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Interesting they're not DAT's but Minidisc (given the quality difference)
by newaccoutnas 7y ago
Interesting they're not DAT's but Minidisc (given the quality difference)
- celticninja 7y agoFor price and versatility though a minidisc recorder/player wins out
- taneq 7y agoCool factor, too. I still miss using mine, even though my phone is way more convenient.
- toyg 7y agoMusic people here in Europe liked minidiscs a lot. If the internet had not happened, that’s probably what we’d be using now.
- cm2187 7y agoI don't think the internet killed the minidisc (internet connected devices only came long after minidiscs were gone). CD-R and flash memory probably did.
- ImprovedSilence 7y agoMinidiscs came well after CD-R. They were smaller (as was the portable player), held more data (lossless songs), and didn’t skip. The MP3 player that was basically a hard drive with a wheel, and then a phone, killed minidiscs...
- newaccoutnas 7y agoThat's not quite true: re: lossless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Transform_Acoustic_Coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Transform_Acoustic_Co...
- ranma42 7y agoThe original Minidisc only held 60 or 74 Minutes with lossy ATRAC compression (292kbit/s), so about 125-150 Megabytes per disc.
- toyg 7y ago> internet connected devices only came long after minidiscs were gone The CD-R was already there, but more importantly Internet formats had happened. The advent of the internet made people switch to the MP3 as the primary medium for popular music consumption, because it was easy to move on a still-pretty-slow network. At that point the market went about finding the fastest way to deliver MP3s "from modem to ears". Minidiscs were better than CD-Rs in that regard (they were R/W, compact, and didn't skip; whereas RW formats for CDs were bad, fragile, expensive, and prone to failure), but still nowhere as good as an actual hard drive in your pocket (an mp3 player) with its high transfer speeds and ever-increasing capacity. In the timeline without the internet, people probably don't care for MP3s and have gone for "something like the CD but smaller and RW", i.e. the minidisc.
- icebraining 7y agoI'm not sure, once you had cheap storage, I think many would just start ripping their originals to disk and trading over sneakernet. And MP3 made sense as a way to squeeze more tracks into the player.
- newaccoutnas 7y agoOh sure, I'm British and have a minidisc in a box somewhere with my old mixes recorded at home. Just that, well, they're Radiohead and DATs were better for audio quality.
- acomjean 7y agoMy understanding is the Magneto-Optical properties of mini-disc are quite archival. Having retired my box of minidiscs last year, the ones I tried all still played. The quality was very good, (Could not tell the difference from the CD, Sony optimized compression for quality, thinking people cared about it..then 128kbps mp3s showed up). And discs always beat tapes for convenience...
- ficklepickle 7y agoI found my minidisc player after about a decade in a box. Not only did the discs still play, the single AA battery still had enough juice to power it!