Topic: Sony PCM-D100

[page]

I would never use an external AD with this deck and record DSD

Pretty much, yeah I agree. This is basically a D50 that does DSD and has a better volume lock on it. If you wanted to use an external ADC (which is likely to be PCM) then you're almost better off getting a cheaper D50.

Wish they could come out with a DSD firmware for the hs-p82 then the discussion would be over 
Tascam already has a few DSD playback and bench recorders

I think they would need the units to swap chips.

I'm only luke warm about it in the hs-p82; I'd have to drop it to PCM for editing... Seems like a whole lot of churn and space with 8ch for what would amount to not much gain. Now, the D100 has potential on some of the classical 2ch stuff I do if I could find a super clean preamp ala a Millenia or Forsell that was field powered as I'm very rarely editing that stuff, or at least so few edits that using a DSD DAW wouldn't hurt nearly as much. That would be (.)(.)

[H₂O]

Am hoping the hardware is already in place

The v3 had a DSD capible burr brown AD chip (I am pretty sure a lot more support chips, a diff clock and different wiring - would have been needed to make this work)

[thomasdrv]

It's avalible in Japan from 21 November

[F.O.Bean]

Im REALLY tempted to get one of these! With that Denon DSD Receiver coming onto the market, it could be a killer setup with Sony D100>DSD Denon Receiver. I just dont think my playback is good enough to hear the true DSD quality at the present moment tho

[LikeASong]

What's up with the DSD format? Last time I read about it, the general consensus was that it wasn't overly superior to PCM - IF AT ALL, due to DSD's higher distortion and other factors. Has something changed?

[tekdroid]

I wonder if they have made the start-up time far faster? I want to start recording almost immediately.

* FLAC playback finally. However no FLAC recording, which is a real shame.
* Hi-Res Audio seems to be its main selling point over the PCM-D50.
* SD card support.
* wireless remote
* Editing in-body. Fade-in and fade-out may save some time for some users.
* File split & join
* pitch-adjustment like the PCM-M10.
* option to record to 2 different file formats at once.
* 6 choices of EQ (which include custom settings apparently).
* orange backlight is gone, replaced with white.
* redesigned controls, mics, etc.

Price.
$450 would be a lot more reasonable than the equivalent of ~$1000 Sony is asking from their store.
Unit is still pretty bulky. It would be great to make it smaller.

[adrianf74]

$450 would be a lot more reasonable than the equivalent of ~$1000 Sony is asking from their store.  Unit is still pretty bulky. It would be great to make it smaller.

I'm willing to bet it'll street around $650-$700 which is still too much for what it is. 

[H₂O]

I wonder if they have made the start-up time far faster? I want to start recording almost immediately.

* FLAC playback finally. However no FLAC recording, which is a real shame.

FLAC recording doesn't work very well - the fact that it has to realtime process the recording, FLAC encoding eats up CPU cycles (which in turn kills the battery and slows down the file IO) and limits the compression ratios (This has to do with the limited memory and CPU on the recorder - and the fact you are streaming in the audio)

The Sound Devices 7xx series offered this for the first time in 2007 and I ran it once and never again.  I only got 10-20% compression and the recorder couldn't record at as high of sampling rate as when recording in BWF

Record RAW - FLAC later

[H₂O]

Pic between D50 and D1 - give an idea of size (same as D50) and screen size Larger than D50

[tekdroid]

Record RAW - FLAC later

True, but just like MP3 and MPEG2/MPEG4 video, if there is enough demand the necessary steps will be made to do it in hardware efficiently. I guess there is not enough demand on the hardware side even though it's 2013. Lossy codecs get all the hardware encoding attention.

[ScoobieKW]

I'd have to say that with the price of storage media, that battery life would trump file size.

Even with a dedicated chip, the encoding processing takes energy.

 

[LikeASong]

+1. Don't see the need of directly recording to FLAC, converting from raw to flac wastes very little time compared to the significant investment in hardware that would be neccesary to implement FLAC recording in our portable recorders.

[tekdroid]

re: FLAC encoding
Writing to flash media also takes energy. Sony's D100 pages brag about MP3 battery life on their unit. To me that suggests that despite the heavy processing to encode to MP3, they are already making battery savings by writing far less data to the flash chips versus the raw data being dumped onto them.

I don't see why FLAC can't be done similarly (eventually), since encoding to FLAC doesn't require any of the heavy-processing psycoacoustics algorithms, right?

Writing far less data will mean power savings when writing to flash, which could offset some of the processing power consumption...I don't know. Sony had no problem with battery life when they were making MiniDisc. ATRAC was implemented really well and it meant less motor spin time and effective buffering. Anyway, MP3 has had a long time to get to the stage it has now (as far as efficient encoding implementations are concerned), so it may take a while with FLAC too, but to be honest I don't think enough demand is there among the population, sadly. Because I think it could be done easily if the will was there.

One thing I do know is that the HD camcorder I bought recently does really well with battery life, despite massive number-crunching recording to AVCHD or MP4. In comparison to this complexity, FLAC encoding would (should) be far easier. FLAC's problem is that it's not integrated in any major consumer standards from any of the Big Companies, so there must be far less will to go there except in specialist devices such as this, which finally get some playback love.

We don't see FLAC implemented in Blu-ray standards. Not in CD. Not in DVD. Not in many electronics used at home or portably. So there's probably not much incentive to develop (and spend money on) an encoder. Anyway, I'm happy that playback is there. This is how it started for MP3 too.

[H₂O]

MP3 is lossy and FLAC is lossless - lossy compression doesn't require as many resources as lossless compression

Lossy compression can cut corners to encode faster - such as cutting out all assumed inaudible frequencies, etc

Lossless compression uses larger look up dictionaries and better compression is achieved with more historical information is known about the stream.

Also MP3 recording will use the lowest settings of the AD 16bit 44.1khz

If i where recording in FLAC I would want to encode at 24bit 96khz which has a stream rate at almost 3x that of 16bit 44.1khz

[LikeASong]

+1. Don't see the need of directly recording to FLAC, converting from raw to flac wastes very little time compared to the significant investment in hardware that would be neccesary to implement FLAC recording in our portable recorders.

I meant that "...converting from raw to flac ON OUR COMPUTERS wastes...", forgot that part. Every taper knows how to do a wav>flac conversion and it's a fast, easy one - why bothering in implementing a completely new encoding method? Just for the sake of saving 10 minutes?