Okay, I know this is an old thread, as are all of the threads I have just finished reading, relating to this issue of transferring minidisc recordings to a hard drive. This might end up being a fairly pedantic question as well, but it is what it is....
Originally, my question was also whether there was anything to be gained by a real-time MD transfer to a 24-bit file. After all, we do it with cassettes. Still, at this point I get that it would make a lossy (ATRAC) file just a bigger lossy file, only with less artifacts, which seems moot to me.
My situation is that I picked up a SHARP MD-420 unit some years back, and recorded a tron of shows with it, before realizing the implications of ATRAC compression. At that point, I switched to a Microtrack, and things started looking (and sounding) a whole lot better.
In the meantime, I've got a few hundred minidics sitting here that need to be transferred, so I can store them as data, and can play them on a .flac player on my computers. It seems to me that my sole potion is to run them through an analog cable into the hard drive, which is a shame, since that means by-passing the 4-pole signal, in favor of a standard 1/8" cable, into the soundcard.
As there is no optical out on the unit, and no dedicated "line out" which would establish a sort of "auto-level" output gain into the computer, do I just crank the output volume from the MD until all the way? It seems like the answer would be yes, and frankly, I can play back minidiscs at just about any level, and still capture it satisfactorily on my hard drive, but I'm wondering if any discussion has taken place about setting a recommended output level for capturing on a computer?
Also, what about not capturing as 24-bit, but bumping the sample rate from 44.1 to 48kHz? Mathematically, that seems more appropriate, and that would also more directly affect the dynamic range, so I'd be eager to hear any thoughts on that approach.
Thanks in advance, and if there actually was a discussion about these two points that I missed, sorry!