31 Responses to “MiniDisc Players”

1. Bunyip Says:
   August 31st, 2007 at 7:48 am

   Actually, Mini-Disc actually came on the market about 3 or 4 years before we saw the first iPod. At the time it was the best option for random access digital recording - and a great replacement for audio cassettes.
   I still own mine and while my ipod has replaced it for day to day use, I still have some great mixed discs that I listen to from back in the day.

2. Jonathan Tenkely Says:
   August 31st, 2007 at 10:39 am

   I purchased an Aiwa MiniDisc player in 1998 and used it up until 2000 when I purchased an MP3 player. I built all kinds of mix discs of my CD collection. It was really impressive to me that I could rip down the songs I wanted, including track data, and have a player that was so small. One of the most impressive features at the time was the fantastic anti-skip protection the player offered, as well as the remote/display that was a part of many of the headphone cords. I still can’t figure out why the iPod doesn’t have a secondary display option in a headphone cord. I never purchased any of the albums released on MiniDisc, but I have many friends that did.

   I would say that the MiniDisc was one of the coolest pieces of tech I owned in the late 90’s.

3. lens Says:
   August 31st, 2007 at 3:51 pm

   The original post is quite ignorant. Minidisc players came out in 1992, long before MP3 players (and likely the poster) were even a twinkle in their developer’s eye. They were sold as replacements for cassette tapes! Unfortunately Sony did a very poor job of marketing them. Using their own (once again) oddball format didn’t help, but the basic technology was outstanding. At about $1 a disc, Minidiscs were the best quality portable audio recording medium per $ until only a few years ago, when flash prices finally beat them. Also, it took a LONG time after MP3 players appeared before decent portable digital audio RECORDERS showed up. That’s why Minidiscs hung on for so long. I sold my HHB Minidisc recorder only last summer.

4. admin Says:
   August 31st, 2007 at 8:08 pm

   Oooops. Mea culpa, my memory has it that they came out in 96, only a couple of years before the first MP3 players such as the Neo.

5. tgpo Says:
   September 2nd, 2007 at 9:46 pm

   Still use mine. I went on a video shoot last month and used it as my audio recorder. It’s a very handy digital recorder!

6. Graham Says:
   September 5th, 2007 at 11:57 pm

   The MiniDisc may have been a failure in America, but it was incredibly successful in Japan, and it’s still used fairly widely there. Music’s sold on MD and nearly all stereos support it in the place of tapes. Though it failed in every other market besides Japan, I wouldn’t necessarily call it one of the biggest tech product failures.

7. ross Says:
   September 6th, 2007 at 12:24 am

   Ha! I went to minidisco.com today just to see if they were still around.

   The MD was pretty good for recording live shows with a stereo mic. I still listen to some of those recording and I even dug out my CD/MD component during our recent move.

   Great site, by the way.

8. kamagurka Says:
   September 6th, 2007 at 6:15 am

   Man, I loved my minidisc so much. And I think you have your timeline wrong, I had mine years before the first feasible mp3-players came out. And the death of minidisc wasn’t so much the mp3player, but sony’s ridiculous handling of the format.

9. Curtis Says:
   September 6th, 2007 at 7:16 pm

   I love my minidisc players. It was a great technology that should have been huge. Also was great for making radio bits (actually still is). Do I use them for listening anymore? Only when I want to get misty-eyed.

10. Arnau Says:
    November 27th, 2007 at 8:37 am

    Anyone who has a music band or a job in journalism (specially in a radio channel) knows that minidisc was a little big revolution. At least here in Barcelona (Catalunya) and most of the countries in Europe. MD still kicks digital recorders asses (not digital players)!

11. Conrad Says:
    December 3rd, 2007 at 9:37 pm

    I dont know why MD is on this list. I got my first MD in 1994. MiniDisc players have been around for a long time in asia and have been very popular for about a decade before mp3 systems came around. It’s problably a failure here in North America since it came out so late.

12. aj Says:
    January 2nd, 2008 at 7:38 pm

    I have 2 MD players and love them both. At a time when solid state MP3 players (Nomad, et al) got maybe 6 hours off a charge (and no moving parts!) my MD got over 50 hours playtime on a single AA. This made it a hands-down win for travel as I didn’t need a bulky docking cradle and wallbrick to recharge pathetic MP3 players.

    I still use mine to this day, I have no BS DRM issues interfering with me, and given Apple’s anti-consumer hijinks lately only confirms I’ll never own an iphone, ipod, or i-anything that comes out of Cupertino.

    Looking at some other lists on oobject.com I wonder who makes these lists and what criteria, if any, goes into selection.

13. Augestine Says:
    January 26th, 2008 at 9:22 pm

    Ah, finally oobject got a failure right…

    The minidisk was great in the beginning. But then better (and cheaper) alternatives came out. As others have mentioned here, it works great as a voice recorder. I use mine all the time to record conferences.

14. luky Says:
    February 6th, 2008 at 4:56 am

    It’s all Sony’s fault that MD didn’t become what it deserved. When it was released (around ‘92) it was IMO the most advanced system for carrying music around. At this time it was not yet possible to burn your own CD.

    But Sony made the same mistake again, they made Betamax: They would not care about what consumers want. If you guys think Apple DRM is ugly you really ought to have a look at Sony’s policies ;)

15. Aaron Says:
    February 27th, 2008 at 1:42 am

    Minidisc is still my top cheap, easy, portable tech for audio recording-editing-playback. Recording studio in your pocket; can’t beat it. Plugs into everything. Plus, almost everybody I know in Europe has one.

16. Isaac Says:
    March 11th, 2008 at 2:19 pm

    I loved my mini disc player, it really would of caught on to however sony isnt renouned for there sharing of technology. Like Luky says they made the same mistake with betamax

17. Spartan117 Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 2:56 pm

    I dont see how it failed when they were first made in 1991 (jan. 12) by sony now they are out dated thanks to mp3 players and flash drives but for how long they were out they made a good alternative to bulky cassesettes and CDs

18. Kin Says:
    June 3rd, 2008 at 3:19 am

    instead of MiniDisc, you should have put Philips’ Digital Audio Tape (DAT) which was dead on arrival

19. Patrick Says:
    June 3rd, 2008 at 3:33 am

    In my opinion the Mini-Disc was in fact a very advanced system at the time it was released in the early nineties.
    At this time CD’s could not be burned or copied. The only alternative to digitally record sound or digitally copy songs from a CD was the DAT (digital audio tape) recorder as it is still used by audio professionals today.
    A MD could hold 120 MB of data (equalling about 700 MB of with Sonys ATRAC compression) at a time when 1.44 MB Floppy Disks where still in use and a high end Intel 80486 PC had maybe a 500 MB harddrive. And remember MP3 was only approved as an ISO/IEC standard in 1991. So at the time the Mini-Disc was released with the ATRAC compression it was not at all evident that MP3 would become so popular.
    I wonder why Sony never launched the MD as a digital storage device such as a few years later the Zip-Drive was released by Iomega with great commercial success.

20. Liz Says:
    June 11th, 2008 at 3:56 pm

    My ipod died and I rediscovered how awesome my old minidisc player is. I’m so annoyed with Apple’s hijinks - and in particular the fact that now that I was stupid enough to buy so much music that switching away from the ipod to a different player is a gigantic pain in the backside. What I don’t get is how Apple is so obviously just another big evil restrictive closed-technology corporation but so many people have bought into this legend that it’s offering up some kind of magical fairyland alternative to “the man!” The moral of this story is, whoever has the best PR team wins!! And you can’t expect a quality product to sell itself (like beta) Oh I know, I’ve just made a million Apple fans angry with me for talking smack about their favorite kool-aid.

    Anyway I’ll probably make a deal with Satan again someday (i.e. buy another ipod) but I don’t need to see my music or watch tv shows… which means I’m ok “muddling through” with my sony minidisc.

    Ahhh!!! The freedom of minijack to minijack! The comfort of listening to a mixed disc! The amazing battery life! I donno - seems to work for me! :)

21. Donkeyballs Says:
    July 5th, 2008 at 10:43 pm

    True these failed (Sony’s bad bad idea to allow only Sony-owned music had a lot to do with it). And true my iPod carries 12,000 tunes, something that’d require a small pickup truck’s-worth of MDs to do. But the sound quality is amazing, it records at broadcast quality, and (at least in the early generations) had the typical Sony over-featuring. I still love the obsolete little f**ker.

22. Z Says:
    December 18th, 2008 at 10:38 pm

    Ha minidisc died both from Sony’s proprietary strategy and the birth of flash based players. Solid state players consume less power, have no moving parts, cannot skip, have increased in capacity (32G of data is possible now), and have become very cheap. With SD card slots in some models, you can make it a removable media type player as well. SD cards have become very cheap and at the same time capacity has increased. Coupled this hardware with more assessible MP3 format, it is not surprising minidisks have been obsoleted. The next wave is multimedia players incorporating video as well. This is something minidisc and their at most 1G data capacity will never do. RIP Sony Minidisc. Sony should have promoted their products better when nothing else was available. It’s sort of like Betamax, they never learn.

23. ca95f Says:
    January 2nd, 2009 at 6:00 pm

    Minidisc had to compete against DCC (Digital Compact Cassete) and not DAT (DAT is uncompressed, like CD on a tape - much of it’s technology is still used in recording studios). DCC had a superior codec at the time (PASCAL) than Sony’s 1st-gen ATRAC, but it was cumbersome to use when compared to MD.
    The only fault of Sony was that it sold the rights to it’s technology at a very high cost. In Europe only Sony and Sharp (and later Aiwa - a Sony subsidiary) sold commercial MD equipment. All but Sony had a reputation of continuous hardware failures.
    Their format however was undoudtedly the king. Too easy, faster than realtime and a promising replacement for the floppy disk with capacities that began at 120MB and reached 1GB - at a time when the only alternatives were CD burners that cost as much as a scooter.
    Unfortunately, Sony never realised it’s own product’s potential and it remained a custom, somehow exotic platform that never became mainstream.
    Calling it a failure however is far too stretched. It just wasn’t as succesfull as it could (and maybe should) have been. After all, the Video Wars have clearly shown us that it is not always the best product that wins the battle (IMHO, VHS was worse than both Video 2000 and BetaMax), but good marketing and a high profit margin.

24. makoto Says:
    March 13th, 2009 at 4:02 am

    i just resurrected my minidisc after finding a whole batch of mixed discs which i made during my high school years. it takes me back to those good old times where there was no such thing as an ipod, and changing discs look ever so cool., as compared to my friends who had to survive with carrying a chunky discman in their pockets. i must say…sony’s workmanship (made in japan) is brilliant….6 years later my net MD works as if i just opened the box! i’ve been through 3 ipods in those 6 years…thats cheap china labour for you.

25. jaune Says:
    April 20th, 2009 at 8:06 pm

    My brother used to record mixtapes on minidisc, back in 1993. It was uncommon to see I my country those md recorders, but I remember Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” LP was sold on minidisc as well. I find the original post pretty inaccurate, wich is sad because you can check the facts over the Internet. I had my minidisc in 1993, where I recorded my favourite songs from cds. I can tell. It was quite bulky for today’s standards, but looked very cool, and had cd sound quality.

26. maximilien Says:
    May 9th, 2009 at 7:36 pm

    Mini disk players were very neat devices and still are quite popular in the music industry, there are no digital recorders under serveral thousand dollars that have the capabilities that the mini’s had. Dj’s used these for years for mobil recording until laptops became stable enough for recordings. Mini’s were around for quite alot longer than what was stated on this post, even when they did come out with mp3 players they could only hold about a couple songs and they never added recording capabilities.

27. Azot Says:
    May 27th, 2009 at 12:52 am

    какой-то оффтоп уже начался :)

28. Федор Says:
    June 21st, 2009 at 4:15 am

    Беда, что вода, — нечаянно на двор придет. :)

29. нeвидимкa Says:
    July 4th, 2009 at 1:53 pm

    Любопытно написано. А это все на основе Вашего личного опыта? :)

30. alan Says:
    August 28th, 2009 at 8:39 pm

    I used a minidisc for years as part of my dj set - the seamless looping function was the killer for me and still is cos its a damn sight smaller than a laptop!! My Aiwa AM F 70 eventually died and a year or so later Ireplaced it on ebay for US$40!! Woot!!!

31. Bluecrab Says:
    December 8th, 2009 at 2:59 pm

    Still using my MD decks and portables. I have an MD head unit in my car. It’s great for listening to books on CD (4 CDs fit on one MD). Too bad MD never really caught on here in the U.S.

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