This is where I pretend to be a hard-core audiophile, having ears and speakers good enough to pick apart audio created using various recording methods, or something. I'm not an audiophile; I don't have incredibly expensive headphones or speakers, and my ears aren't yours, so it's really hard to make any evaluation of the R-70's sound completely objective. I have, however, tried to be thorough in what I'm being subjective about.
Minidiscs use the ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding) system to slim down digital audio so it will fit onto the disc's 140MB capacity. As with most audio compression schemes, ATRAC is lossy, which means that there is necessarily some loss in quality. The question is, are your ears and equipment good enough to notice? I could go into great detail about how ATRAC works, but that's done far better in this paper. Instead, I'm going to tell you how it sounds.
For audio quality testing I used a set of computer speakers (with sub), headphones, and my stereo. Music was encoded using the 'normal' settings on the R-70, with MP3s being recorded using the Fraunhofer encoder, at 128, 192, and 256 with VBR on. All encoded audio was tested against the original digital source, in this case all from originally mastered CDs. I tried to hit all genres with the following tracks.
- Nine Inch Nails - Wish
- Tool - Stinkfist
- Econoline Crush - By the Riverside
- U2 - Beautiful Day
- R.E.M. - Daysleeper
- Tori Amos - Hey Jupiter
- Dido - Thank You
- Meat Beat Manifesto - Prime Audio Soup
- Moby - Natural Blues
- Johnny Cash - Ring of Fire
- Geto Boys - Damn it Feels Good to Be a Gangsta
- Orff - O Fortuna
- Beethoven - Fifth Symphony
- David Bowie - Space Oddity
- Rolling Stones - Street Fighting Man
An eclectic playlist, to say the least. I wanted to include some Britney Spears for all the fans out there, but was unable to track down an actual CD of her work to provide a pristene enough digital copy for comparison purposes. All you bubble-gum pop fans will just have to extrapolate.
So how does it sound? Well, remember, this is all subjective and very dependent on both my ears and the equipment I used. In general, the R-70 versions of all songs had sound quality somewhere between 192- and 256-Kbps MP3s. The sound quality leans significantly more towards the 256 end of the scale, with only a couple of songs being slightly lacking compared to the 256-Kbps VBR MP3. All in all, the R-70 sounds great, and blows 128-Kbps MP3s out of the water. The ATRAC version of the songs, for the most part, sounds more rich than their MP3 counterparts. Again, this is with my ears and my equipment; take that with a healthy grain of salt.
Comparing to the original CD source is difficult, as the results from both 256-Kbps MP3s and Minidisc are virtually indistinguishable from the originals. MP3s encoded at 192 Kbps are more easily spotted, especially with headphones, but in general, both the 256-Kbps MP3s and ATRAC encoding were as "near CD" quality as my equipment and ears were able to determine.
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