James Jarvie wrote,
| I just bought a Sharp MT-15 (my first venture into the world of MDs). I
| made a recording on Saturday with which I am very disappointed. The
| recording came from a very well recorded cassette. I patched the RCA
| cables from the cassette into the minidisc input of the MD, and made my
| first recording. The quality stinks.
My first guess is that the recording level may have been too high, and the
signal would have been clipped in conversion from analog to digital.
| Now I know that I should have tried a digital recording. But I couldn't.
| I don't have any equipment (currently) with a digital output.
You couldn't: you were copying an analog source. An audiocassette is an
analog storage medium that outputs an analog signal. You had no choice.
With a DAT player at James's job,
| I tried hooking up the DAT via an optical cable that I bought; but the MD
| didn't know that the connection was made.
There are a large number of possibilities there. It could have been an
analog, not optical cable; it could have had the wrong kind of connector.
Perhaps the DAT doesn't send out a digital signal until it starts playing,
so if you start the MD recorder first it will find no signal. Perhaps you
had set some things incorrectly.
| I had the same trouble with a mini plug to mini plug cable that I bought to
| play the MD through the aux jack on my car CD player.
That would not be an optical cable, nor one suitable for coaxial digital
signals.
| My question: Is the compression responsible for the terrible quality
| recording?
Probably not, unless your recorder is malfunctioning.
| Is it that I started with an analogue source (still a bad thing because I
| want to record many analogue sources as noted above).
No; analog recordings to MD sound almost as good as digital ones, and when
the source is audiocassette or vinyl, you have no choice.
| Audio Quality must be close to a CD or I abandon the
| format regardless of conveniences.
It should be, and it's hard to tell what went awry for you.
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