MD

[Robert E Englebretson]

> Although MD is a digital medium, it does not allow for digital
> reduplication. The recording technology comes with built-in encryption
> that means any copy of an MD is an analog copy, even though the original
> is digital.

Generally speaking, this is not quite accurate.  I can't speak for your
particular model, but the ones I'm familiar with (and MD technology in
general, as well as consumer-grade DAT) use a copy protection scheme
called SCMS (Serial copy management System).  What this means is, you
*can* make unlimited digital copies directly from the master disk.
However, you are not allowed to make digital copies of the
first-generation copies, and if you do they will be done via analog.
(Some professional-quality decks don't use SCMS at all, and there are
supposedly some tricks-of-the-trade for defeating the SCMS circuit in the
consumer-grade ones too.)  So, you should in fact be able to get direct
digital from your master recordings as often as you like, no matter what
kind of MD recorder you have.. (Just be careful how you treat the
masters!)  One of the numerous advantages of MD over magnetic
contact-media (like DAT or cassette) is that there is no physical
interaction between the heads and the medium, so they don't degrade and
wear out.

 > I am sure that some kind of digital MP3 recorder will soon
> come out and replace MD.




I wouldn't count on that, at least not for several years to come.  Each
has its place in the electronics market, and there are plenty of
advantages of MD over MP3.

Many of us in the Linguistics Dept. at UC Santa Barbara have been using
minidiscs for field recording, and they are indeed a wonderful tool.  I
use a stereo mic, (listening to and transcribing multi-party interaction
is much more accurate in stereo).  the ad sent around on this list
Saturday was a bit glossy--the times referred to are battery times, not
actually recording times.  We are still limited by the amount of data that
can fit on a minidisk:  74 minutes in stereo or 148 minutes in mono.  (Be
careful if you use mono though, since some models won't be able to play
them back!)  There are now 80-minute disks out, if an extra 6 minutes is
useful... As far as the price, if you look around you should be able to
find decent models under $200 (I recently bought a Sharp MDMS722 for $189,
and the MDMS702 should be even cheaper...)

--Robert Englebretson
Dept. of Linguistics
UC Santa Barbara