quite impressed with MD audio
 

I just went out browsing around my local Circuit City last night and on a complete impulse buy, I bought the Sony MZ-N707 minidisc recorder. (well I asked the salesman if I could return it if I didnt like it and he said within 30 days.... so I bought it)

I came home and plugged it up to my Mixpre using the tape-out jack and ran that into the line-in jack on the recorder, I never imagined such sound could come out of such a little thing... it sounded fantastic. I assume it has a lot to do with running high-end mics though a professional pre-amp but it really did sound fantastic.

There were a few reasons I decided to go with it, one, it was cheap ($200) and two, it has line in, mic in, optical in, a VU meter, manual recording level adjustment and the media is durable and cheap.

I figure it will hold me over until the solid-state and/or HD recorders become more plentiful in our little DV world. Plus I didnt have to rob the bank this time.

So anyone concerned about the audio quality of MD, its not as bad as you may think.

Chris

FYI: Visit http://www.minidisk.org for possibly more than you ever wanted to know about MiniDisc.

Good to hear youi like it, and my experience is that MiniDISC has a good, stable timebase too for sync in post.

I have hit that site, I think I have hit every digital audio related site on the net in the past few months looking for a good digital recorder. It has some great info and resources, I just didnt think MD was for me. I played around with it a few years ago, still have my old decks, was just never that impressed with it. It has come a long way though!

Im wondering if I pick up a nice AD converter and run optical in if it will sound even better?!?

It was kinda nice to finally get a bargain, toys in this field aint cheap...

Chris

Some MD recorders have optical in only. I guess it depends on whether or not your external A/D is better than the one in the MD recorder.

For recroding audio from a PC using optical to the MD recorder would save a D/A and A/D cycle - which is a good thing to save. Or course the audio out should be 44.1 kHz/16-bit for MD.

Some sound cards only have coax output. MidiMAN (or M-Audio, I forget which) offers a modest cost optical/coax S/PDIF signal converter - the "CO2"

I was thinking about going with the Denecke AD-20, a 20 bit 48Khz converter that has 2 XLR inputs and a S/PDIF and Optical output. The minidisc recorder has a sampling rate converter so it will take the 48KHz rate without an issue.
I would be willing to bet that is produces a cleaner signal than the built in converters that the minidisc recorder uses... the recorder is really not much bigger than a minidisc itself and it will be compressing straight digital at that point.

I have had my eye on it for a while now, I think I am just going to get it since I saved so much money on the recorder. It seems to be a pretty versatile unit that can turn most any consumer recorder into a pro-sumer machine by giving it balanced inputs and a clean digital signal.