macs/digital audio etc

[Goddard, Duncan]

>>>When I was consulting for Apple we took to calling the Macintosh II the "desktop
> airport" it was so loud in comparison to the all in one Mac.<<<
> 
our company migrated us off mac desktops (I had an lc, then a big performa) about two years ago. the pc occupies twice the desk area, the monitor is huge, the virus scan keeps hanging all other activity and the thing crashes every twenty minutes anyway.
whereas the mac- I deleted "finder" off it once, completely, and still recovered it.
still.....
my i-mac (at home) is one of the noisiest things I possess, emitting an ear-piercing whistle even when it's off. this takes ten minutes to go away even when the mains lead is removed. bad psu. also, when it's running, even without the cd-r drive, it sounds like a hairdryer. makes more noise than the mellotron. by "all in one mac", I guess you're referring to the classic/se or even lisa? could I turn one of them into a midiscope, I wonder....
 
>>>Has anyone used a digital PC audio card with the optical interface on an MD to transfer the contents? <<<

mmmm.... not yet. I don't have digital o/p on my mini-mini-disc machine. however, I frequently use both the optical and coaxial digital connections in/out of a terratec soundcard in my pc without any trouble (with, I hate to say, roland daw products, and with a philips cd recorder)

>>>since the combination of the two encoding methods could result in nasty artifacts.<<<

interesting question- the equivalent in the video domain can be quite nasty (some of our mtv channels are stripped from our multiplexes and recoded at slightly different bitrates by other broadcasters; the concatenated artefacts are like moving versions of the sort of blockiness in too-small j-peg images). 
I'd imagine that you'd "hear" even more missing from the original material than with the mini-disc on it's own, but it'd be difficult to quantify objectively. this aspect of the signal's degradation would be the case however the audio finds it's way from one box to the other, even via the analogue domain; the original auddio no longer exists and you'd be compressing data that's already compressed, even though it's apparently back at it's full bit-rate. 


are people generally happy with the quality of mp3 for anything other than browsing? is the mass-marketing of digital audio really going to change from cd-sale? mini-discs are ok-ish for walkthings, but they haven't really even started taking sales away from cd in the uk, and meanwhile, the hifi manufacturers are flogging lots of ways to make md's from cd's, suggesting that they will replace cassette but not cd.

duncan.



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