With the help of Babelfish translation, I looked at Sony's Japanese
web pages about the new Hi-MD machines. It appears that they support
three modes of recording:
Linear PCM at 44.1/16 ("CD quality" with no data compression)
Hi-SP at 256Kbps (5 to 1 compression)
Hi-LP at 64Kbps (22 to 1 compression)
Using these 3 recording methods, the capacity of the new 1GB Hi-MD
disc is:
Linear PCM...1 hour, 34 minutes
Hi-SP...7 hours, 55 minutes
Hi-LP...34 hours
MSRP for the 1GB Hi-MD disc is $7 USD.
It looks to me that the Hi-MD machines cannot themselves record any
of the other ATRAC formats (SP, MDLP, ATRAC3 and so on). But they
can recognise and play other ATRAC formats in the event they are
transferred to the minidisc from a PC. Such is the price of
progress, I suppose.
--oryoki
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