Subject: Re: digital recording media From: Robert Eiichi Irie <irie(at)AI.MIT.EDU> Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1999 15:28:23 -0500I can offer some information regarding consumer level portable minidiscs. A wealth of information is available at www.minidisc.org On Mon, 11 Jan 1999, Sheila Williams wrote: > > I would be most grateful for advice from anyone with experience of using > portable digital recording equipment? > > There seem to be two choices available now, Digital Audio Tape or Minidisc. > > Can anyone recommend any particular model for high quality sound > recordings, such as for speech? or suggest which system (DAT or Minidisc) > is the best and for what reasons. be aware that minidisc recording is a perceptually based lossy compression format. ('ATRAC') It's interesting to note tho that Dragon Systems recommends Sony's MZ-R50 as the "dictation recorder for their speech recognition system." > > I need to take into account transferability to computer (eg the Kay system) > for analysis - from the descriptions I've seen all the digital systems seem > to have digital output on optical channel only - is there equipment > available to convert this to standard input interfaces? You mention portable recording equipment-Most minidisc portables I've seen do not have digital output (they do have digital optical inputs tho) but regular line outs. Most consumer level DAT machines should have electrical digital output in the SPDIF format, which some newer PC sounds cards support so you can transfer digital data directly, bypassing DAC/ADC stages. If you do run across optical output on minidisc *decks*, they are probably TOS-link style, for which there are TOS to SPDIF converters. Check out the minidisc webpage for more info.. Robert McGill is running a new version of LISTSERV (1.8d on Windows NT). Information is available on the WEB at http://www.mcgill.ca/cc/listserv