can avoid that, but it's possible that some technical degradation would in fact be almost completely inaudible to most listeners.
Sometimes it may make sense to perform a technical degradation in order to achieve an overall better result. This may be particularly true for video, but could also be true for audio. I have some high resolution videos which I took on a camera in Africa. Some of these do not play well on many computers, or on computers running certain operating systems. After trying one video on several iMacs - with fast and slow processors, and also comparing the same video on Windows also running on one of the iMacs I came to the conclusion that the videos would not work reliably on just any computer. I then surmised that part of the problem was actually reading in the data in real time during playback, so I tried using a very small amount of digital compression (fractional - perhaps even less than 1% degradation) in order to reduce the file size. This resulted in a file perhaps 3 times smaller, but that played without any obvious visible bad effects, and all the stuttering and jittering in the original file was removed. In a case like that I'd still keep the original, as in the future it might be possible to use it directly, but for playing I'd always use the compressed version.
One of the articles I mentioned earlier does indicate that there is compatibility between ATRAC versions, claiming that even the earliest devices could playback recordings done using later standards. However, this is not the same as claiming that the quality of playback would be as good. There is also some discussion about how many copies (non digital) can be made before artefacts start to become obvious, and this can be as few as 3 or 4, at least for early equipment. Thus if possible copies should be made of the original digital from the MD, and as MrGG suggests, some pro equipment can copy MDs or extract the files without the problems of DRM etc. which make this difficult for end users using consumer equipment.
It is still possible, as I claimed, that newer equipment could extract even more "quality" from the recordings, though realistically from what has been mentioned so far, the limitations are more likely to be due to the sources - perhaps broadcast quality FM, which is in many ways lower quality anyway than MD quality. It would still make sense to keep the original MDs as "master" versions, and if copies are made, then ideally they should be digital copies.
Re my earlier comments on digital and maintaining quality, it is of course possible to get paranoid about this. For example, the recordings I made recently have, with all due respect, flaws which have nothing to do with the recording, or the recordist, or the equipment used. I don't want to degrade the audio quality further if I can avoid that, but it's possible that some technical degradation would in fact be almost completely inaudible to most listeners.
Sometimes it may make sense to perform a technical degradation in order to achieve an overall better result. This may be particularly true for video, but could also be true for audio. I have some high resolution videos which I took on a camera in Africa. Some of these do not play well on many computers, or on computers running certain operating systems. After trying one video on several iMacs - with fast and slow processors, and also comparing the same video on Windows also running on one of the iMacs I came to the conclusion that the videos would not work reliably on just any computer. I then surmised that part of the problem was actually reading in the data in real time during playback, so I tried using a very small amount of digital compression (fractional - perhaps even less than 1% degradation) in order to reduce the file size. This resulted in a file perhaps 3 times smaller, but that played without any obvious visible bad effects, and all the stuttering and jittering in the original file was removed. In a case like that I'd still keep the original, as in the future it might be possible to use it directly, but for playing I'd always use the compressed version.
One of the articles I mentioned earlier does indicate that there is compatibility between ATRAC versions, claiming that even the earliest devices could playback recordings done using later standards. However, this is not the same as claiming that the quality of playback would be as good. There is also some discussion about how many copies (non digital) can be made before artefacts start to become obvious, and this can be as few as 3 or 4, at least for early equipment. Thus if possible copies should be made of the original digital from the MD, and as MrGG suggests, some pro equipment can copy MDs or extract the files without the problems of DRM etc. which make this difficult for end users using consumer equipment.
It is still possible, as I claimed, that newer equipment could extract even more "quality" from the recordings, though realistically from what has been mentioned so far, the limitations are more likely to be due to the sources - perhaps broadcast quality FM, which is in many ways lower quality anyway than MD quality. It would still make sense to keep the original MDs as "master" versions, and if copies are made, then ideally they should be digital copies.
Comment