Posted by Rick Denney on May 04, 2001 at 10:58:09:
In Reply to: Re: Minidisc or DAT? posted by Mark Wiseman on May 04, 2001 at 08:10:11:
If you go with minidisc, then you can buy those anywhere. I saw one just like mine at Best Buy for $249, and I've seen them 15 or 20 bucks cheaper mailorder.
The microphones are a bit more of a problem, unless you have a Guitar Center or Mars Music in your area. Mars Music usually has a comparison setup that will allow you to take your MD recorder in, and try out all their mikes for yourself. They sell the AT-822 for about $300.
One point that I forgot to mention earlier, but needs to be said. Professional recording studios routinely record and re-record the same signal over and over again. It's recorded once when you lay the track, and again when that track is mastered, again when the master is adjusted for the distribution medium, and again to make the distribution master, and finally once more when the copies are made. That's why they are so committed to ultra-clean gear. Noise from each generation adds to the noise from previous generations. For example, if the noise level of a minidisc recorder is -85 dB, then going through it twice will render a noise level of -72 dB. Ten generations through the recorder will raise the noise level to -55 dB. If the listening level of the peaks is at 100 dB, then that noise level will be audible. Keeping things digital and uncompressed addresses these issues--each generational copy is bit-perfect. When we record on DAT the first time, and do all our mastering digitally, then we add no noise in each generation, except when we downsample it from 48 kHz to 44.1 kHz. We end up with -85 dB noise level on the CD offered in the stores, if our recording technique was flawless and if the studio was truly quiet. That's what the DDD means on that CD case--digitally recorded, digitally mastered, and digitally distributed. The very best DDD CD's achieve between 80 and 85 dB signal/noise ratio.
On the other hand, we are usually interested in making a field recording, and then mastering it directly onto the CD that we will listen to. So, we have the noise when we lay the track (resulting from the minidisc compression), the noise when we record it into the sound card (unless we spend extra on a MD deck with digital outputs), and then we go directly into the CD with no resampling. If we start with -80 dB (not quite as good as the DAT), and have one analog step into the sound card, we might end up with a noise level of -75 dB. In even an ideal playback environment, that's enough to render the noise level inaudible.
Minidisc is therefore unsuitable for studio use where sounds will be rerecorded on the MD medium generationally. Recording engineers who use minidisc use it for the first generation only.
Remember also that DAT is a storage medium for digital information. Much of the generational recording that used to be done on DAT is now done on hard disk. That is one reason why DAT is not as popular as it once was.
So, for the types of recordings that we do--natural acoustic field recordings where we have at most one generational loss between the original recording and what we send to the audition committee (using the general "we" here--I don't have to deal with audition committees), we suffer no audible effect when we start with something like minidisc. The result we get is still far, far better than the best vinyl pressings or analog tapes that were the state of the art not so long ago.
There is another point that must be considered: My analytical comparisons assume good technique. The experiences reported elsewhere might or might not represent consistent technique. It is easy to condemn a medium because the results were not so good, when the problem wasn't the medium but the fact that the recording levels were set too high or the mike too close and some of the sounds were clipped or overloaded, or the levels were too low or the mike too far from the group and the room or equipment noise had to be amplified too much to bring the master to normal listening levels. This is equally true with DAT and minidisc, and even more true with analog tape.
Rick "who apologizes for the length of this 'afterthought'" Denney