I think you'll find that although the things may be out of production, it probably isn't the end of the story. There are still a lot of enthusiasts out there who use those things, including some community radio services which use them as a cheaper alternative for trills and promos.
So I think there's still life in the old dog yet! On 18 Sep 2011, at 09:44, Dane Trethowan wrote: And so its time to mourn the end of the Minidisc with the last model rolling off the Sony production line at the end of this month, Sony stopped producing blank Minidiscs earlier this month. Minidisc was first introduced to the world 20 years ago by Sony along side its compeditor the DCC - Digital Compact Cassette - from Phillips. Both these formats were deliberately marketed at the consumer, the idea of the DCC was that a cassette recorder could play/record on a digital media. The idea of the Minidisc was that a portable device could be offered to fit into a shirt pocket which would play pre-recorded audio and be able to record high quality audio. As we can see from history, DCC flopped which is interesting because the idea's a sound one - pardon the pun - and Minidisc ruled the roost. I first saw a portable minidisc recorder in late 1993 though I wasn't at all interested, I played about with the machine making some recordings and playing some pre-recorded MD'S which were available at the time but the media to me sounded extremely harsh and I refused the buy it, oddly the dealer of the Sony shop where I saw it agreed me me and suggested I perhaps look at a DAT - Digital Audio Tape - machine or wait a little longer when it came to the MD, I bought a DAT recorder and that's another story for another day and whilst it can be said beyond doubt that a DAT machine has provided me with the best audio recorder I've ever used it didn't come anywhere near MD for the manipulation of an audio recording. In 1994 I bought my first MD hi-fi deck and the dealer at the Sony shop was dead right! audio quality of recordings had improved quite a bit, a little furry at the top end but certainly very listenable. Bought my first MD portable in 1995 and audio quality had improved to the point where a recording made from a CD was much the same as the original, particularly if that recording was made with a digital lead linking source CD player to MD recorder. In 2001 I bought another MD recorder, a lot smaller than the first portable recorder I bought, this one did indeed fit a shirt pocket but yet this recorder did so much more, was able to play MP3 files, had various "Recording" modes to MD using different levels of compression or no compression at all, I think from memory you could record 11 hours of audio using 128K compression which sounded very reasonable when it came to music. The last generation of Minidisc I played with was a product beyond Sony's wildest dreams back in 1991, this little beauty could be used as an external drive on your computer so copy anything over to a Minidisc, press the play button and hear the music, see the pictures etc. Problem with this system was that the space on a MD was limited to 1GB, think Sony brought out a higher capacity blank MD which was backwards compatible with all MD recorders. So here we are at the end of the MD road and its the perfect time to reflect on this wonder development as I am doing. For many of us including myself it would have been the first experience had with digital recording and editing and ah! how very precise we thought the editing was, certainly far better than tape. I still have my 2001 portable MD unit here, works perfectly though I have to get a replacement rechargeable battery for it at some stage. I still use it because its the smallest thing in my audio toolbox which I can carry around with me allowing me to edit my recordings. ======================================= The Techno-Chat E-Mail forum is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free To modify your subscription options, please visit for forum's dedicated web pages located at http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/techno-chat You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Techno-Chat group at either of the following websites: http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/techno-chat/index.html Or: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> you may also subscribe to this list via RSS. The feed is at: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> --------------------------------------- ======================================= The Techno-Chat E-Mail forum is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free To modify your subscription options, please visit for forum's dedicated web pages located at http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/techno-chat You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Techno-Chat group at either of the following websites: http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/techno-chat/index.html Or: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> you may also subscribe to this list via RSS. The feed is at: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> ---------------------------------------
