Techmoan: MiniDisc - an appreciation

[kevm14]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3BceoMuaA

I've been waiting for this.

I had an MZ-R55 in high school. Pretty high end portable player, with record. It was small, too. I though MD was cool but i think one major flaw (as MP3 players were just starting up in 1998, and I had one of the first there, too) is that you had to play music into the machine in real time. It did support S/PDIF input but it was real time.

[kevm14]

http://minidisc.org/part_Sony_MZ-R55.html

This says the R55 used ATRAC 4. Anyway, it sounded great even if it took a while for Sony to get there with audio compression.

[kevm14]

I forgot that MD was a magneto-optical format. It uses a magnet to write, and the laser heats up the media to 200C which effectively erases the track before recording. Playback is exclusively by laser, like a CD. Pretty cool.

[kevm14]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3BceoMuaA

I've been waiting for this.

I had an MZ-R55 in high school. Pretty high end portable player, with record. It was small, too. I though MD was cool but i think one major flaw (as MP3 players were just starting up in 1998, and I had one of the first there, too) is that you had to play music into the machine in real time. It did support S/PDIF input but it was real time.

Wait, there was netMD. It could transfer via USB, including track data. Holy crap. Had no idea they made this. It was after I had mine.

In any even that is a perfect explanation for why MD didn't take off: everything it should have done came out too late to be relevant.

[kevm14]

Hi-MD?? 1GB? Man, minidisc really had a whole lifetime, outside of even my experience in the late 90s.