MD equipment query

[Sonja L. Lanehart]

In my last post to this thread, I mentioned Bartek Plichta's
(Michigan State U) paper. He comes out strongly against MDs for use
in phonetic analysis because of the compression that's mentioned
below. Once that information is lost it cannot be recaptured. Nancy
Niedzielski (Rice U) also mentioned that one of her students did a
study comparing MDs to other recording technology. She offered to
send the paper upon request. Nancy's e-mail as listed in the NWAV
directory is niedz at ruf.rice.edu.

I asked about MD vs other recorders during the summer on the linganth
list and bought the MD. I love it. I realize it won't work for
phonetic analysis now, but that's OK. It will work for my purposes.
The microphone is apparently an even bigger deal than the MD itself.

I hope all works out.    --Sonja

>   Paul Garrett has made the decision to go with minidisc.  The
>website mentioned (www.minidisc.org) is quite useful, but convinces
>me that I would never use minidisc.  For phonetic purposes, any
>compression algorithm leaves you with unknowns in the signal, and
>those will be a concern for every reader of every paper based on
>those signals.  Since compression algorithms are typically written
>by speakers of English and tested on English, they may do more
>damage to distinctive sounds in other languages than they do to
>English, thus making the "acceptable" level of compression
>questionable.  Further, the duplication of minidiscs to later
>generations only compounds this problem with every copy, while
>duplication of DAT or digitized audio is essentially error-free for
>many generations.  (Only when large stretches of sound are
>unrecoverable is there any degradation.)
>   I know that many researchers are not concerned with phonetic
>structure, but it would strike me as a shame to preclude phonetic
>analysis by using compression technology.
>   Doug Whalen DhW
>--
>Doug Whalen (whalen at haskins.yale.edu)
>Haskins Laboratories
>270 Crown St.
>New Haven, CT 06511
>203-865-6163, ext. 234
>FAX:  203-865-8963
>http://www.haskins.yale.edu/


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Sonja L. Lanehart
Department of English                 706-542-2260 (office)
University of Georgia                 706-542-1261 (messages)
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Athens, GA 30602-6205                 lanehart at arches.uga.edu
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