Early minidisc players/recorders will forever be a unique and coveted item for some folks. Sony made a curious 'mistake' in those early units where they added

Early minidisc players/recorders will forever be a unique and coveted item for some folks. Sony made a curious 'mistake' in those early units where they added recording functionality AND a fully digital S/PDIF input with zero copy protection or restrictions. You could plug an early portable minidisc recorder straight into a digital audio output from a high end (at the time) CD player to make digitally bit-perfect rips of CDs, or plug it into the digital output of a mixer board to make great live music recordings. You could even get a minidisc drive for computers and copy off your bit-perfect music rips to upload and share on the internet. Very, very quickly Sony realized their mistake and later minidisc players removed S/PDIF inputs (but left the outputs). Nowadays HDMI, etc. have all baked in copy protection to the wire protocols. So for a very short period of time minidisc was this odd little thing that was an enormous threat to the future of the music industry.