My first post!

From Wednesday's show:: The HSX-109 and RioReciever.

I have only one disagreement with that review. It states that the unit has poor rip speeds.

I disagree completely. Its rip speed is decent (not spectacular), but the more important factor is the way it handles encoding. One of the beautiful things about the unit is that it does all the encoding in the background, so you can feed it a stack of discs all in one sitting and have it worry about the encoding later. I can actually get a lot more ripping done in a single sitting on this unit than I've ever been able to do on my PC.

And the above is all without interrupting playback of anything you're currently listening to. Wow.

I'm SO tempted to get one of these things primarily as a ripping machine that feeds my empeg and secondly (is that a word?!) to pump audio into my decent home system. Does this have TosLink?

Would be nice if you could buy a version without any hard drives.... It would lower the entry price.

(For the record, I started THIS thread prior to the other one being locked, but I should have linked to this thread over here... live and learn!)

Does this have TosLink?

I don't know exactly what TosLink is, but the HSX-109 does have an optical digital audio output. Is that what TosLink is?

I'm SO tempted to get one of these things primarily as a ripping machine that feeds my empeg

Unfortunately, it won't directly feed the empeg at the moment. This is one of the features they are planning for the future. I'm waiting on pins and needles for that feature. And if it would feed a Rio Riot, I might even consider getting one of those so I could use the Riot outdoors while I'm mowing the lawn or whatever.

In another thread, Rob said that Riot support is coming very soon, empeg support coming a little later.

Yep, TosLink is the brand name for the square looking optical connector. Most optical connections use this except for portables that use minijack looking connectors.

Thats awesome that it has that!

I fully trust the team to eventually implement empeg dumping. It is great to know that they all have empegs so they are more motivated!

I too am considering a portable for just the same reason. Noise cancelling headphones even do a decent job with the noise from the lawn mower (but can't handle wind very well).

It hurts to think of all the money I spent on MiniDisk equipment that I never use anymore. At least I was able to sell the car deck!

Empeg download could even make the same update as Riot support, in a simpler form than our ultimate goal.

Rob

Empeg download could even make the same update as Riot support, in a simpler form than our ultimate goal.

That would be rather cool, I must say.

Because as a standalone ripper, the HSX really rocks. It would definitely make a great empeg-feeder.

Except that it doesn't do VBR or normalising.

Except that it doesn't do VBR or normalising.

Well, I don't have a problem with either of those things.

The storage on the car player is easy enough and inexpensive enough to upgrade, so although VBR is nice, it's not completely necessary. I'm quite happy with encoding at 256kbps-fixed on the HSX, the resulting files sound great on the car player.

And normalizing isn't an issue because (as far as I can tell), almost all of the CD's I've ever seen are already normalized. I get better results with Richard's dynamic volume adjustment than I ever could with normalizing.

Really? I've had very varied results ripping from CD, and find that many don't appear to be normalised at all.

I am fundementally against dynamic volume adjustment.

Really? I've had very varied results ripping from CD, and find that many don't appear to be normalised at all.

When ripping the bulk of my album collection, I used a program which gave me a report of the peak level of each song. All but a couple of them them were at 97 percent or above.

It is possible that your collection is more eclectic than mine. I pretty much only have mainstream albums in my collection.

I am fundementally against dynamic volume adjustment.

I understand the fundamental arguments against dynamic compression, and they are valid. However, normalization still will not make two differently-produced albums appear to sound at similar volumes, and is therefore useless to me.

In practice, Richard's voladj works quite well. When I need audiophile quality at proper volume levels, I can turn it off.

Both features which I need. Although both <i>could</i> be fixed in a software update