When I started doing serious digital location (field) recording, MiniDisc was utterly, completely game-changing. In the days prior to USB charging being ubiqu

When I started doing serious digital location (field) recording, MiniDisc was utterly, completely game-changing. In the days prior to USB charging being ubiquitous, it offered "near-CD" quality and noise floor, battery consumption that defied belief (8 hours' recording on a AA or two), extreme portability, removable robust stable media, and, for a golden moment, Sharp and Sony offered extremely well-engineered recorders which were a high point of quality in a consumer-tier device. The early Sharp recorders like the MZ-R50 had titanium chassis etc.; and Sharp and Sony competed to have the best set of features for users like me: extremely quiet analog preamps with high-quality DAC (prior to ATRAC compression); then, un-compressed PCM recording; pre-roll buffers... it was divine. This was me fawning on the technology, 20 years ago: https://quietamerican.org/links_diy-recorders.html https://quietamerican.org/links_diy-recorders.html The site still hosts a few dozen hours of raw recordings and composition made almost entirely from recordings made on MD. This project got some play, the voice-over was recorded later but all the source sound was MD: https://quietamerican.org/related_annapurna.html https://quietamerican.org/related_annapurna.html Here's a track which were more adventurous sonically: https://quietamerican.org/download/disc-va/01_-_Three_Trains.mp3 https://quietamerican.org/download/disc-va/01_-_Three_Trains... Here's a straight recording: https://quietamerican.org/download/sources-nepal/donkey_train_leaving_marpha.mp3 https://quietamerican.org/download/sources-nepal/donkey_trai... NB: [good] headphones a must; these are near-binaural recordings with highly-spatialized sounds stages. Paired with high-quality electret "binaural" style microphones, recordists like me could carry in a very small bag a recording kit of unprecedented quality. Here's another piece made with all-MD recordings: https://quietamerican.org/commissions_ge.html https://quietamerican.org/commissions_ge.html MD replaced DAT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Tape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Tape) , which was incredibly expensive, finicky, non-direct-access (it was tape after all..), battery-hungry, big, etc... once MD supported uncompressed PCM DAT was pointless in the field, to some extent. MD died in the face of the rise of HD then solid-state player-recorders like the iPod and its record-enabled alternatives. Today the closest analog for recordists is to use SD/SSD recorders. A tear for the old skool. <3 Footnote: MD makes a cameo in the original Matrix as the medium on which Neo delivers some content to the client who takes him to the "White Rabbit" party. While later-generation HiMD did support storage of arbitrary files, I assume this was done because it looked cooler/more unfamiliar than a CDROM. :)