I appreciate the mentions and your very considered and sensible approach to MiniDisc. I guess melted loading belts are just going to become more common. I’m glad I replaced mine when I did.
A lot of the later Sony MD machines dont seem to have suffered from this. Maybe the compound was better. I have two units from the late 80's with the original belts and they are still good... Cassette players and R2R machines Ive done loads....
@@Jewellerybybarrie Guess you have been lucky. I have one of the last home models available in the UK, the Sony MDS-JB980 and the loading belt failed about 5 years ago. Thankfully a friend kindly helped by obtaining and fitting a new one.
Rubber bands, my very first dealer used to sell me broken separates hifi units and items for £1 each. I had to fix them using items I found around my home. I'd save lunch money to buy said items. I can't begin to name the items I bought. All thrown away by my family. My favourite item was a Sony TC 206 cassette player. Used it to record some German oral assignments with a friend. I even got the VU meters illuminated god knows what. I don't joke when I say that unit must have weighed around 5kg. Oh and the opening mechanism was strange, like a toy car. Using a weight and winding mechanism to have it open slowly. Some of the items didn't even need fixing, a Marantz CD player whose tray only retracted using the power button. Or a Sony amp with an extra long volume slider, it crackled only when moved. Just set the volume and it was fine. I hate to think about those objects now.
Mary-Chapin Carpenter's "Come On Come On" album is almost exactly as loud as that Oasis album, but doesn't get much recognition because it's a Country album from 1992, which was before the CD loudness war was even a recognized phenomenon, and it used old-fashioned analog compression to make it loud, rather than digital brickwalling. Plus it's a well-recorded and well-mixed album despite its loudness, whereas everything from Oasis sounds like distorted mush.
The one industry to wholeheartedly adopt MD in the 90’s was broadcasting. Being able to record up to 8 hours on a disc instead of one hour on a reel of tape made time delaying programs so much easier. MD lasted until hard drive space became ridiculously cheap.
I must confess after using thousands of Cassette tapes with my ZX81, C64, in multiple cars and about a dozen ghetto blasters, walkmans and players, not once did I ever experience a tape getting chewed up. Thanks for the upload.
Lucky guy! I have about 25 tapes that were eaten at one point by some player somewhere (and all different ones). They now have audio dropouts in the spots where they were eaten.
@@Cincinnatijames I still have my C64 and ZX81, I'll fire them up over the festive period, last time I did a couple of years ago 3D Monster Maze, Action Biker and Football Manager were working fine. My cassette journey has not ended, there is still time for me to join the chewed up club.
it was usually a really shitty cheap effed up mechanism that did this, and/or extremely thin or cheap longest play cassettes... that had prob been through such mechanisms plenty and/or received a bit too much heat in a car etc. to soften up just enough.....P Metal type tapes were the BOMB, and with Dolby C, you COULD get DAMN close to CD quality, at least as far as any non-cyborg could hope to honestly hear..... 😁
Minidisc did not fail in the UK. It had good success until replaced by solid state digital record and playback systems. There were many portables and home decks sold and it also enjoyed professional use too.
Yep just blame Steve Jobs and the iPod... But MD should have nailed CD's coffin shut but it didnt because of the fact that MD was recordable multiple times when CD was only single.
@@Jewellerybybarrie I personally don't think Minidisc was ever going to get near CD, the quality didn't get close until the later revisions of ATRAC, however it was meant to replace cassette and for me it did for all my home recordings. The instant access and on disc editing meant it also replaced reel to reel for playing in Sound F/X in my local theatre and carts in some TV and radio production.
I still have 3 working disc players here in the UK. The eject band is rubber and needs replacing every 15 years but it is easy to do and the band is £4. To release a jammed disc turn the player upside down and press ‘eject’ button.
@Jewellerybybarrie Everyone was getting into the Mp3 market, not just the iPod. Even later, MiniDisc played MP3s that were converted to ATRAC with a NetMD recorder.
I've used many formats over the yearsand I've always gone for the stuf that was convenient. I got on CD very early purely because I saw the benefit of using it in my DJ business. Along with 12" singles, it worked very well. But when Minidsc came out I could see it was unlikely to suceed but I kept an eye out for some shops selling their stock off cheap as I saw benfit to using it it to record my own songs. I bought a cheap Sony unit and 90 blank discs that were being sold off cheap. And since then I 've ended up using them more and more over the years. I've used them for backing up old computer casettes, but I've ended up loving the sound of Minidsc. I use it most nights to lay in bed listening to. Works for me.
I have to laugh because it seems like that's the reaction I get every time I post a video :) It just takes me too long to post. I'm going to try to change some stuff so it takes less time; the way I used to make videos clearly does not work for me anymore in terms of getting them done in any sort of reasonable timeframe.
I have an MDS-JE330. It worked about a year ago, so I must dig it out and check those belts. Loved MD back in the day, as I used to work for Sony so had access to the staff shop. They alwats had blank MDs. Even had MD in the car for a while. Thanks for the video, and never worry about the tech bits being boring. They are always worth this time in my book.
I love old Sony equipment but their belts *always* turn to liquid tar :) So yeah I would just go ahead and replace the belt in yours even if it seems ok for now. Eventually they will all need it. I've never had a piece of Sony equipment made pre-2005 or so that didn't have belts like that. (I'm just not sure about their newer stuff, but the older stuff is all like that.)
I was a kid when Last Action Hero came out, and there was a shot where Arnold swaps a minidisc in a player to change the music in the movie. I wanted one of those and eventually figured that it was something made for the movie. Then I watched The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, one of the episodes mentions recording a song onto minidisc. Got curious and realized they were the thing Arnold had in Last Action Hero. Eventually got a Minidisc deck and ran with it.
Thank you so much for getting into the weeds with the technical stuff. As a signal processing nerd I highly approve of your opinion of that being the best part.
I discovered MD in '97 or '98. I read about it in a magazine, I'm sure, but I'd found an online community that was cataloging the JDM hardware and proxy buying them that got me started. A friend at work joined me, abd we each bought a portable player/recorder. It took ages to arrive, but it was live at first sight. I think it was my first experience with pride of ownership. At the time, I was recording in analog to dodge the copy protection, and so that I could level match my mixes. It was the cost of the blank discs, and the advent of MP3 CD-Rs that killed Minidisc for me. I could put hours of music on a 50¢ CD-R. But it's the hours spent lovingly crafting mixes on tape and MD that triggers nostalgia.
Minidisc players were available from Sony in a very compact Walkman size and it was the perfect format in the late 90’s for taking my favorite music on a run! These Minidisc players were able to read ahead and buffer multi-second segments of the music, largely as a power-saving feature so that the disc wouldn’t have to spin continually. It ran on just a single AA battery. Sony touted “G-protection”, making the mechanisms more fault-tolerant even when being jostled and bumped. All that meant it was robust enough to not skip when it was subjected to repeated shaking even in the midst of a sprint. No other format could offer that performance, with the higher quality and seekability of digital. It was definitely underrated by the public. You’ve prompted me to pull my player out of storage tonight in a bit of nostalgia. Still works! Thanks for this great video.
I bought a little Sony Net MD player in 2001. I loved that thing. Ripped all my favorite CD's to MD's and it was no problem to carry 3 or 4 of them around in addition to the one in the player. Good times.
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I think this move by Sony was the first nail in the coffin. Instead of embracing MP3, they insisted on the ATRAC format. This required either fresh ripping, or transcoding which was a heavy workload for computers at the time. I truly believe if they'd allowed drag and drop for MP3, we'd have seen minidiscs as a leader in the MP3 player market.
I still have a good quality Nakanichi cassette deck. It still plays & records. I use high quality cassette tapes like Maxell & never had one break or get tangled up. I have a copy of my Brother's jazz show from college in late 1979 & it still plays with no degredation.
I was one of the US MiniDisc fans from day one. (Couldn't afford the original MZ-R1, which was a terrible monstrosity, anyway, got the MZ-R2 on release day.) I had been one of those rare people who did tape things using metal tapes and the later-improved Dolby NRs, and even then, MiniDisc sounded better, and was FAR more convenient. Had my portable player (R2 eventually broke, got an R50,) a home "bookshelf system" (MD+CD+tape that I still have, although it no longer reads MDs,) and even a CD+MD in one slot JVC car stereo that I moved between three cars over the years before abandoning MD as my daily-use media. One thing that I still have, that appears to have been a *VERY* short-lived "flash in the pan" in the US are a couple dozen prerecorded read-only Minidiscs. They came in bigger cassette-sized cases with cassette-size album art pull-outs, and the shutter on them only opens on the "bottom", not the top. Looking at the disc media, they appear identical to a CD, the silver surface of a pressed CD, not the darker surface of an early CD-R.
You can adjust the recording level of a digital input on your MiniDisc deck. Page 17 of the operating instructions says "You can adjust the recording level regardless of the source selected with the INPUT button." It also says, "The volume can only be increased up to +12.0 dB (for analog recording) or +18.0 dB (for digital recording)." You can reduce the level by the same amounts even though that isn't specifically mentioned.
Wow. Even if you're not a professional sound engineer, your testing is masterful! You covered everything I could think of, and more. Personally, when recording a minidisc, I use a cd or wav file from one. Then run that signal through a separate dac and into the minidisc recorder.set for sp or normal recording. To my old ears the playback sound on a portable minidisc player is better than the same tracks at 320 kbps MP3s on portable MP3 players. I also have a minidisc deck in my home stereo hi-fi stacks. The difference between the minidisc and the cd is not much on my home hi-fi gear. Not much of a difference that I can hear anyway. To me, Cds, minidiscs, and CCTs are fun formats. I get a kick out of hard media. And I really like hearing an entire album from track one to track last. There's a worthwhile experience we're missing out on when we just cherry pick tracks on a streaming service. Or when we allow an algorithm to do that for us.
Thanks... definitely not a pro audio engineer but I've been a musician for most of my life. I don't really get into it on this channel much but I have played in bands and recorded music, both in recording studios and on my own. So I have a little bit better than zero knowledge when it comes to recording, but obviously not nearly to the level of someone who does it for a living. But there's a reason why I have that EMU 0404 :) and it came in handy for this video. I hadn't used it in years before this. I'm sure there are a lot better interfaces out there now (with official Windows 10/11 drivers, unlike what I was using here).
Back in the day, the MiniDisc was locked away like they were crown jewels and priced accordingly. So I stayed with what I could afford, Ye Olde Compact cassette.
I was a solo musician right around the time MiniDisc made it's premiere in the market and bought the MZ-1 for recording backup tracks. I was using cassette tapes which had no random seek so I was locked into the same set list unless I recorded a new tape with the songs in a different order. CD-R technology was limited to SCSI writers which were very expensive, problematic, portable CD players were prone to skipping and there were format incompatibilities too. The MiniDisc gave me random seek, titles, shuffle (not so good for a live gig but fun when listening to music), portability and a rugged player. Eventually I got some decks and a multitrack unit for more pro sounding recordings. I still have some decks and portables that work but my multitrack has died. Great format but poorly marketed with too much proprietary nonsense and lack of foresight killed the MiniDisc. It is now relegated to instructional and repair videos, like this one. Kudos for keeping the memory alive!
Same here - MiniDisc was basically the gold standard for backing tracks in my one man band performing days and for other acts at the time. Maybe still is but I'm out of the scene these days. It had all the right qualities - very robust, easily recordable, portable. Way better than CD in many ways.
Thank you for such a well put together resume about the progress of home recording from Compact Cassette through to solid state recorders. I used many formats starting with reel to reel through cassettes (never had DCC) Minidisc and solid state , and my own conclusions align with yours, but I still have a soft spot for physicality of the medium and the recordings (Mainly live music whilst providing PA systems to local events), and even today, some of the cassette material still brings back plenty of great memories.
I was enamored by the Sony MZ-1 usable display demo at the local Tower Records back in 1992 and the excitement has never worn off. Just a fantastic idea that made sense as a cassette replacement. Too bad people thought it was trying to replace the CD!
I freakin love the MD. Went all in with MD in the early 2000’s with a few top end Sharp 1-Bit home systems like the SD-SG11. Still have them today and they still work and look great. It was such a media ahead of its time. Really enjoyed how robust MD is physically, and the fact you can erase and re-record on them and have CD quality was amazing.
Thanks for a great video and for paying proper attention to DCC as well as MD. The DCC900 was the first DCC recorder and is the least reliable. Colin at Does Not Compute had a really bad experience with one, and unfortunately he never got it fixed. The big problem with this recorder is that it used SMD capacitors, which, being over 30 years old by now, are guaranteed to leak and destroy the circuit board. The DCC Museum doesn't even replace the caps anymore; they only repair 900's by replacing the entire circuit board. Second-generation DCC recorders are much better; they use electronic components that are much more reliable and the most likely flaw you will find in a DCC300 or DCC600 is that it needs new belts and new gears, all available from the DCC Museum of course. Third generation DCC recorders such as the DCC730 and DCC951 made huge steps forward in integration and design. You can even program your own titles on you self-recorded tapes. And I've been working for years on a project to make some more improvements to 3rd generation DCC recorders, such as a customizable VU meter and the possibility to stream to and from a PC, program titles with a normal keyboard instead of the remote control, and maybe even the possibility of making your own prerecorded DCC's. I'm also thinking of replacing the S/PDIF input and output chips, so you can record from, say, BluRay players that only output Dolby Digital or DTS (and no PCM); that should take care of the SCMS limitations too.
I have a ton of MDs. I went through 3 failing Sony units that quit loading. What threw me off the belt route was it acted like the problem had more to do with software or reading incompatibility. So i eventually bought a Tascam, hoping that the more pro-aligned brand would be reliable. SO FAR (acknowledging the jinx) it has been reliable. After seeing your video here and i recall watching a Techmoan video on the subject, I hope i can diagnose and repair the problem if it crops up. I loved the MD format. It was very useful.
The belt issue is only really for the MDLP decks. The earlier decks used cogs and gears without any belts which is why there are so many working MDS-JE330 models out there.
Awesome! I’ve got a Sony MiniDisc deck and it’s such a cool format to use. It’s great to add songs onto and have custom playlists with a physical format. Sure cassettes and CDs do the same, but everything from the way it works, to ATRAC/NetMD, and the many different designs that both the players and MDs themselves have make it fun to use. It was very interesting to see the detailed overview of the different formats. Glad that you were able to get it working, that keyboard input is also a great addition!
I remember when I was 19 and the idea of being able to record on a disc captured my imagination. I ended of finding a way to at least borrow $700 to buy a player/recorder. The SQ was VERY disappointing compared to CD even on my crappy audio system at the time. I talked to someone about minidiscs and they wrote it off as "trim 20% of the top, trim 20% off the bottom, put is on a little disc, and charge a fortune for it. The analysis of the waveform confirms what he said and what my ears were telling me. Turns out he was right on the money.
Thank you for that! Every time I’ve tried to pronounce it properly I’ve been chastised for pronouncing it “techniks”…. Even by studio producers, engineers, and assorted other recording industry personnel. I tell them reading/ spelling/english comprehension is a wonderful thing! 😛 Thanks for the grammatical support. 👍 We’re in the “techniques” minority out there, trust me!
@ It’s only ever pronounced Techniques by Americans anyway. Nobody across the entirety of Europe or Australia or New Zealand or the UK or anywhere in Asia, pronounces it with a Q.
I jumped on this right when it came out and loved it! MP3 ultimately pulled me away though (which had its own growing pains). I needed the music with me at the gym, road biking, in-line skating........exercising. I'm not a true audiophile so I can't speak to the superior quality of one over the other but the speed of adding songs on an mp3 player, and the volume was just untouchable by cd. Agree with you 100% though, it was cool as hell, quality was off the charts, fun to play with (can't discount that).
When I worked at a Sony Outlet store back in the late 00s, we had minidisc players and they were pretty much non-movers in the US. However, we had quite a few international travelers, and we got a lot of people who were interested in the mini disc marine head units. I had one guy come in and buy, like...5 or 6 of them for his "various boats"...which I think may have been more mini disc players that we sold for the entire rest of my time there, combined. Mini disc seemed neat, and I was tempted to get one when we were liquidating them just for the novelty of it all. But I was in college and luxury money mostly went to stuff that I knew I'd use, rather than random dead media formats.
I had a Yamaha MD8 an 8 track mini disc multitrack recorder that my band used to record practices. We feed it the 8 busses Group/Aux channels from our Yamaha PM 5000 analog mixer to the 8 tracks of the MD8 and we would use it as a writing tool. It was far more reliable than ADAT or DAT recorders of the time and you didn't have to rewind or get a punch-in just perfect. Even though it was a 16 bit 44.1Kilohertz machine it didn't have that terrible Digital scratching sound if you clipped the inputs like the Alesis or other DAT machines did. It was about as perfect of a setup as young band could want in 1998. We would have 20 or 30 friends come over to practice to listen and they always wanted tapes or CDs to listen too because they felt like they were a part of the group as well. We lived in a small town with nothing to do, no movie theater, no bowling alley so it was either come over to our "jamroom" or go hangout in the local gas station parking lot. But the Minidisc recorder we had was like having a professional engineer record your rehearsals. It captured our actual sound and made us better because we could make ourselves a copy with our parts turned up to listen to and learn from. So our vocalist would make a mixdown with his vocals way up so he could hear where he needed to work on things. We would get stereo drums, 2 separate guitars tracks, 1 bass guitar, 2 isolated vocals and mono keyboard part when one of us played a keys part for a total of 8 live tracks. Mini disc was far better than DAT but lacked the track count of analog. We ended up finding an analog Tascam MSR-24 a 24 track 1 inch multitrack machine that was used so I traded a guitar amp for it, we got it after the Yamaha MD8 died after the power flickered during a storm! WHOMP WHOMP.
24:44 That's odd, as I had a MiniDisc recorder that looked exactly like that (but black) that I bought here in the UK in late 1997 or early 1998 and it was a good deal as it was reduced in price and came with some high-quality Cambridge Audio interconnects. MiniDisc seemed pretty popular in the UK from my perspective. I knew a lot of people who had portable players.
Mini disc was great for me to record my DJ sets and listen back to them in the early 2000s. I actually bought my first one when visiting the UK, finding them in the US without going to a Sony store was not easy
I think Sony should have released a 5.25" Minidisc PC drive early on, to allow the discs to store PC data or audio, back in the mid/late 1990's storage was expensive and recordable CDs were in their infancy, Sony could have made a big inroad and got MD drives into millions more homes if they'd gone that route, if techincally possible. Net MD was too little, too late.
I still have a mds-j550 in my stereo rack to this day! I own another deck for my other stereo, a few different portables and a car deck as well! I was a fan since around 1999. I admit I don’t use them daily anymore, but for about 6 years it was my most used format. What amazes me is to this day, I’ve never had a disc fail! I still have the first discs I made and they all play great still. Although I’ve been through a few decks over the years. Mostly due to the same issue yours had. But back then I knew nothing about repairing them. 😞
I’m no “audiophile” and have 50+ year old ears but I can definitely tell a significant difference between the MP3 and AAC files I play on my phone, or even over Bluetooth to my hifi and the CD’s I play directly on my CD hifi. Lossless definitely sounds better.
I remember getting a portable MD recorder in middle school in 96. To myself and nerdy friends, it was soace age tech and "CD" quality copying during a sleepover at friends places was amazing before the days of discovering MP3 and CD burning. A cargo shorts pocket full of MDs was amazing VS tapes/CDs in a pocket lol In 2000ish I got the diamond rio, but storage was INSANELY expensive, I couldn't afford a 64 MB CF card for like $100, so I stuck with MD for a bit longer, still with many people not knowing about MD, it was still space age for those people in 2002. It was a great format IMO. Memories
In Brazil it was an obscure technology. I was amazed when my brother installed a Sony MDX-C7900 in his car because his father in law at the time had a recorder unity
nice video with lots of details, good job, i can share something, my experience. MD are amazing and easy to use but in some cases i still prefer cassette. there is only 1 condition, you need really good deck not cheap s... good tape and good deck will gives you lots of fun and quality as well. when i was young during cassette golden age i didnt have good deck and quickly i jump into cd and then mp3 even but now i do vintage audio restoration as hobby and mostly are cassette decks. now im able to compare all those formats DAT, DCC, MD, CD, Vinyl and cassettes. DAT is amazing when it comes to quality no compressed and most of them has very good DAC and sound superb. When it comes to cassette you need really fully restore deck as i do. im taking apart every single bit of mechanism, all clean and assembly back with good grease, new rubber parts, new switches or opened and clean properly (not spray like swith cleaners, there are rubish). good deck with chrome or metal tape recorded +4 or +8 (in some decks) and you wont hear noise unless you play very creazy loud and no no no any dolby, they are compressors and companders, all sound not natural as without. also you needd to have deck with bias calibration so you can setu record bias for the tape, every tape need diferent bias setup. after all the cassette sound is amazing, nice, worm so natural and no digitalisation which you can hear on many digital formats. Turntable and cassettes are the most natural soundings devices (but good one) another thinks are sources of your music. im buying old records not new or remastered, hudge diferent.
29:50 He's sort of right, it was Oasis' previous album Definitely Maybe. Owen Morris was the third mastering engineer they had mix the album after hating the previous two, feeling that the album didn't sound loud and aggressive like their live shows, so Morris essentially created brick walling for that album to achieve that goal, and the band loved it. You can see Morris taking the blame for starting it in the Oasis Definitely Maybe documentary here on youtube th-cam.com/video/E2oNRM8lhps/w-d-xo.html
I got a portable minidisc player last year and it's been just fun to discover this old format. I made a couple "mixtape" minidisc with covers and stickers and everything for my friends. It was a bit tedious to record though, as I have an older model and I could only use the digital out/in to record via my PC. And of course with the 4 seconds pause in mind for the separate tracks.
If I do decide to get a portable player (which I probably should have started with), it'll definitely be a NetMD player that doesn't require real-time recording. Still, I guess part of the fun for me is actually recording stuff the way I used to on cassette, but then having all the benefits of CD-style controls afterwards. I can see it becoming tedious if you do a lot of it, but I remember making mix tapes for my friends in the old days and I actually enjoyed sitting there and having to actually listen to the music I was recording.
I have the lower end version of that Technics dual deck cassette recorder. Mine lacks dual auto reverse, and HX Pro, and Dolby C. It also has LEDs for the VU vs VFD.
I suggest you buy a portable netmd recorder. The software is very easy to use. It'll record an album in 15ish minutes and no adding track titles, it'll import them automatically. I bought one on Facebook for 50 bucks. It's the most convenient method I've found for recording. Great video!
I loved mini disc. I used to record my cds to them . I had a md head unit in my Sierra Cosworth with stiff suspension. So cds would always jump and skip , were MD would not .
I never got on the alternative media types treadmill. While I really wanted a DAT deck, I didn't want to get a new CD player with digital output. As it was, for portable music, I could lay down a better than average first generation dub with my CD player and tape deck, which were highly acclaimed among those lucky enough to get one of my mix tapes. MiniDisc never entered consideration as I knew what lossy compression was, and it wasn't worth it for the cost/effort. Another thing not mentioned is that portable CD players were getting really good with digital skip protection... and car units were practically impervious. So when the alternative formats came into existence, they were already outshined by the advancements in CD... rendering them superfluous or irrelevant. That being said, I always enjoy your videos. They show your passion for the things you like. And while I've know about the 'brick wall' of music for a while, I cant remember seeing it in a waveform like in your video where you can see how bad it really is. I look forward to the next video. Take your time.
I used a Minidisc portable player starting in 1998. I used them to make mixes because i didn't want to use cassettes and cd burners were insanely expensive. Used them until 2005 when I bought an ipod. I liked it as a portable format. much better than using a discman.
I own both a MD (two portable Sony players in fact) and two tape decks. Tens of minidisks and literally hundreds of tapes (about 300 to be exact). Almost all of my tapes (maybe ~200) are blank tapes I bought off ebay, flea markets, garage sales, giveaways. I have *NEVER* paid 50$ for a tape, and trust me, I have many not only perfectly sounding but also still in their packaging. But, to the point. 1. Love the vid, no objections to MD, they're great and great fun to use. 2. No, tapes do not degrade with time as fast is you suggest, and the need to buy new is nowhere near as pressing is insinuated here. Yes, my tapes that were made in the 1970s may be "deck destroyers" already, I don't recommend going that far back, but something from the 90s or 2000s you can treat as new pretty much. 3. If you want to fare final resolutions on tapes you must have a good or a very good deck. Get a 3 head, maybe not Nakamichi but even a better Marantz, and record off CD pressing the monitor button (tape/source). You'll be very surprised. 4. Many people who even give a damn about physical media trade them and swap between each other. Sure, LPs are the king of hipster trade, but IF you wanna record your own mixes, and maybe give to a friend, tape has a strong position. Why? Well, clean MD is not that easy to find on the cheapo. Like I said, I can shoot a genial tape such as BASF Chrome Maxima for like 5eur on a good day, and record it on a 3-head then send to a friend. With an MD, well my friends don't have these at all... 5. Let's face it we're old anyway, the "kids" nowadays only listen to stream anyway...
I use a DAT for mastering and a CD recorder or MD for the final copy. If i ever lose the original due to age or scatches i can always make a new copy from the DAT. I use DAT becase i have lost recordings due to failed hard, thumb, SD card drives, from proper storage. I have tapes from 30 years ago that still work fine with zero errors. I can even back up a multi track audio such as DTS and Dolby Digital on a DAT tape and record it directly to a CD via Tosliknk or digital out without protecton with track marks in place. I even recovered multi-track studio recordings with the use of digital input on a pc from DAT. There is also multitrack used for MinDisc like a Tascam MD portastudio recorder. I only peserve my rare recordings and not use it for stuff that can be found easily elsewhere. Tape still stands the test of time even if its digital. I always made two copies and stored them differently. Optical media does have a shelf life. It self erases over time when the dyes in the disc deteriorate and the data becomes corrupt and is unplayable.
Very interesting comparisons at the end. I found a good Dolby C cassette deck was certainly vastly superior to B or no NR for my home recordings. MD was reasonably popular here in the UK and pretty much equaled CD quality to my non-golden ears.
In 1999 I had a portable walkman MiniDisk and a home unit, I thought it was the future, it was small and the disks were in a caddy like case and so didn't scratch, I remember the prices of units falling to the point of nearly giving them away and then it just disappeared. At one point it was quite popular in the UK and many of my friends had them, I would have thought Sony should have learned from the Betamax and allowed it to be licenced to other manufacturers. I cant believe the price of cassettes these days, I have some packs of BASF metal tapes and some TDK regular tapes that I bought around 2001, they are still good.
I got the MZ1 (iirc), the very first portable recorder, circa 1992 / 1993 It blew my mind, and friends. I even hit few tennis while having the MZ1 in it's supplied "holster", it mostly kept playing without any pause 🙂 I took it to various friends live sets (in pubs, or reception rooms) : using a cheap Sony tabletop stereo mic, it blew their mind too how incredibly close to the live conditions were captured on the disc. It was head and shoulders above anything they had used to record before. My MZ1 was very expansive (for a consumer product, at least : 4.500 Francs), but was way cheaper than any DAT deck / portable. Mostly pro / high end studios were using DAT at that time, I still have the MZ1, but its loading mechanism is jammed for years 😕 I never dared to strip it down, trying to fix this. I missed an opportunity to buy a Yamaha table deck, I've regret having missed it the day after. Sometimes, I look around french Craig's list... no luck so far : mostly blank MD (second hand or brand new). By the way : great video, and thanks for others videos about MD !
Minidisc did not fail. Lossless HD had a long life in Japan and amongst true audiofiles worlwide. Minidisc hd was superior to the early mp3 streaming but once streaming was able to match the audio quality it was much easier for consumers to use. Advances in DRM also sped up the streaming impetus being backed by record labels. And Apple jumping on the bandwagon with Ipod sealed it. Apple having a cool factor in the priority consumer segements have always fought disk material and disk drives, such as Blu Ray and DVD’s. I still use my hd mini disk but since Sony desupported Soundstage and made downloaded new material too difficult, I use it less and less.
I have lots to comment on. Firstly I love 8-Track and reel to reel, I still use them and I'm glad someone else has finaly said that cassettes sound terrible. I only used them for my 8 bit computers.
MD would have caught on with the introduction of the lossless HiMD subformat, Unfortunately the writing was already on the wall for physical formats in general, Not to mention the HiMD recorders and blank HiMD media was way too expensive for the average user to begin with.
I've got both of these and in my experience: minimal. But I already can't hear the difference between MD and CD. You'll only be able to hear it if you can hear the difference between an MD and a CD. If you're not already into MD/HiMD and you're interested in the 352kbit format, grabbing an AT3CD player is a significantly cheaper way to do it. (HiMD recorders cost ~2-4x as much as MDLP/NetMD recorders.) EDIT/add: In fact, I can't hear a difference between Type-R SP and AT3+ all the way down to 192kbit, but whenever I use HiMD I often use 256 or 352 to try to get pretty close to the MD SP/LP2 runtimes. The other-other way to get 352 would be to use one of Sony's many flash/HDD-based AT3 players from the NW- series, but there's a point at which "why not just put FLACs on an SD card?" might be the easier answer, if you have very good hearing.
Hey Cory, I've got a RH1 and a EH50. I mainly do 352 on MD80s. But I'm considering going to MD SP. I wouldn't mind getting a nice Sony deck with a digital out, HiMD don't have I believe. It would be interesting what the actual difference is in sound. Or if the awesomw 352 is placebo
When you recorded the cassette couldn't you just plug the line out of the tape deck into the line in on the PC ? It's what I do when I transfer reel to reels, 8-Tracks or records. I get perfect copies.
@@ModernClassic I use an old SoundBlaster card fron the 90's. Plus my ears are shot from 45+ years of loud music, so I probably couldn't tell the difference anyway. LOL.
Dolby C uses a technique called spectral skewing to increase headroom and high amplitude high frequency response. I have a couple of accurately calibrated decks here, one Pioneer and one Teac, that are both capable of making recordings that are flat within 1dB from 20Hz to 20kHz at 0dB even with a humble TDK FE Type I tape when recorded with Dolby HX Pro and Dolby C. Maxell UR tapes are diabolically awful by comparison to TDK FE tapes, so you may want to pick up a few of those at some stage while you still can.
For me they were fantastic. The old use case of recording live concerts from the radio. The post and pre editing capabilities were fantastic on later Sony units and could be controlled by a pc keyboard too. You never knew when the orchestra was going to start so you could start recording up 10 or so seconds after they did and still capture it all using the buffer inside the recorder. Then cut the session up after in to tracks and fade out the applause. When radio went digital on satellite and on terrestrial then direct digital input. Being lossy was a shame but good enough for the bandwidth limited radio broadcasts. Far better than DAT or CD recordable for on the machine editing.
I love the MD media. I’m looking at to get me a stationary MD player. I got my Sony MZ-R90 Walkman in late 90s or early 2000 i think. I still love to use it today.
the bandpass on 128k mp3 is perfect for fm radio. stereo FM cuts audio above 15khz which explains wy my low power FM sounds good even with my old 128k mp3's.
This is more of an interesting tidbit than anything, but revisiting the ATRAC3 LP2 vs. Vorbis 128kbit test from 20+ years ago where Vorbis beat LP2 at equivalent bitrates when both those codecs were new, but seeing how the latest version of the reference Vorbis encoder does in the modern day might be cool, ditto for Opus at SP and LP2-equivalent bitrates.
The Sony portable MiniDisks are superior to anything under one particular circumstance. That is when using IEM's while riding a motorcycle, with a helmet of course. The first crucial part is the remote which can easily be mounted on a jacket in the lapel area with buttons operable with gloves. Thus the whole rig was mounted in/on a jacket. The second great thing is the volume levels are high, which is sadly needed on motorcycles, and they sound fine. The other great thing is the astounding battery life. The terrible thing was the need to convert all files to Sony's codec, and the whole making disks chore. Which is why I went to phones and Bluetooth receivers. That and allowing Google map voice commands, a hugely good thing on a motorcycle in unfamiliar urban environs. The control was on the phone on a mount. Less than ideal but fine. I never found Bluetooth receiver that sounded as good as the MiniDisks in a mobile situation.
I had a Sony MD deck in my system for a long time. It was nice when I was streaming something to just flip it on and record something I like. Super convenient. Transformer crapped out though last year. That's what sucks now about minidisc. Everything is 20 plus years old now and everything but the highest end stuff really wasn't built to last.
I used to have a MiniDisc player from Pioneer in my stereo rack. For some reason I thru it away many many years ago. It was working so I don't know why I thru it away. I guess I didn't use it that much. It took a long time to get the music onto the disc. Same time as the CD because you were actually recording to the disc, just like a regular tape. I think that was the reason I didn't use it that much. It was easier with a CD I also had a portable MiniDisc player. I think it was a Sony. It had a "mini controller" thing on the headphone cable. It had a small display showing the song name and you could switch song with it while the player were in your pocket.
I can’t be 100% sure, since cameras, lighting, and displays make a difference, but I suspect that player is Sony silver, not champagne. Sony mostly reserved champagne for its high end home audio devices (mostly the ES series), which an E-series* minidisc deck is not. Even higher-end non-ES decks (like the QS series MDS-JB930’s I have) came in black and silver only. Indeed the front panel of the silver E-series devices are light base plastic with paint. (In fact, the black ones are painted too, though I don’t remember what color the base plastic is.) *Sony home audio components from the mid-90s until the end (around 2004?) fell into a few series, with the E series being the mainstream models, B the upscale models with the QS label, and then the high-end ES series. At least for E and B series, this shows up as the final letter in the prefix of the model numbers, e.g. MDS-JB930, CDP-XB930, TC-WE825S, and STR-DB2000, respectively, for the minidisc deck, CD player, cassette deck, and stereo receiver currently on my shelf - the cassette deck being the only E series component. With some exceptions, in 3-numeral model numbers, the first numeral is the relative place in the lineup (higher number = higher end), while the last two are generation. So my first MD deck, the MDS-JE510, was the second generation of the middle model. (It had followed the MDS-JE500, and was succeeded by the -JE520, -JE530, etc.)
Never had or wanted a MD. They were so expensive here in the UK. By the time the prices dropped, PC CD recorders were the same price with cheaper blank discs.
I have at least three MD players. A couple of Walkman's and a couple built into systems. I find them perfect for archiving my record collection. Why it never caught on was due to Steve Jobs and the original Ipod... Thats all, as far as Im concerned MD should have easily killed off the CD as its smaller, re-writable and just as good quality of sound wise.. I also use cassettes on a regular basis and reel to reel. I'm looking at buying a MD multichanger so I can just load it up and allow it to play. You did a good balanced video (see old tech) but one issue. Cassettes never got eaten due to the medium, but the lack of maintenance and leaving the things in a hot car. I still have pre recorded cassettes from the mid 1970's and they play perfectly.
I may at some point. I've actually had an LD player since the format was current and it still works. (I wasn't an early adopter, but unlike with MiniDisc, I did buy into it once it proved its worth.) It's a simple player, not a high end one (I think it's something like a Pioneer CLD-E2000), but that may be why it still works fine. A lot of high-end players are busted nowadays because their mechanisms are so much more complex. I've sold a lot of my LD's but I still have a few good ones.
Didn’t see much info on how this format did outside the US, and having a video on the topic without at least expanding benefits of NetMD vs using it as a traditional recorder is weird.
It didn't fail in Europe or Japan and wasn't really until the 4th generation iPod and iPod mini did it start to decline in the UK. Matt from the TH-cam channel Techmoan has covered it quite extensively, worth a watch to see how it's perceived this side of the pond.
I was too broke to afford DAT or MD so I recorded CDs to VHS hifi, as it was the lowest noise and highest range I could afford. It worked. MP3s were a boon and a curse because I can hear the artifacts. 128 is nails on chalkboard. 192 is annoying. I guess 320 is OK. But I went FLAC as soon as storage space became affordable. Most of my library is now FLAC or even WAV. Storage is so cheap, even FLAC is hardly worth the effort to encode to save a little bit of space. It's mainly useful for the meta tags. Lossy encodes are absolutely out of the question any more. I may be in my mid 50s now but MP3s still sound terrible to me.
I have a mini CD player from 1978 to 1983....by Philips and Aiwa ....it works with a full size CD... sometimes it would skip the last songs...a real classic 😊
CC has one advantage to all digital players (except the most sophisticated ones) - this is a short analog path with no digital patterns in a signal. The rest use better or worse DACs, and that's a real issue with a digital player. I agree to use CD/SACD/streamer with only a good external DAC (like Chord or higher). That's about a serious listening. For everything else it's about tactile and visual representation, and CC and MD are great in this. LPs are even better in these terms (near mint condition + MC microline cartridge + ultrasonic bath + an MC transformer + discrete phono stage = exceptionally good sound) PS Let's skip R2R cause 99% of audiophiles do not have an access to good copies And even when you record to a CC from a digital source, these patters are muffled with a tape imperfectness. And sure, you have to use a good DAC to record from.
I was also using MD for quite a few years. But: I did not buy a single one original MD in a record store. I only used copies of CDs MD sound - as long as you didn't use extra compression for long play mode - was really okay But.....MD could not survive because digital storage (USB sticks with MP3) is so much easier/better
I was considering MD back in the mid 90's and could not justify it. The cons just outweighed the pros. The only pros it had was, 1, it look cool as hell. 2, it sounded good. and 3, you can randomly skip and jump between tracks. But that's it. The cons were 1, it was expensive as hell, $700 vs $50 for a cassette player. 2, the blank disks were hard to come by ( Prerecorded stuff was even harder to get). 3, You couldn't share mix recording with your friends because you were the odd kid on the block. and 4, It was too little, too late. By 1997, I got a CD burner for my PC and the rest is history. MD, for as cool as it was, it was just an oddball out there, and even if Sony had drop the price down to $100, I still would have passed it up.
minor nitpick that you might've thought about already while editing but MP3 CDs are still "pure digital". I was thinking the "proper" term would be "solid state MP3 player" but then I remembered that iPods had HDDs in them. So i guess it's more like "integrated storage MP3 player"?
I don't like it anymore than you do, but "digital" is what the common term is for music that's just a file you download and store somewhere. Technically it is not wrong, since that's what we're doing on minidisc or CD or whatever too. They all should just be referred to as "digital".
Okay , just starting the video, so I might be out of line. MiniDisc Did NOT fail, it was very successful in Japan. AND COMPACT CASSETTE CAN BE EXCELLENT quality , tape has a bad reputation but Cassette Tapes CAN sound Excellent,, as you say , with the right tapes and gear. Anyway buy CDs if you want the best audio
I appreciate the mentions and your very considered and sensible approach to MiniDisc.
I guess melted loading belts are just going to become more common. I’m glad I replaced mine when I did.
The man himself! How cool is that?
A lot of the later Sony MD machines dont seem to have suffered from this. Maybe the compound was better. I have two units from the late 80's with the original belts and they are still good... Cassette players and R2R machines Ive done loads....
@@Jewellerybybarrie Guess you have been lucky. I have one of the last home models available in the UK, the Sony MDS-JB980 and the loading belt failed about 5 years ago. Thankfully a friend kindly helped by obtaining and fitting a new one.
Techmoan and Modern Classic are by far my two favorite presenters on youtube. Tanks you for everything you both do.
Rubber bands, my very first dealer used to sell me broken separates hifi units and items for £1 each. I had to fix them using items I found around my home. I'd save lunch money to buy said items. I can't begin to name the items I bought. All thrown away by my family.
My favourite item was a Sony TC 206 cassette player. Used it to record some German oral assignments with a friend. I even got the VU meters illuminated god knows what. I don't joke when I say that unit must have weighed around 5kg. Oh and the opening mechanism was strange, like a toy car. Using a weight and winding mechanism to have it open slowly.
Some of the items didn't even need fixing, a Marantz CD player whose tray only retracted using the power button. Or a Sony amp with an extra long volume slider, it crackled only when moved. Just set the volume and it was fine.
I hate to think about those objects now.
Mary-Chapin Carpenter's "Come On Come On" album is almost exactly as loud as that Oasis album, but doesn't get much recognition because it's a Country album from 1992, which was before the CD loudness war was even a recognized phenomenon, and it used old-fashioned analog compression to make it loud, rather than digital brickwalling. Plus it's a well-recorded and well-mixed album despite its loudness, whereas everything from Oasis sounds like distorted mush.
im a simple man. i see Minidisc, i click.
The one industry to wholeheartedly adopt MD in the 90’s was broadcasting. Being able to record up to 8 hours on a disc instead of one hour on a reel of tape made time delaying programs so much easier. MD lasted until hard drive space became ridiculously cheap.
I must confess after using thousands of Cassette tapes with my ZX81, C64, in multiple cars and about a dozen ghetto blasters, walkmans and players, not once did I ever experience a tape getting chewed up.
Thanks for the upload.
Lucky guy! I have about 25 tapes that were eaten at one point by some player somewhere (and all different ones). They now have audio dropouts in the spots where they were eaten.
@@ModernClassic My good fortune with tapes were offset by my "luck" with CD's I always ended getting them scratched!
Calling bs.
@@Cincinnatijames I still have my C64 and ZX81, I'll fire them up over the festive period, last time I did a couple of years ago 3D Monster Maze, Action Biker and Football Manager were working fine.
My cassette journey has not ended, there is still time for me to join the chewed up club.
it was usually a really shitty cheap effed up mechanism that did this, and/or extremely thin or cheap longest play cassettes... that had prob been through such mechanisms plenty and/or received a bit too much heat in a car etc. to soften up just enough.....P
Metal type tapes were the BOMB, and with Dolby C, you COULD get DAMN close to CD quality, at least as far as any non-cyborg could hope to honestly hear..... 😁
Minidisc did not fail in the UK. It had good success until replaced by solid state digital record and playback systems. There were many portables and home decks sold and it also enjoyed professional use too.
Yep just blame Steve Jobs and the iPod... But MD should have nailed CD's coffin shut but it didnt because of the fact that MD was recordable multiple times when CD was only single.
@@Jewellerybybarrie I personally don't think Minidisc was ever going to get near CD, the quality didn't get close until the later revisions of ATRAC, however it was meant to replace cassette and for me it did for all my home recordings. The instant access and on disc editing meant it also replaced reel to reel for playing in Sound F/X in my local theatre and carts in some TV and radio production.
I still have 3 working disc players here in the UK. The eject band is rubber and needs replacing every 15 years but it is easy to do and the band is £4. To release a jammed disc turn the player upside down and press ‘eject’ button.
@Jewellerybybarrie Everyone was getting into the Mp3 market, not just the iPod. Even later, MiniDisc played MP3s that were converted to ATRAC with a NetMD recorder.
@@Jewellerybybarrie Why blame Steve Jobs when you should be blaming Sony's draconian DRM policies on... everything in the 2000s?
I've used many formats over the yearsand I've always gone for the stuf that was convenient. I got on CD very early purely because I saw the benefit of using it in my DJ business. Along with 12" singles, it worked very well.
But when Minidsc came out I could see it was unlikely to suceed but I kept an eye out for some shops selling their stock off cheap as I saw benfit to using it it to record my own songs.
I bought a cheap Sony unit and 90 blank discs that were being sold off cheap.
And since then I 've ended up using them more and more over the years. I've used them for backing up old computer casettes, but I've ended up loving the sound of Minidsc. I use it most nights to lay in bed listening to. Works for me.
What good timing. I was just thinking to myself that I Modern Classic hasn't uploaded in a while. Good to have you back.
I have to laugh because it seems like that's the reaction I get every time I post a video :)
It just takes me too long to post. I'm going to try to change some stuff so it takes less time; the way I used to make videos clearly does not work for me anymore in terms of getting them done in any sort of reasonable timeframe.
Maybe a cckpit video? Or is that a no-no?
This is my first dose... Instant subscribe, and only the third channel I've ever selected full notifications for.
I have an MDS-JE330. It worked about a year ago, so I must dig it out and check those belts. Loved MD back in the day, as I used to work for Sony so had access to the staff shop. They alwats had blank MDs. Even had MD in the car for a while. Thanks for the video, and never worry about the tech bits being boring. They are always worth this time in my book.
I love old Sony equipment but their belts *always* turn to liquid tar :) So yeah I would just go ahead and replace the belt in yours even if it seems ok for now. Eventually they will all need it. I've never had a piece of Sony equipment made pre-2005 or so that didn't have belts like that. (I'm just not sure about their newer stuff, but the older stuff is all like that.)
I was a kid when Last Action Hero came out, and there was a shot where Arnold swaps a minidisc in a player to change the music in the movie. I wanted one of those and eventually figured that it was something made for the movie. Then I watched The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, one of the episodes mentions recording a song onto minidisc. Got curious and realized they were the thing Arnold had in Last Action Hero. Eventually got a Minidisc deck and ran with it.
I'm pretty sure it was a deceased MD they used in Demolition Man, too.
there was this other anime, teacher onizuka, kanzaki used an aiwa player i think. there was a somy one too lol
Thank you so much for getting into the weeds with the technical stuff. As a signal processing nerd I highly approve of your opinion of that being the best part.
I discovered MD in '97 or '98. I read about it in a magazine, I'm sure, but I'd found an online community that was cataloging the JDM hardware and proxy buying them that got me started. A friend at work joined me, abd we each bought a portable player/recorder. It took ages to arrive, but it was live at first sight. I think it was my first experience with pride of ownership. At the time, I was recording in analog to dodge the copy protection, and so that I could level match my mixes.
It was the cost of the blank discs, and the advent of MP3 CD-Rs that killed Minidisc for me. I could put hours of music on a 50¢ CD-R. But it's the hours spent lovingly crafting mixes on tape and MD that triggers nostalgia.
Minidisc players were available from Sony in a very compact Walkman size and it was the perfect format in the late 90’s for taking my favorite music on a run! These Minidisc players were able to read ahead and buffer multi-second segments of the music, largely as a power-saving feature so that the disc wouldn’t have to spin continually. It ran on just a single AA battery. Sony touted “G-protection”, making the mechanisms more fault-tolerant even when being jostled and bumped. All that meant it was robust enough to not skip when it was subjected to repeated shaking even in the midst of a sprint. No other format could offer that performance, with the higher quality and seekability of digital. It was definitely underrated by the public. You’ve prompted me to pull my player out of storage tonight in a bit of nostalgia. Still works! Thanks for this great video.
I still love MiniDisc. I use the format almost every day.
I bought a little Sony Net MD player in 2001. I loved that thing. Ripped all my favorite CD's to MD's and it was no problem to carry 3 or 4 of them around in addition to the one in the player. Good times.
I think this move by Sony was the first nail in the coffin. Instead of embracing MP3, they insisted on the ATRAC format. This required either fresh ripping, or transcoding which was a heavy workload for computers at the time.
I truly believe if they'd allowed drag and drop for MP3, we'd have seen minidiscs as a leader in the MP3 player market.
Fantastic in-depth comparison! Looking fotwatd to new videos!
I still have a good quality Nakanichi cassette deck. It still plays & records. I use high quality cassette tapes like Maxell & never had one break or get tangled up. I have a copy of my Brother's jazz show from college in late 1979 & it still plays with no degredation.
I loved MiniDisc SO much and wished it would've caught on in the US!
I was one of the US MiniDisc fans from day one. (Couldn't afford the original MZ-R1, which was a terrible monstrosity, anyway, got the MZ-R2 on release day.)
I had been one of those rare people who did tape things using metal tapes and the later-improved Dolby NRs, and even then, MiniDisc sounded better, and was FAR more convenient.
Had my portable player (R2 eventually broke, got an R50,) a home "bookshelf system" (MD+CD+tape that I still have, although it no longer reads MDs,) and even a CD+MD in one slot JVC car stereo that I moved between three cars over the years before abandoning MD as my daily-use media.
One thing that I still have, that appears to have been a *VERY* short-lived "flash in the pan" in the US are a couple dozen prerecorded read-only Minidiscs. They came in bigger cassette-sized cases with cassette-size album art pull-outs, and the shutter on them only opens on the "bottom", not the top. Looking at the disc media, they appear identical to a CD, the silver surface of a pressed CD, not the darker surface of an early CD-R.
You can adjust the recording level of a digital input on your MiniDisc deck. Page 17 of the operating instructions says "You can adjust the recording level regardless of the source selected with the INPUT button." It also says, "The volume can only be increased up to +12.0 dB (for analog recording) or +18.0 dB (for digital recording)." You can reduce the level by the same amounts even though that isn't specifically mentioned.
Wow. Even if you're not a professional sound engineer, your testing is masterful! You covered everything I could think of, and more. Personally, when recording a minidisc, I use a cd or wav file from one. Then run that signal through a separate dac and into the minidisc recorder.set for sp or normal recording. To my old ears the playback sound on a portable minidisc player is better than the same tracks at 320 kbps MP3s on portable MP3 players. I also have a minidisc deck in my home stereo hi-fi stacks. The difference between the minidisc and the cd is not much on my home hi-fi gear. Not much of a difference that I can hear anyway. To me, Cds, minidiscs, and CCTs are fun formats. I get a kick out of hard media. And I really like hearing an entire album from track one to track last. There's a worthwhile experience we're missing out on when we just cherry pick tracks on a streaming service. Or when we allow an algorithm to do that for us.
And paying for said service & hoping ISP doesn't fail 😂
Thanks... definitely not a pro audio engineer but I've been a musician for most of my life. I don't really get into it on this channel much but I have played in bands and recorded music, both in recording studios and on my own. So I have a little bit better than zero knowledge when it comes to recording, but obviously not nearly to the level of someone who does it for a living. But there's a reason why I have that EMU 0404 :) and it came in handy for this video. I hadn't used it in years before this. I'm sure there are a lot better interfaces out there now (with official Windows 10/11 drivers, unlike what I was using here).
I had many cassette tape players over the years and I’ve never had them lose the tape. Idk what everyone was talking about
Back in the day, the MiniDisc was locked away like they were crown jewels and priced accordingly. So I stayed with what I could afford, Ye Olde Compact cassette.
I was a solo musician right around the time MiniDisc made it's premiere in the market and bought the MZ-1 for recording backup tracks. I was using cassette tapes which had no random seek so I was locked into the same set list unless I recorded a new tape with the songs in a different order. CD-R technology was limited to SCSI writers which were very expensive, problematic, portable CD players were prone to skipping and there were format incompatibilities too. The MiniDisc gave me random seek, titles, shuffle (not so good for a live gig but fun when listening to music), portability and a rugged player. Eventually I got some decks and a multitrack unit for more pro sounding recordings. I still have some decks and portables that work but my multitrack has died. Great format but poorly marketed with too much proprietary nonsense and lack of foresight killed the MiniDisc. It is now relegated to instructional and repair videos, like this one. Kudos for keeping the memory alive!
Same here - MiniDisc was basically the gold standard for backing tracks in my one man band performing days and for other acts at the time. Maybe still is but I'm out of the scene these days. It had all the right qualities - very robust, easily recordable, portable. Way better than CD in many ways.
Thank you for such a well put together resume about the progress of home recording from Compact Cassette through to solid state recorders. I used many formats starting with reel to reel through cassettes (never had DCC) Minidisc and solid state , and my own conclusions align with yours, but I still have a soft spot for physicality of the medium and the recordings (Mainly live music whilst providing PA systems to local events), and even today, some of the cassette material still brings back plenty of great memories.
I was enamored by the Sony MZ-1 usable display demo at the local Tower Records back in 1992 and the excitement has never worn off. Just a fantastic idea that made sense as a cassette replacement. Too bad people thought it was trying to replace the CD!
It might have been good to replace both with MiniDisc. It was moving in that direction. Mp3 killed it.
Eurobeat! Hell yeah! Haha. I've been watching you literally forever and never would have thought.
I freakin love the MD. Went all in with MD in the early 2000’s with a few top end Sharp 1-Bit home systems like the SD-SG11. Still have them today and they still work and look great. It was such a media ahead of its time. Really enjoyed how robust MD is physically, and the fact you can erase and re-record on them and have CD quality was amazing.
Thanks for a great video and for paying proper attention to DCC as well as MD.
The DCC900 was the first DCC recorder and is the least reliable. Colin at Does Not Compute had a really bad experience with one, and unfortunately he never got it fixed. The big problem with this recorder is that it used SMD capacitors, which, being over 30 years old by now, are guaranteed to leak and destroy the circuit board. The DCC Museum doesn't even replace the caps anymore; they only repair 900's by replacing the entire circuit board.
Second-generation DCC recorders are much better; they use electronic components that are much more reliable and the most likely flaw you will find in a DCC300 or DCC600 is that it needs new belts and new gears, all available from the DCC Museum of course.
Third generation DCC recorders such as the DCC730 and DCC951 made huge steps forward in integration and design. You can even program your own titles on you self-recorded tapes. And I've been working for years on a project to make some more improvements to 3rd generation DCC recorders, such as a customizable VU meter and the possibility to stream to and from a PC, program titles with a normal keyboard instead of the remote control, and maybe even the possibility of making your own prerecorded DCC's. I'm also thinking of replacing the S/PDIF input and output chips, so you can record from, say, BluRay players that only output Dolby Digital or DTS (and no PCM); that should take care of the SCMS limitations too.
I have a ton of MDs. I went through 3 failing Sony units that quit loading. What threw me off the belt route was it acted like the problem had more to do with software or reading incompatibility. So i eventually bought a Tascam, hoping that the more pro-aligned brand would be reliable. SO FAR (acknowledging the jinx) it has been reliable. After seeing your video here and i recall watching a Techmoan video on the subject, I hope i can diagnose and repair the problem if it crops up. I loved the MD format. It was very useful.
The belt issue is only really for the MDLP decks. The earlier decks used cogs and gears without any belts which is why there are so many working MDS-JE330 models out there.
Awesome! I’ve got a Sony MiniDisc deck and it’s such a cool format to use. It’s great to add songs onto and have custom playlists with a physical format. Sure cassettes and CDs do the same, but everything from the way it works, to ATRAC/NetMD, and the many different designs that both the players and MDs themselves have make it fun to use. It was very interesting to see the detailed overview of the different formats. Glad that you were able to get it working, that keyboard input is also a great addition!
I remember when I was 19 and the idea of being able to record on a disc captured my imagination. I ended of finding a way to at least borrow $700 to buy a player/recorder. The SQ was VERY disappointing compared to CD even on my crappy audio system at the time.
I talked to someone about minidiscs and they wrote it off as "trim 20% of the top, trim 20% off the bottom, put is on a little disc, and charge a fortune for it. The analysis of the waveform confirms what he said and what my ears were telling me. Turns out he was right on the money.
4:40 Technics is pronounced “Tech-niks”, not “Techniques”
Thank you for that! Every time I’ve tried to pronounce it properly I’ve been chastised for pronouncing it “techniks”…. Even by studio producers, engineers, and assorted other recording industry personnel.
I tell them reading/ spelling/english comprehension is a wonderful thing! 😛
Thanks for the grammatical support. 👍 We’re in the “techniques” minority out there, trust me!
@ It’s only ever pronounced Techniques by Americans anyway. Nobody across the entirety of Europe or Australia or New Zealand or the UK or anywhere in Asia, pronounces it with a Q.
@@just_passing_through Well I'm about as American as one can get, and I never pronounced it "techniques"!
Cheers
@@4GuitarTrance Aha! We’ve got one if the good ones here then 👍
I jumped on this right when it came out and loved it! MP3 ultimately pulled me away though (which had its own growing pains). I needed the music with me at the gym, road biking, in-line skating........exercising. I'm not a true audiophile so I can't speak to the superior quality of one over the other but the speed of adding songs on an mp3 player, and the volume was just untouchable by cd. Agree with you 100% though, it was cool as hell, quality was off the charts, fun to play with (can't discount that).
I have exactly same model. Still works like a charm.
When I worked at a Sony Outlet store back in the late 00s, we had minidisc players and they were pretty much non-movers in the US. However, we had quite a few international travelers, and we got a lot of people who were interested in the mini disc marine head units. I had one guy come in and buy, like...5 or 6 of them for his "various boats"...which I think may have been more mini disc players that we sold for the entire rest of my time there, combined.
Mini disc seemed neat, and I was tempted to get one when we were liquidating them just for the novelty of it all. But I was in college and luxury money mostly went to stuff that I knew I'd use, rather than random dead media formats.
I had a Yamaha MD8 an 8 track mini disc multitrack recorder that my band used to record practices. We feed it the 8 busses Group/Aux channels from our Yamaha PM 5000 analog mixer to the 8 tracks of the MD8 and we would use it as a writing tool. It was far more reliable than ADAT or DAT recorders of the time and you didn't have to rewind or get a punch-in just perfect. Even though it was a 16 bit 44.1Kilohertz machine it didn't have that terrible Digital scratching sound if you clipped the inputs like the Alesis or other DAT machines did. It was about as perfect of a setup as young band could want in 1998. We would have 20 or 30 friends come over to practice to listen and they always wanted tapes or CDs to listen too because they felt like they were a part of the group as well. We lived in a small town with nothing to do, no movie theater, no bowling alley so it was either come over to our "jamroom" or go hangout in the local gas station parking lot. But the Minidisc recorder we had was like having a professional engineer record your rehearsals. It captured our actual sound and made us better because we could make ourselves a copy with our parts turned up to listen to and learn from. So our vocalist would make a mixdown with his vocals way up so he could hear where he needed to work on things.
We would get stereo drums, 2 separate guitars tracks, 1 bass guitar, 2 isolated vocals and mono keyboard part when one of us played a keys part for a total of 8 live tracks. Mini disc was far better than DAT but lacked the track count of analog. We ended up finding an analog Tascam MSR-24 a 24 track 1 inch multitrack machine that was used so I traded a guitar amp for it, we got it after the Yamaha MD8 died after the power flickered during a storm! WHOMP WHOMP.
Minidisc isn't dead to me. I enjoy it and use it to this day as i did when it was released or when i first saw it at a mall.
24:44 That's odd, as I had a MiniDisc recorder that looked exactly like that (but black) that I bought here in the UK in late 1997 or early 1998 and it was a good deal as it was reduced in price and came with some high-quality Cambridge Audio interconnects.
MiniDisc seemed pretty popular in the UK from my perspective. I knew a lot of people who had portable players.
Mini disc was great for me to record my DJ sets and listen back to them in the early 2000s. I actually bought my first one when visiting the UK, finding them in the US without going to a Sony store was not easy
I think Sony should have released a 5.25" Minidisc PC drive early on, to allow the discs to store PC data or audio, back in the mid/late 1990's storage was expensive and recordable CDs were in their infancy, Sony could have made a big inroad and got MD drives into millions more homes if they'd gone that route, if techincally possible. Net MD was too little, too late.
I still have a mds-j550 in my stereo rack to this day! I own another deck for my other stereo, a few different portables and a car deck as well! I was a fan since around 1999. I admit I don’t use them daily anymore, but for about 6 years it was my most used format. What amazes me is to this day, I’ve never had a disc fail! I still have the first discs I made and they all play great still. Although I’ve been through a few decks over the years. Mostly due to the same issue yours had. But back then I knew nothing about repairing them. 😞
I’m no “audiophile” and have 50+ year old ears but I can definitely tell a significant difference between the MP3 and AAC files I play on my phone, or even over Bluetooth to my hifi and the CD’s I play directly on my CD hifi. Lossless definitely sounds better.
I remember getting a portable MD recorder in middle school in 96. To myself and nerdy friends, it was soace age tech and "CD" quality copying during a sleepover at friends places was amazing before the days of discovering MP3 and CD burning. A cargo shorts pocket full of MDs was amazing VS tapes/CDs in a pocket lol In 2000ish I got the diamond rio, but storage was INSANELY expensive, I couldn't afford a 64 MB CF card for like $100, so I stuck with MD for a bit longer, still with many people not knowing about MD, it was still space age for those people in 2002. It was a great format IMO. Memories
I had never heard of Digital Compact Cassettes or video on MiniDiscs before this video.
In Brazil it was an obscure technology. I was amazed when my brother installed a Sony MDX-C7900 in his car because his father in law at the time had a recorder unity
nice video with lots of details, good job, i can share something, my experience. MD are amazing and easy to use but in some cases i still prefer cassette. there is only 1 condition, you need really good deck not cheap s... good tape and good deck will gives you lots of fun and quality as well. when i was young during cassette golden age i didnt have good deck and quickly i jump into cd and then mp3 even but now i do vintage audio restoration as hobby and mostly are cassette decks. now im able to compare all those formats DAT, DCC, MD, CD, Vinyl and cassettes. DAT is amazing when it comes to quality no compressed and most of them has very good DAC and sound superb. When it comes to cassette you need really fully restore deck as i do. im taking apart every single bit of mechanism, all clean and assembly back with good grease, new rubber parts, new switches or opened and clean properly (not spray like swith cleaners, there are rubish). good deck with chrome or metal tape recorded +4 or +8 (in some decks) and you wont hear noise unless you play very creazy loud and no no no any dolby, they are compressors and companders, all sound not natural as without. also you needd to have deck with bias calibration so you can setu record bias for the tape, every tape need diferent bias setup. after all the cassette sound is amazing, nice, worm so natural and no digitalisation which you can hear on many digital formats. Turntable and cassettes are the most natural soundings devices (but good one) another thinks are sources of your music. im buying old records not new or remastered, hudge diferent.
29:50 He's sort of right, it was Oasis' previous album Definitely Maybe. Owen Morris was the third mastering engineer they had mix the album after hating the previous two, feeling that the album didn't sound loud and aggressive like their live shows, so Morris essentially created brick walling for that album to achieve that goal, and the band loved it. You can see Morris taking the blame for starting it in the Oasis Definitely Maybe documentary here on youtube th-cam.com/video/E2oNRM8lhps/w-d-xo.html
I got a portable minidisc player last year and it's been just fun to discover this old format. I made a couple "mixtape" minidisc with covers and stickers and everything for my friends. It was a bit tedious to record though, as I have an older model and I could only use the digital out/in to record via my PC. And of course with the 4 seconds pause in mind for the separate tracks.
If I do decide to get a portable player (which I probably should have started with), it'll definitely be a NetMD player that doesn't require real-time recording. Still, I guess part of the fun for me is actually recording stuff the way I used to on cassette, but then having all the benefits of CD-style controls afterwards. I can see it becoming tedious if you do a lot of it, but I remember making mix tapes for my friends in the old days and I actually enjoyed sitting there and having to actually listen to the music I was recording.
Half of my minidiscs have become corrupt/unplayable since I recorded them in the late 90's..... all my 80's cassettes still play though!
I have the lower end version of that Technics dual deck cassette recorder. Mine lacks dual auto reverse, and HX Pro, and Dolby C. It also has LEDs for the VU vs VFD.
HX-Pro & adjustable bias control really improved recordings on Normal bias cassettes, had it on my Onkyo TA2200
I suggest you buy a portable netmd recorder. The software is very easy to use. It'll record an album in 15ish minutes and no adding track titles, it'll import them automatically. I bought one on Facebook for 50 bucks. It's the most convenient method I've found for recording. Great video!
I loved mini disc. I used to record my cds to them .
I had a md head unit in my Sierra Cosworth with stiff suspension.
So cds would always jump and skip , were MD would not .
I never got on the alternative media types treadmill. While I really wanted a DAT deck, I didn't want to get a new CD player with digital output. As it was, for portable music, I could lay down a better than average first generation dub with my CD player and tape deck, which were highly acclaimed among those lucky enough to get one of my mix tapes. MiniDisc never entered consideration as I knew what lossy compression was, and it wasn't worth it for the cost/effort. Another thing not mentioned is that portable CD players were getting really good with digital skip protection... and car units were practically impervious. So when the alternative formats came into existence, they were already outshined by the advancements in CD... rendering them superfluous or irrelevant.
That being said, I always enjoy your videos. They show your passion for the things you like. And while I've know about the 'brick wall' of music for a while, I cant remember seeing it in a waveform like in your video where you can see how bad it really is. I look forward to the next video. Take your time.
Minidisc is one of the best formats ever. Using a TASCAM MD-350 here and a TASCAM DA-30 for DAT. OK, and a TASCAM CD-RW900SX for CDs.
I used a Minidisc portable player starting in 1998. I used them to make mixes because i didn't want to use cassettes and cd burners were insanely expensive. Used them until 2005 when I bought an ipod. I liked it as a portable format. much better than using a discman.
I own both a MD (two portable Sony players in fact) and two tape decks. Tens of minidisks and literally hundreds of tapes (about 300 to be exact). Almost all of my tapes (maybe ~200) are blank tapes I bought off ebay, flea markets, garage sales, giveaways. I have *NEVER* paid 50$ for a tape, and trust me, I have many not only perfectly sounding but also still in their packaging. But, to the point. 1. Love the vid, no objections to MD, they're great and great fun to use. 2. No, tapes do not degrade with time as fast is you suggest, and the need to buy new is nowhere near as pressing is insinuated here. Yes, my tapes that were made in the 1970s may be "deck destroyers" already, I don't recommend going that far back, but something from the 90s or 2000s you can treat as new pretty much. 3. If you want to fare final resolutions on tapes you must have a good or a very good deck. Get a 3 head, maybe not Nakamichi but even a better Marantz, and record off CD pressing the monitor button (tape/source). You'll be very surprised. 4. Many people who even give a damn about physical media trade them and swap between each other. Sure, LPs are the king of hipster trade, but IF you wanna record your own mixes, and maybe give to a friend, tape has a strong position. Why? Well, clean MD is not that easy to find on the cheapo. Like I said, I can shoot a genial tape such as BASF Chrome Maxima for like 5eur on a good day, and record it on a 3-head then send to a friend. With an MD, well my friends don't have these at all... 5. Let's face it we're old anyway, the "kids" nowadays only listen to stream anyway...
I use a DAT for mastering and a CD recorder or MD for the final copy. If i ever lose the original due to age or scatches i can always make a new copy from the DAT. I use DAT becase i have lost recordings due to failed hard, thumb, SD card drives, from proper storage. I have tapes from 30 years ago that still work fine with zero errors. I can even back up a multi track audio such as DTS and Dolby Digital on a DAT tape and record it directly to a CD via Tosliknk or digital out without protecton with track marks in place. I even recovered multi-track studio recordings with the use of digital input on a pc from DAT. There is also multitrack used for MinDisc like a Tascam MD portastudio recorder. I only peserve my rare recordings and not use it for stuff that can be found easily elsewhere. Tape still stands the test of time even if its digital. I always made two copies and stored them differently. Optical media does have a shelf life. It self erases over time when the dyes in the disc deteriorate and the data becomes corrupt and is unplayable.
Fellow Curve fan, I see you are a man of taste.
Very interesting comparisons at the end. I found a good Dolby C cassette deck was certainly vastly superior to B or no NR for my home recordings. MD was reasonably popular here in the UK and pretty much equaled CD quality to my non-golden ears.
In 1999 I had a portable walkman MiniDisk and a home unit, I thought it was the future, it was small and the disks were in a caddy like case and so didn't scratch, I remember the prices of units falling to the point of nearly giving them away and then it just disappeared.
At one point it was quite popular in the UK and many of my friends had them, I would have thought Sony should have learned from the Betamax and allowed it to be licenced to other manufacturers.
I cant believe the price of cassettes these days, I have some packs of BASF metal tapes and some TDK regular tapes that I bought around 2001, they are still good.
I got the MZ1 (iirc), the very first portable recorder, circa 1992 / 1993
It blew my mind, and friends.
I even hit few tennis while having the MZ1 in it's supplied "holster", it mostly kept playing without any pause 🙂
I took it to various friends live sets (in pubs, or reception rooms) : using a cheap Sony tabletop stereo mic, it blew their mind too how incredibly close to the live conditions were captured on the disc.
It was head and shoulders above anything they had used to record before.
My MZ1 was very expansive (for a consumer product, at least : 4.500 Francs), but was way cheaper than any DAT deck / portable.
Mostly pro / high end studios were using DAT at that time,
I still have the MZ1, but its loading mechanism is jammed for years 😕
I never dared to strip it down, trying to fix this.
I missed an opportunity to buy a Yamaha table deck, I've regret having missed it the day after.
Sometimes, I look around french Craig's list... no luck so far : mostly blank MD (second hand or brand new).
By the way : great video, and thanks for others videos about MD !
Minidisc did not fail. Lossless HD had a long life in Japan and amongst true audiofiles worlwide. Minidisc hd was superior to the early mp3 streaming but once streaming was able to match the audio quality it was much easier for consumers to use. Advances in DRM also sped up the streaming impetus being backed by record labels. And Apple jumping on the bandwagon with Ipod sealed it. Apple having a cool factor in the priority consumer segements have always fought disk material and disk drives, such as Blu Ray and DVD’s. I still use my hd mini disk but since Sony desupported Soundstage and made downloaded new material too difficult, I use it less and less.
Cassettes are not Dead! I bought a portable minidisc player/recorder when they first came out. It stopped working a few years ago.
I have lots to comment on. Firstly I love 8-Track and reel to reel, I still use them and I'm glad someone else has finaly said that cassettes sound terrible. I only used them for my 8 bit computers.
MD would have caught on with the introduction of the lossless HiMD subformat, Unfortunately the writing was already on the wall for physical formats in general, Not to mention the HiMD recorders and blank HiMD media was way too expensive for the average user to begin with.
What a great video! I would be interested in seeing the difference between MD & Hi-MD (SP Type-R VS Hi-MD AT3+ 352kb)
I've got both of these and in my experience: minimal. But I already can't hear the difference between MD and CD. You'll only be able to hear it if you can hear the difference between an MD and a CD. If you're not already into MD/HiMD and you're interested in the 352kbit format, grabbing an AT3CD player is a significantly cheaper way to do it. (HiMD recorders cost ~2-4x as much as MDLP/NetMD recorders.)
EDIT/add: In fact, I can't hear a difference between Type-R SP and AT3+ all the way down to 192kbit, but whenever I use HiMD I often use 256 or 352 to try to get pretty close to the MD SP/LP2 runtimes.
The other-other way to get 352 would be to use one of Sony's many flash/HDD-based AT3 players from the NW- series, but there's a point at which "why not just put FLACs on an SD card?" might be the easier answer, if you have very good hearing.
Hey Cory, I've got a RH1 and a EH50. I mainly do 352 on MD80s. But I'm considering going to MD SP. I wouldn't mind getting a nice Sony deck with a digital out, HiMD don't have I believe.
It would be interesting what the actual difference is in sound. Or if the awesomw 352 is placebo
When you recorded the cassette couldn't you just plug the line out of the tape deck into the line in on the PC ?
It's what I do when I transfer reel to reels, 8-Tracks or records. I get perfect copies.
You don't get "perfect" copies. You get the same thing I got, or probably worse, because modern sound cards are pretty terrible.
@@ModernClassic I use an old SoundBlaster card fron the 90's. Plus my ears are shot from 45+ years of loud music, so I probably couldn't tell the difference anyway. LOL.
Dolby C uses a technique called spectral skewing to increase headroom and high amplitude high frequency response. I have a couple of accurately calibrated decks here, one Pioneer and one Teac, that are both capable of making recordings that are flat within 1dB from 20Hz to 20kHz at 0dB even with a humble TDK FE Type I tape when recorded with Dolby HX Pro and Dolby C. Maxell UR tapes are diabolically awful by comparison to TDK FE tapes, so you may want to pick up a few of those at some stage while you still can.
Great video, cheers.
What my usage was: recording a 2 to 2.5 h speech in Mono without any interrupt.
For me they were fantastic. The old use case of recording live concerts from the radio. The post and pre editing capabilities were fantastic on later Sony units and could be controlled by a pc keyboard too. You never knew when the orchestra was going to start so you could start recording up 10 or so seconds after they did and still capture it all using the buffer inside the recorder. Then cut the session up after in to tracks and fade out the applause. When radio went digital on satellite and on terrestrial then direct digital input. Being lossy was a shame but good enough for the bandwidth limited radio broadcasts. Far better than DAT or CD recordable for on the machine editing.
I love the MD media. I’m looking at to get me a stationary MD player. I got my Sony MZ-R90 Walkman in late 90s or early 2000 i think. I still love to use it today.
the bandpass on 128k mp3 is perfect for fm radio.
stereo FM cuts audio above 15khz which explains wy my low power FM sounds good even with my old 128k mp3's.
This is more of an interesting tidbit than anything, but revisiting the ATRAC3 LP2 vs. Vorbis 128kbit test from 20+ years ago where Vorbis beat LP2 at equivalent bitrates when both those codecs were new, but seeing how the latest version of the reference Vorbis encoder does in the modern day might be cool, ditto for Opus at SP and LP2-equivalent bitrates.
I remember when those were for sale. I bought a Philips CDR-880 instead because I could record more minutes on it vs the miniDisc.
The Sony portable MiniDisks are superior to anything under one particular circumstance. That is when using IEM's while riding a motorcycle, with a helmet of course. The first crucial part is the remote which can easily be mounted on a jacket in the lapel area with buttons operable with gloves. Thus the whole rig was mounted in/on a jacket. The second great thing is the volume levels are high, which is sadly needed on motorcycles, and they sound fine. The other great thing is the astounding battery life. The terrible thing was the need to convert all files to Sony's codec, and the whole making disks chore. Which is why I went to phones and Bluetooth receivers. That and allowing Google map voice commands, a hugely good thing on a motorcycle in unfamiliar urban environs. The control was on the phone on a mount. Less than ideal but fine. I never found Bluetooth receiver that sounded as good as the MiniDisks in a mobile situation.
I had a Sony MD deck in my system for a long time. It was nice when I was streaming something to just flip it on and record something I like. Super convenient. Transformer crapped out though last year. That's what sucks now about minidisc. Everything is 20 plus years old now and everything but the highest end stuff really wasn't built to last.
i used MD as master "tapes" and sometimes as a digital backup for my four track.
I used to have a MiniDisc player from Pioneer in my stereo rack. For some reason I thru it away many many years ago. It was working so I don't know why I thru it away. I guess I didn't use it that much. It took a long time to get the music onto the disc. Same time as the CD because you were actually recording to the disc, just like a regular tape. I think that was the reason I didn't use it that much. It was easier with a CD
I also had a portable MiniDisc player. I think it was a Sony. It had a "mini controller" thing on the headphone cable. It had a small display showing the song name and you could switch song with it while the player were in your pocket.
MiniDisc was very popular in many parts of Europe. For example here in Sweden.
I can’t be 100% sure, since cameras, lighting, and displays make a difference, but I suspect that player is Sony silver, not champagne. Sony mostly reserved champagne for its high end home audio devices (mostly the ES series), which an E-series* minidisc deck is not. Even higher-end non-ES decks (like the QS series MDS-JB930’s I have) came in black and silver only.
Indeed the front panel of the silver E-series devices are light base plastic with paint. (In fact, the black ones are painted too, though I don’t remember what color the base plastic is.)
*Sony home audio components from the mid-90s until the end (around 2004?) fell into a few series, with the E series being the mainstream models, B the upscale models with the QS label, and then the high-end ES series. At least for E and B series, this shows up as the final letter in the prefix of the model numbers, e.g. MDS-JB930, CDP-XB930, TC-WE825S, and STR-DB2000, respectively, for the minidisc deck, CD player, cassette deck, and stereo receiver currently on my shelf - the cassette deck being the only E series component.
With some exceptions, in 3-numeral model numbers, the first numeral is the relative place in the lineup (higher number = higher end), while the last two are generation. So my first MD deck, the MDS-JE510, was the second generation of the middle model. (It had followed the MDS-JE500, and was succeeded by the -JE520, -JE530, etc.)
No, it's champagne. It's about as common as black in Japan. Silver was reserved for Europe.
Nice clean up and paint job.
Never had or wanted a MD. They were so expensive here in the UK. By the time the prices dropped, PC CD recorders were the same price with cheaper blank discs.
I have at least three MD players. A couple of Walkman's and a couple built into systems. I find them perfect for archiving my record collection. Why it never caught on was due to Steve Jobs and the original Ipod... Thats all, as far as Im concerned MD should have easily killed off the CD as its smaller, re-writable and just as good quality of sound wise.. I also use cassettes on a regular basis and reel to reel. I'm looking at buying a MD multichanger so I can just load it up and allow it to play. You did a good balanced video (see old tech) but one issue. Cassettes never got eaten due to the medium, but the lack of maintenance and leaving the things in a hot car. I still have pre recorded cassettes from the mid 1970's and they play perfectly.
You should do a video about LaserDisc.
I may at some point. I've actually had an LD player since the format was current and it still works. (I wasn't an early adopter, but unlike with MiniDisc, I did buy into it once it proved its worth.) It's a simple player, not a high end one (I think it's something like a Pioneer CLD-E2000), but that may be why it still works fine. A lot of high-end players are busted nowadays because their mechanisms are so much more complex. I've sold a lot of my LD's but I still have a few good ones.
I have cdrs with the SCMS encoded and the PC ignores it when ripping them, even windows media player!!
Didn’t see much info on how this format did outside the US, and having a video on the topic without at least expanding benefits of NetMD vs using it as a traditional recorder is weird.
It didn't fail in Europe or Japan and wasn't really until the 4th generation iPod and iPod mini did it start to decline in the UK. Matt from the TH-cam channel Techmoan has covered it quite extensively, worth a watch to see how it's perceived this side of the pond.
I was too broke to afford DAT or MD so I recorded CDs to VHS hifi, as it was the lowest noise and highest range I could afford. It worked. MP3s were a boon and a curse because I can hear the artifacts. 128 is nails on chalkboard. 192 is annoying. I guess 320 is OK. But I went FLAC as soon as storage space became affordable. Most of my library is now FLAC or even WAV. Storage is so cheap, even FLAC is hardly worth the effort to encode to save a little bit of space. It's mainly useful for the meta tags. Lossy encodes are absolutely out of the question any more. I may be in my mid 50s now but MP3s still sound terrible to me.
I have a mini CD player from 1978 to 1983....by Philips and Aiwa ....it works with a full size CD... sometimes it would skip the last songs...a real classic 😊
You couldn't record the SACD as it can't be played over optical/coaxial. You needed to select the cd layer via your SACD player
CC has one advantage to all digital players (except the most sophisticated ones) - this is a short analog path with no digital patterns in a signal. The rest use better or worse DACs, and that's a real issue with a digital player. I agree to use CD/SACD/streamer with only a good external DAC (like Chord or higher). That's about a serious listening. For everything else it's about tactile and visual representation, and CC and MD are great in this. LPs are even better in these terms (near mint condition + MC microline cartridge + ultrasonic bath + an MC transformer + discrete phono stage = exceptionally good sound)
PS Let's skip R2R cause 99% of audiophiles do not have an access to good copies
And even when you record to a CC from a digital source, these patters are muffled with a tape imperfectness. And sure, you have to use a good DAC to record from.
I was also using MD for quite a few years. But: I did not buy a single one original MD in a record store. I only used copies of CDs
MD sound - as long as you didn't use extra compression for long play mode - was really okay
But.....MD could not survive because digital storage (USB sticks with MP3) is so much easier/better
Isn't the MD80 a passenger jet?
I was considering MD back in the mid 90's and could not justify it. The cons just outweighed the pros. The only pros it had was, 1, it look cool as hell. 2, it sounded good. and 3, you can randomly skip and jump between tracks. But that's it. The cons were 1, it was expensive as hell, $700 vs $50 for a cassette player. 2, the blank disks were hard to come by ( Prerecorded stuff was even harder to get). 3, You couldn't share mix recording with your friends because you were the odd kid on the block. and 4, It was too little, too late. By 1997, I got a CD burner for my PC and the rest is history. MD, for as cool as it was, it was just an oddball out there, and even if Sony had drop the price down to $100, I still would have passed it up.
I repaired my loader mechanism with an orthodontic intraoral elastic band for braces. I got a pack of 100 for $4. Should last me a while :)
minor nitpick that you might've thought about already while editing but MP3 CDs are still "pure digital". I was thinking the "proper" term would be "solid state MP3 player" but then I remembered that iPods had HDDs in them. So i guess it's more like "integrated storage MP3 player"?
I don't like it anymore than you do, but "digital" is what the common term is for music that's just a file you download and store somewhere.
Technically it is not wrong, since that's what we're doing on minidisc or CD or whatever too. They all should just be referred to as "digital".
@ModernClassic i guess it's commonplace to have "physical" vs "digital" now.
Okay , just starting the video, so I might be out of line. MiniDisc Did NOT fail, it was very successful in Japan. AND COMPACT CASSETTE CAN BE EXCELLENT quality , tape has a bad reputation but Cassette Tapes CAN sound Excellent,, as you say , with the right tapes and gear. Anyway buy CDs if you want the best audio
Also very successful in Europe too, sales were good up to the introduction of the 4th gen iPod/iPod mini.
Everyone know that, we all watched techmoan video about it, you don't need to be pedantic, just watch the video, he obviously knows that.