What happens when I try to play an LP track on old, non-MDLP hardware?
The track is played as silence. A 20 min. LP2 track is played as 10 min. silence. A 20 min. LP4 track is played as 10 min. silence (because the MD unit thinks it’s playing an SP mono track). The non-LP machine’s display of the track name is also likely to show the characters “LP:” at the beginning of the title. These characters are put there by MDLP recorders in their factory default setting (this feature, called “LPstamp”, can be disabled). MDLP machines will also strip off the initial “LP:” (if LPstamp is enabled) when displaying LP track names.