MZ-R900 Atrac and Atrac R

[Andrew Pielet]

I am a little confused. My R900 has Atrac 3, correct? Is Atrac R new? Or does sony utilize both for this machine? Why does everybody (now) say Atrac R is the best? I am not sure what I have, what is new, what is the difference, Why they changed Atrac so recently. I haven't seen too many explanation posts on this subject, so I am sure others would like to knowas well.
Thanks!!

 

[gloco]

Atrac 3 is Atrac Type R. Type R sounds so much better than Atrac 4.5. Instruments are separated, there's "air" in the recording and there's a lot of treble richness in the recording. Also, the midrange is much "Warmer" and basically, Type R recordings sound a hell of a lot like the original. Type R is backward compatible, my Sony MD unit from 2 yrs ago plays all Type R recordings. So its not really a issue. I don't know why they changed it, but i'm not complaining.

 

[DanG]

ATRAC3 is not the same as ATRAC Type R. ATRAC Type R is still regular ATRAC (292 kbps compressed audio) but encoded in a different way. Sharp, I believe, has entitled their newest flavor ATRAC v6.

ATRAC3 is a totally new compression algorithm, known also as "MDLP". It compresses down to 132 kbps for double playing time and 64 kbps for quadruple playing time. Why is it not 146 kbps and 73 kbps? Because the Sony engineers forgot to include the standard feature in Atrac decoders to play unknown information as silence. So some of the memory which could be used for higher-fidelity audio needs to be used to make sure older MD players don't play loud static when trying to read ATRAC3.

 

[coolvij]

.....and DanG saves the day!