[Five]

yes, that recording is quite good for MD... do you have another track from that show where the drummer's really hitting the cymbals all the time? I think the lack of cymbals is what's really making it sound very close to full quality.

I confessed earlier that my example is a little skewed, because the room used for the atrac recording is really hard to get a good recording in. But it is a true story, that is my last atrac recording side by side with my first Hi-MD WAV recording. But still, I have downloaded some atrac MD shows and they sound really substandard on average (older codecs??).

the whole banning of atrac came about from the topic of high bitrate mp3 recordings, how they sound about the same as atrac which is allowed. so it is more logical to have both or none... since this is a lossless site, none is more logical!

I found a silver boot for $3.99 at a goodwill (like a permanent garage sale store) and got it home to discover that it was sourced from high bitrate mp3. it sounded 99.9% identical to what I imagine the lossless version would sound like, and also sounded better than 9/10 lossless torrents I have downloaded in the last few years. Another time a Billy Joel set showed up that was lossy-sourced at an average bitrate and got pulled, but it sounded much better than the fully lossless 12th generation tape that I left running on the tracker.

bottom line here is that for better or for worse, this is a lossless tracker. The potential for lossless is greater. wouldn't you feel better recording on a lossless recorder than on your atrac md? don't you believe that you have the strong potential of getting an even better recording by using a WAV recorder? if you can squeeze so much quality out of an antiquated lossy deck, imagine what you could do recording at 24bit.