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. 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; 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. I suggested that people do listening tests; nobody did
except me, and with my tin ears I couldn't tell the difference.
Sony MD decks in monitor mode do apply sample rate conversion to digital
input and do strip out (why?) track number information; in record or
record/pause, the output signal preserves track number information and,
apparently, does not resample. In both cases, the SCMS bits of the output
match those of the input.
(Note: I'm not sure whether track number information is stripped in monitor
mode if the original input is from MD; it certainly is if the original input
is from CD. Other brands may function differently; my Pioneer CDR recorder,
for example, does not remove track number information in monitor mode.)
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