Is there something wrong with this comment or what?

"Little info on atrac 3, instead of compressing the whole file losing quality on everything like mp3, atrac3 simply removes all the unaudible sound to the human ear that the file contains, so all the music/noise thats in the file that can be heard by humans, retains its near original quality. This is how atrac3 give you better quality at a lower bit rate over mp3."

By "indierocker" at pricegrabber.com

Found this in a www.pricegrabber.com review. Here's the link to it:

http://www.pricegrabber.com/rating_getprod...d_type=masterid

It's the first review on the linked page. The quote I took is four paragraphs down.

I thought MP3s were superior to atrac. So what's the deal with this review? I tried to correct the reviewer, but he insists that Atrac is superior! So I am going to be flamed or this guy?

You both just need to prove your claims by someway (abx tests). The first paragraph doesnt have any sense. "instead of compressing the whole file losing quality on everything like mp3".

By reading this review, you can just be sure this guy looks just like a MD zealot. "i have a creative zen", "My brother has an ipod" and everything just to say his MD is better than anything else.

Actually, everyone on that page seens like this. This one made me laugh: "Bottom line: iPods, like the name implies, are for loners, MiniDiscs are for the community minded people who actually have a life and friends to share it with."

all lossy codecs throw away stuff the human ear can't hear...
I'm not sure what they mean by low bitrates, but it is definitely not true for 128kbps:



IMHO actrac sucks and doesn't give any advantage a different format couldn't offer...

welcome to HA Lsportline43.
that is one piece of uninformed crap. what he is referring to:
"atrac3 simply removes all the unaudible sound to the human ear that the file contains, so all the music/noise thats in the file that can be heard by humans, retains its near original quality"
...is called psycho acoustic model. almost every audio encoder makes use of this. it basicly tries to predict what we (as humans) can and cannot hear and throws out the part that it thinks we can't hear.
that point he described right. what he's wrong about is that not only Atrac3 makes use of such methods but as already stated most audio encoders do, including LAME (MP3).
he is also referring to lower bitrates where Atrac3 should yield higher quality than MP3. that is not proven and give it's performance at higher bitrates also unlikely.
have a look here:



at 128kbit LAME beats Atrac3 which comes last.


edit: OMG I'm slow

I don't understand why someone would want to praise Sony's Atrac format. People only use it because they have to. Well that's what seems to be the case, for Sony continues to try and do any and everything to have their hardware solely play Atrac.

Also Lame MP3 programmers are only concerned with sound quality. The Lame programmers do not care about whether people use the format on certain players or computers or hardware or some non-sense like that. From this point of view Lame MP3 definitely seems like the way to go, soundwise anyhow.

Now that MiniDisc is all but dead, there's really only one single reason you'd ever want to use ATRAC: It's possible to play ATRAC tracks seamlessly on Sony's players.

Of course, there are a few MP3 players that can play MP3's seamlessly; Sony just doesn't want you doing so with theirs.

I think you guys need to get your facts straight. MP3 plays with no problems whatsoever on all Sony players for more than a year. Edit: Ok, I forgot about MD players but the newer MD players also could play MP3.

So what. Even if ATRAC offered superior audio performance at a given bitrate to MP3, which the data says it does not - the market has spoken and ATRAC is a dying codec.

Old rotting horse corpse here, nothing to see, move along.

He means gaplessly, I believe, which Sony does not do.

Another Sony failure...OT: Will Blu-Ray be next?

Yes, but please note that the MP3 decoder in 2nd generation MD players is crippled. Therefore, ATRAC files will sound better than MP3 files on these players.

Taking the history of Sony in mind (root kit anyone?) I wouldn't be surprised if this was done on purpose.

I think i'm gonna womit really bad, really soon!!! It reminds me of that SACD/CD combined discs with crippled CD part...

I also still can't believe it. According to the graphs in the topic at minidisc.org I linked to in my previous post, Sony basically added a low-pass filter with cutoff at 2 kHz and already 6 dB reduction at 6 kHz. I mean, how obvious is that?

Sony is a really arrogant company, and the problem is that they get away with it untill now. I hope they really get punished for their latest misbehaviour regarding the root kits.

Fortunately you can more-or-less cancel out that stupid filter using the player's EQ.

But fortunately, being told this stuff, you can do yourself a much bigger favour and avoid MiniDisc altogether.

By the way, I was banned from MiniDisc.org and ATRAClife several months ago so I can only guess as to the content of the post linked. There's a serious lack of respect (not to mention reason) in that community. Their admin wouldn't know his ASPEC from his elbows either.

It's a shame. I would like to sell my NH700 but I have no buyers now.

Has this actually happened? Do you know if this is confirmed somewhere on the Internet? I'd like to show that story to some SACD fanatics I know of...

Yeah, and the thread(s) in which I posted ABX results for ATRAC Type-R vs. ATRAC3plus samples mysteriously disappeared from their portal, too. The owner of those forums (some kid named Chris, apparently) must reside in some delusional place where ATRAC is cool and/or desirable. Why on Earth there would be "fan sites" dedicated to a codec and company so restrictive and anti-consumer just boggles my mind.

Luckily, now that almighty SONY is supporting MP3 on most of its devices (DRM hoopla aside), ATRAC should finally fade away. MiniDisc itself has been rather "dead" for years now, at least here in the states.

As for your MZ-NH700, you could be sneaky and list it on eBay as a "1GB Sony MP3 player"

Haha, no way. I've always been against lying in advertising (hmm, like Sony does), so it would be quite badly hypocritical of me to lie like that.

I read it somewhere on this forum about year ago, unfortunately don't remember where.

I remember that some guy said that he went to some audio store and had the salesperson demostrate him some SACD player and compare it to CD. I think he used a mixed SACD/CD disc and some exhibition speakers. The guy said that SACD sounded much brighter and clearer than the CD part... I personally doubt that someone would really hear a difference between 44.1kHz/16bit and 96(192?)kHz/24 bit, yet the guy claimed he clearly did. The guy also concluded that the CD part must have been something else than just a simple samplerate/bit-depth conversion of the SACD part.

Sadly, there seems to be no way (so far) to rip SACD into a wave. If there was, one could downsample the wave to 44/16 and compare the waveform/spectral view to the CD part (for amplitude, at least). But this ain't that easy nowadays.
I would gladly lough into SACD enthusiasts' faces, trust me...

Cygnus, those ABX results weren't deleted intentionally; it was due to a SQL database flop where we had to revert to a backup otherwise we'd have to start anew (couldn't afford that). At the time, the last backup we could revert to was a week or two old (we're now on a daily backup routine) and it was a huge loss -- not only that topic, but quite a few others as well as registrations. I was severely disappointed that the ATRAC ABX test you guys had participated in was gone. Please try and talk to me first before making such inane and disrespectful comments -- if you wish to dwell on it further I welcome more personalized communication via phone or e-mail. I encourage you guys to start over with another test, I can even post a link to it on minidisc.org so you can have numerous participants and so forth.

Neo Renegade, the reason why you were banned from both sites is because you used extremely foul language towards a moderator (Ishiyoshi). If you want me to post what you said for the others to see, I can, to assure that there is no confusion as to why you were banned.

p.s. Aren't a few of the sentiments in this topic a violation of the rules, e.g. "flame war"?

Regards,

Christopher MacManus
forums.minidisc.org + atraclife.com admin

SACD CAN be ripped to PCM, with a standalone SACD player's digital out. It will output a 44/16 pcm digital signal which you can directly record and compare.

If there is truth to what you say about the topics being deleted, I'm happy - but to somebody who doesn't frequent your board(s) as often as HA, the deletion suspiciously looked as though it were an act of retribution. (I also did consider that it might have been related to the "Dex" incident, though). My apologies.

In terms of the aforementioned testing, the threads in which the original samples and ABX session were discussed can still be found here at HA (see the "listening tests" forum). Unfortunately, I don't have the time or interest right now to conduct new tests, especially with ATRAC3plus - I've always been more interested in Type-R's performance, as I still have held on to (and use) my beloved MDS-JE530 deck after all these years, and the vast majority of MD gear out there is std-MD, not Hi-MD. Two years ago, many MDCF members still were also using std-MD; now, it would seem that many have moved on to Hi-MD, which will also allow people to use LAME 3.97 encodings, bypassing ATRAC altogether. Sony's other players, including my own NW-E407, also allow this, so I question if concentrating on ATRAC3plus is even a worthy endeavor at this point. Sound quality issues aside, I've found it much less annoying to use MP3 Manager and LAME compared to SonicStage and ATRAC3plus.

Let me go off on a tangent here while I have your attention, Chris. I've found over the years that many MDCF members openly dismiss and/or dispute every single ATRAC-related ABX result or listening test that anybody has posted, not just me. Though it's gotten much better at the MDCF (the T-board was especially notorious for this), I still see a plethora of unsubstantiated quality-related comments being made about MP3's, non-MD or non-Sony DAPS, and all manner of things every time I browse the board. While that's not to say that those sorts of things don't go on here sometimes, the appalling audio-related ignorance on MiniDisc-related forums is one of the reasons why I don't bother posting on them anymore. And believe me, I used to - I have over ten years of MD experience! Why would I ever want to bother posting a test if people are just going to slam it because they don't like the results?

As the admin of two boards, you're in a position to change that. Now that Hi-MD supports MP3, I think it's time that you incorporate a FAQ or forum-fork about EAC, encoding LAME MP3's, how to conduct objective listening tests, ABX software links, etc on the MDCF. I'd also suggest moving toward adopting a rule like our TOS #8, which states that all sound-quality related statements must be substantiated by data that supports them, i.e. via double-blind testing. Let's face it, I don't think anybody (including myself) has ever used MD because we think that it has superior sound to other formats; it's about the cool hardware. Thus, even if the truth is not in ATRAC's favor all the time, I don't see how that would harm people who like Sony's hardware or send them running; after all, there’s always LAME.

The most annoying thing about Sony devices are, imo, that some atrac/MD devices decoded/played mp3s with frequency roll-off starting at 3 ? kHZ, so that mp3s clearly sounded dull, wrong and bad on purpose, to "show" i" "inferioty of mp3" ...
source: a topic here at ha

And I am also not an anti-Sony zealot, I started my digital music era with Sony CD-X33ES and Sony DAT
Still both working really fine.

If you consider latest spyware on Sony-music CDs together with the fouly mp3-playback, then you know, why Sony should be written these days like: So never.

Yeah. Sony's business practices can be absolutely asinine at times. It's too bad, because they make some good products.

Come to think of it, I have a small stereo, a 300-disc changer, a TV and a discman; all made by Sony, and I'm happy with every one of them.