Rat, you were off the mark on a couple points.
| The dummy data is required so that MiniDiscs recorded in | LP modes will not damage older players. "Damage"? There would be no damage, just pointless noise. | That is why you get slightly less than 160 minutes in LP2 mode out | of an MD-80 disc. False. You get exactly the same duration in LP2 as in SP mono, which is exactly double that of SP stereo and half that of LP4. Anything less is due to fragmentation and will affect SP mono and LP2 identically. I strongly recommend that you take an empty 80-minute disc and allow it to fill with a single track of LP2. You'll find it holds 161m58s, which is not "slightly less than 160 minutes." | Sony had to do it that way becuase they left no room for expansion in the | MD storage algorithm. Admittedly, they never foresaw a time where anyone | would want to *reduce* recording quality. Yes, there you were right. | Looking at ATRAC in "bits per second" is somewhat inaccurate because it | doesn't work that way. But it does work that way. One second of audio is encoded to a fixed number of bits (different for each mode), even in LP4. | Standard ATRAC removes 4 bits out of every 5 | from the signal resulting in a 5:1 reduction ratio. No, it does not remove four bits out of every five while keeping one. It encodes the audio into decoder data that occupy about 1/5 the space of the PCM representation of the audio. You can view that if you like as throwing out all bits and replacing them with data for an ATRAC decoder to read on playback. | There is no data compression in any MD ATRAC algorithm. Agreed. "Compression" is a poorly chosen word for what ATRAC does. ----------------------------------------------------------------- To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
