Re: DAB 2 FM

Steve,

I was thinking about recording onto a PC, but I was thinking about
compressing to MP3 rather than burning a CD Audio format disc.


OK high bit rate MP3 was the other possibility I thought you might
suggest.

Firstly, how much are MD discs? Do Richer Sounds still do them for 50p or
something?


I get mine from RicherSounds in Oxford. They cost 79p a piece but they
are 80 mins (in practice they hold nearer to 81 mins of music) not 74
mins.

MD and MP3 are both forms of compressed audio, and on my MD deck, it wasn't
even transparent (i.e. you could tell the difference between the CD and the
MD recording of the CD), although it could be due to the CD player having
better audio output circuitry than the MD player.

Yep. I understand that recording from CD to MD results in losses and
people claim that there is a small difference and I have no reason to
doubt that. I haven't got a coax SPDIF cable (I have a Toslink cable to
connect the Pure 701 to the MD deck, but my CD player only has Coax
SPDIF o/p) so I haven't done the comparison myself. All of my MD
recordings are either from DAB or FM (I inherited some MDs that had
been recorded from Radio 3 and ClassicFM) and I have no MDs recorded
from CD.

Although there will be losses when recording from radio sources, I take
the view that radio is already a compromised sub-CD standard source so
I am prepared to sarifice a bit extra loss for the convenience of the
MD.


Anyway, if you use a high bit rate for MP3, it is transparent. Let's say you
used an average bit rate of 250 kbps MP3 to encode your R3 recordings and
stored them on a PC hard drive (and backed them up to DVD-R discs). 200 GB
hard drives are about £50, and if you're using a bit rate of 250 kbps, the
amount of storage is:

(250,000 x 3600) / 2^33= 0.1048 GB / hour of audio

So it costs:

£50 x 0.1048 / 200 = 2.62 pence/hour of audio

so it's 16-times cheaper to store audio on a PC hard drive than on MD
(excluding the cost of DVD-R discs for backing up, but they're only about
50p each or less, and they can store 4.7 GB per disc).

Or if you stored the audio in lossless format (lossless audio doesn't
degrade the audio quality at all, which is why it's called lossless), it'd
cost about 2-3 times more to store audio, but it's still be far cheaper than
storing on MD.


Yep, I agree your cost argument is convincing, but it wasn't on cost
grounds that I choose to use MD, rather convenience. I do have a
really good PC its only 2 months old and has a 250G HD plus DVD-RW but
as I said its in the study, not the lounge and connecting to the Hi-Fi
isn't quite so straightforward at this point in time.

This may seem strange, but I don't have a DVD player and never have had
one so I have nothing in the lounge to play MP3 CR-R or DVD-R on -so
for me MD really is the most practical medium to record from radio
right now even though I fully accept that in fidelity terms its more
compromised and also less flexible than MP3.

Also, you can fit about 7 hours' worth of MP3 audio on a CD-R disc if you
want to listen to it in your car, so you'd have about 6 times fewer CD-R
discs in your car than MD discs.

Yes I agree. MP3 playback from CD/R/RW is a really useful feature of
recent car stereos, and I have been intending to exploit it , as I do
travel a bit with my work and my current company car does have this
feature.

If you did want to start recording on your PC, you could connect to/from
your hi-fi via S/PDIF by buying any old £10 PC sound card that has both
S/PDIF input and output.

Thanks - I will keep that in mind as an option for future.

The only other challenge I have is that now we have at last got a
decent PC and broadband, my wife is on the PC most evenings when I'm
listening to concerts. I am not at all sure that I would be able to
quite trust her not to accidentally kill the recording if I did start
to use the PC in the way you suggest.

Ray


--
Steve - www.digitalradiotech.co.uk - Digital Radio News & Info

Find the cheapest Freeview & DAB prices:
http://www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/freeview/freeview_receivers.php
http://www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/dab/dab_radios.php

.

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