Sony MDS-101 MiniDisc recorder
The Sony MiniDisc family numbers four. The original trio of products-an in-dash car player, a portable recorder, and a portable player-have now been joined by an AC-powered model, the MDS-101. In keeping with MD's mobility motif, however, this first home MD recorder is quite diminutive. It is, in fact, a minicomponent, about half the size of conventional home components. On the other hand, it is relatively roomy compared to its siblings, and thus it offers expanded features not available on the others.
The MDS-101's front panel is a hybrid between those of CD players and DAT recorders. Discs (contained in a cartridge) are loaded into a slot and retrieved with an eject button. The deck has all the standard transport controls, and recordings are initiated by pressing the red record button followed by the play/pause button. As with all MD recorders, there is no need to find a blank portion on the disc; the MDS-101 automatically finds available disc space, even if it is in small fragments scattered across the disc surface. Recording levels for the left and right analog inputs are adjusted with a single knob; there is no record channel-balance control.
The input-selector button enables you to choose between the analog and digital inputs and, when the deck is already in recording mode, to turn the Level Sync feature on and off. When that is turned on during recording from an analog source, it automatically marks a new track number when a pause in the audio occurs; when it is turned off, you must manually add new track numbers by pressing the record button while recording. During recording, track markers are automatically read from the input data stream's subcode (and you can add track numbers manually as well) regardless of whether Level Sync is on or off. The playback-mode button is used to select random or programmed sequences of tracks. In programmed mode, you can select as many as twenty-five tracks for playback. There is a minijack with level control for headphone listening and another for plugging in a stereo microphone. When a microphone is plugged in, the back-panel inputs are defeated.
You can push a button to flash the name of the current track on the MDS-101's twelve-character blue fluorescent display; disc and track titles longer than that scroll across the display. The display button can also be used to, bring up the elapsed or remaining time. The display keeps you fully apprised of operating status. A music calendar displays as many as twenty-five track numbers, showing which tracks are being played back, recorded, or edited. The calendar display distinguishes between prerecorded and user-recorded discs, with and without a grid, respectively. A horizontal bar graph shows input and output levels in the left and right channels. The display also flashes a number of diagnostic messages, such as "Disc Full," "Protected," and "Sorry." When the deck is turned off, it displays a dimmed "Standby" message.
The MDS-101 permits a variety of editing functions for user-recorded MiniDiscs, all controlled via the Edit/ Yes and Edit/No buttons. These functions include erasing a track or disc as well as dividing, combining, and moving tracks. The No button is used to specify or cancel various edit functions, the Yes button to execute a selected function. When a track is erased, its header is removed from the disc's table of contents, freeing the space occupied by the track's contents for future recording, and tracks following the erased one are renumbered to eliminate the gap in the sequence. To avoid confusion when making multiple deletions, it is wise to erase higher-numbered tracks before lower-numbered ones, so that the tracks yet to be erased are not renumbered before you get to them.
With the divide function you can split an existing track into multiple tracks. As you insert new track numbers, the deck automatically renumbers subsequent tracks. The combine function does the reverse, enabling you to combine two consecutive tracks into one; as with the divide function, when two tracks are combined the deck renumbers subsequent tracks. Perhaps the most unusual item in MiniDisc's bag of editing tricks is the move function, which enables you to reorder tracks. That is done simply by renumbering the tracks in the disc's table of contents; no physical movement of data is involved.
These functions can be combined for special-purpose editing. For example, to erase part of a track in the middle, you isolate that portion from the rest of the track by dividing twice, erase the middle of the resulting three tracks, and then combine the two remaining tracks. You can even do some pretty tight editing thanks to a "rehearsal" feature in the divide function, which lets you audition a division by repeating it continuously before you commit to it. If the edit point isn't quite right, you can nudge it with the scan buttons over a range of +/-128 steps of about 0.12 second each. If you need greater precision than that, you can get the resolution down to 0.06 second by pressing the playbackmode button while in the divide mode. If you screw up a division, you can always join the tracks together again. But don't get too carried away: The MDS-101's owner's manual warns that after extensive editing of a track it may be impossible to do combines within it anymore. (The manual also notes that combined tracks may cause dropouts during fast searching.)
The remote control supplied with the MDS-101 duplicates many front-panel functions, such as power on/off and transport control, and adds a few of its own. Thanks to a twenty-five-button keypad, you can directly select as many as twenty-five tracks. A title function enables you to create titles for tracks or discs, with as many as a hundred characters for each title. Characters available, using various button combinations, include capital and lower-case letters, numbers, certain symbols, and spaces. In total, a user-recorded disc's table of contents can hold 1,792 characters' worth of titles. You can also erase track and disc titles on user-recorded discs. Date buttons enable you to display the recording date and time of a user-recorded track, which are automatically marked during recording. Other buttons enable disc or track repeat, A-B repeat, insertion of 3-second pauses between tracks (useful when copying MD's to cassette), and automatic auditioning of the beginnings of tracks on a disc. You can even choose audition times of 6, 10, or 20 seconds.
The remote is not shy about the MD's CD-dubbing capabilities. When the MDS-101 is connected to a Sony CD player with an AU-bus interface, three CD-synchro buttons enable you to enter recording-standby mode and to start and stop CD recording. Three other buttons let you directly control the pause and track-skipping functions on the connected CD player. Like all consumer digital recorders, the MDS-101 is constrained by a Serial Copy Management System (SCMS) circuit, which tags MD recordings made from the deck's digital input so that you cannot make additional digital copies of the first-generation copy.
On the back of the MDS-101 are phono jacks for analog input and output and two Toslink optical connectors for digital in and out. All MD recording and playback is done at the 44.1-kHz sampling rate; attempting to record a digital input running at another sampling frequency will result in an error message on the display. The back panel also holds the audio AU-bus interface socket for connecting the recorder to other Sony components for synchronous recording from CD players and other functions.
The MDS-101 gave very good results when tested by traditional linear measurement techniques-equal in many cases to those obtained from the best CD players. But, like all components that employ perceptual coding, the MDS-101 is designed to encode signals the way the ear perceives them, not the way linear instruments measure them. With such components, linear measurements can uncover gross errors (the MDS-101 clearly did not have any), but not sonic artifacts introduced by defects or limitations of the perceptual-coding system (in this case, Sony's ATRAC system). Researchers are working on measurement techniques suitable for evaluation of perceptual coders, but no standards have been devised.
For now, the best way to judge the sound quality of the MDS-101 and other such components is by careful listening, preferably by multiple pairs of ears under carefully controlled conditions. And that is exactly the approach I took to evaluating the MDS-101. I listened to it with a variety of music digitally recorded from CD's and asked several others to do so as well. The result was the same as with similar evaluations a few months back of the MZ-1 portable MD recorder. About half of the listeners could not hear any difference between a CD and an MD copy, and about half, when making a direct A/B comparison, could discern very subtle differences in imaging and high-frequency transient response. I would conclude from this experience that the MDS-101 uses essentially the same ATRAC perceptual-coding algorithms as the MZ-1- algorithms that are very good, but not transparent for all listeners. The encoding system may be improved in future generations, however, without sacrificing playback compatibility with existing MD equipment.
Critical listening chores done (it's a lot more work than just reading a few meters!), I spent some time simply playing with the MDS-101. A number of things are worth noting. The displays on earlier models (particularly the MDX-U1 car player) scrolled with annoying slowness. The MDS-101 has remedied this with a very speedy but wholly readable scroll. The play/pause button is probably the fastest you'll ever see, since the MDS-101 can go instantly from pause to playback of data already loaded into its buffer memory instead of waiting for data to flow from the disc (with a possible lag of 0.1 to 0.3 second). This capability invites use of the MDS-101 (and other, professional MD models) in professional environments, such as radio stations, where fast cueing is an essential. The MDS-101 is also pretty quick to initiate playback from a cold start: less than 5 seconds from disc insertion to the start of music.
Like earlier Sony MD units, the MDS-101 has a 10-second buffer memory; you can dance all you want- you'll probably never hear any interruptions in the sound when the MDS-101 starts rocking. But, also as with earlier models, it is important not to bump the deck when it is updating a disc's table of contents, since any interference during this critical step can cause loss of your recorded track or the edit you have performed.
When I first tested the MDS-101's siblings, only 60-minute blank MD's were available. Now the first 74-min-ute discs have been released. If you don't mind paying more for the blank disc than for the CD, you can now copy all but the longest CD's to MD. More likely, people will find MD useful for making compilations of their favorite tunes. In that case, an MD can hold as many as 255 tracks with a maximum total playing time of 60 or 74 minutes (disc space may be reduced if you somehow manage to scratch a disc).
After you've copied various CD tracks to MD, you can use the MDS-101's editing features to your heart's content. It's not clear how many people will really use all the fancy editing features (some home recording engineers will undoubtedly do some really cool stuff), but they certainly demonstrate the power of disc recording compared with tape. Personally, my life is too busy to mess with stuff like that, but I suppose, on occasion, I'll find it useful. I do appreciate the write-protect features on MiniDiscs; there's nothing worse than accidentally erasing (or editing) your favorite music. I hope that some clever Sony engineer devises a way to write-protect individual tracks on an MD as well.
A final note: MD labels are upside down-both logically and by the convention established for computer disks. After you read an MD's label, you have to turn it around to insert it into the recorder. MD overcomes all the problems of the CD jewel box- let's go ahead and make it perfect. Hey, Sony, I'm not kidding: There's still time to fix this!
The MDS-101 is an impressive piece of technology. Whether you are using it as a recorder to make discs for playback in your MD portable or as a stand-alone home player, it has more than enough features as well as very good sound quality, which almost equals that of CD. I don't think Mini-Disc is a fad or an ill-conceived system. It brings something new to the party and promises to find many enthusiasts, even if the labels are upside down.
