|
 M-Audio Transit
by Sean
 In 1998 I made what would become one of the best purchases of my adult life; my Sharp 722 minidisc player.
It was little, the media was cheap and (near) infinitely reusable, the ATRAC standard had reached maturity by this time so the sounds quality was (to my untrained ear) CD level. The Sharp 722 comes with two inputs, an analog one and an optical S/PDIF input. The secret to this little boxes' amazing quality was the S/PDIF because it let the ATRAC codec modify a non-noisy signal, something that I wouldn't shell out the cash to do with the analog.
My big problem though was that I had music that had been given to me as mixes, or live CDs from bands I knew, or mixed media CDs from MP3.com (a moment of silence please) that would gag my DVD player (the only device I owned with a S/PDIF out.) On top of which said player never broke the signal, which meant that whenever I recorded a MD for a full album I would then have to go cut it down. Still the sound was great, the size wonderful and I really did enjoy the confused looks from co-workers and passers by whenever they saw me change the media.
All of this has changed now thanks to my discovery of the Transit. Made by M-Audio, a name probably familiar to any desktop musician because of the famous Oxygen-8 USB keyboard that let you be a tweaker without having to squint your eyes to make out the knobs, this little box (about the size of a altoid's tin) allows you to hook up, via USB, to your desktop PC and supplies you with a S/PDIF and analog (1/8th inch) output, as well as a modified S/PDIF/analog input to send sound back via the Transit.
Once installed on your Mac or PC the Transit driver tool allows you to determine the bit rate and directionality of data-stream. The lower frequencies (up to 48KHz) allow for both 16 and 24 bit bidirectionality, where the higher (88.2-96KHz) frequencies only allow for one-way traffic. Interestingly this seems keep to tying into your home stereo because it will transmit 16bit DTS signals as pass-through (via the S/PDIF.)
Now that I've bored you all what this really comes down to is that I can listen to any of my music anywhere I want thanks to this little toy. At $80 a pop (at Daddy's Music on Mass. Ave) this is already the perfect solution to the minority of us out here who don't want to drop $200 on yet another piece of electronics that will go out of date in a year or two.
|
