4 ms·

I was listening to my minidisc player on a train in Italy in the early 2000s and got chatting to an American girl, and she had absolutely no idea what I had in

I was listening to my minidisc player on a train in Italy in the early 2000s and got chatting to an American girl, and she had absolutely no idea what I had in my hand. I was like "see, there's these little discs, and you record your music onto them" and she couldn't even compute what I was showing her. I was pretty stunned too, because all my friends in the UK (I'm British) knew what they were and lots of us had them. It was like we were in two completely different worlds, somehow. Also, the main advantage not well discussed following the rise of the iPod and smartphones, was that virtually all minidisc players were RECORDERS. We really lost something, culturally and creatively, when audio devices lost their record-ins. I used to love plugging my headphones into the stereo-in on my minidisc, and walking around capturing the sounds around me. Later playing back through those same headphones would transport you directly to wherever you were at the time. Amazing for field recording and dumping mixes and tracks onto them. Technology progresses, but it seems like the past few decades it hasn't necessary improved a great deal as it does, and much gets lost.

tablespoon 4y ago
> Also, the main advantage not well discussed following the rise of the iPod and smartphones, was that virtually all minidisc players were RECORDERS. I used to love plugging my headphones into the stereo-in on my minidisc, and walking around capturing the sounds around me. I agree that technological change as resulted in a regrettable loss of common-man recording capability (e.g. streaming and disc-players vs VCRs), but did that actually happen for your use case? Smartphones all have mics, and you can certainly download a recording app even if your phone doesn't ship with one. I know you can kind of abuse headphones into a microphone (I used to do it all the time as a kid), but would they actually work well with good quality? Did you have some special headphones for this use case? I knew a guy who said he had some special earbuds designed for recording concerts: they had a microphone pointing outward from each ear, and he'd plug them into his MiniDisc recorder.
- gizajob 4y ago
  The minidisc I had, and there were lots like them, had a stereo-in that automatically switched between line-level and mic-level. Really amazing considering how small those devices were, because the unit wasn't much bigger than the minidisc itself. The cheap units from Sony and Panasonic (etc) virtually always did this, even though lower budget ones without the recording facility were available. Really a genius move to put a stereo microphone preamplifier into such a tiny unit. The line/mic in was also an optical in at the same time. "Abusing" headphones isn't really the right word to use – headphones and dynamic microphones are almost identical technology. One way, signals go in an drive the diaphragm into producing sound, the other way, audio hits the diaphragm and can then be amplified by a preamplifier, making a microphone. Hence it's really easy to put the earbuds into your ear and walk around recording, and when you play back it's like a perfect binaural recording of what your ears were hearing at the time. I've heard of those earbuds with microphones on the outside, that's a bit more pro. Yes you're correct, smartphones can record really easily, there was just something really aesthetically pleasing about how the minidisc was a device just built to record and playback really well. It was a beautiful way of having a recording device, without the need for dongles or doodads like you need to do it well on a smartphone. I should have also made the point that a piece of technology being limited also encourages one to find ways of transcending the limitation and doing new things with it (see the Gescom album 'Minidisc' that was designed to be played on shuffle). Having a portable field recorder that was affordable to be a birthday or Christmas present endowed one with something more valuable than a mere smartphone with a recording app, for some reason. P.s. try and record something at high volume, like a band playing, on your smartphone with the built-in microphone. You'll basically get a square-wave with interludes. The variable level of the mic preamp on the minidisc made it so you could make decent quality recordings of anything...
Melatonic 4y ago
How good was that recording though? I mean I am sure if you plugged in a decent microphone it would be good. But through the headphones? These days most phones are awesome recorders so I am not sure we really lost that much - I totally get what you are saying for that brief period where ipods were the norm (before phones).
- layer8 4y ago
  Most MiniDisc recorders had digital inputs, which means you could record your CDs or output from a PC sound card losslessly (before ATRAC encoding, which of course is lossy). While you could also do microphone recordings (I think), that wasn’t the primary use case of the recording feature, at least in my experience. There were various MiniDisc-based dictation machines targeted at business users though (simpler ones than in TFA).
- gizajob 4y ago
  The recording was really almost perfect. It was compressed with ATRAC3, which was Sony's codec akin to MP3, and probably about 160kbps CBR, I think. The quality was pretty high, anyway. They did some clever stuff to hide the artefacts, and I think some minidisc recorders even recorded to .wav by the end of the format's life. Nevertheless, you could record digital stereo audio live on a device smaller than a smartphone. I knew some electronic musicians at the time who would play gigs live running sounds off of a couple of minidisc's, and a lot of laptop artists would have a minidisc plugged in as reserve in case of some sort of technical failure with their laptop in a club, which happened frequently back in those heady days around the turn of the millennium.

tablespoon 4y ago

> Also, the main advantage not well discussed following the rise of the iPod and smartphones, was that virtually all minidisc players were RECORDERS. I used to love plugging my headphones into the stereo-in on my minidisc, and walking around capturing the sounds around me. I agree that technological change as resulted in a regrettable loss of common-man recording capability (e.g. streaming and disc-players vs VCRs), but did that actually happen for your use case? Smartphones all have mics, and you can certainly download a recording app even if your phone doesn't ship with one. I know you can kind of abuse headphones into a microphone (I used to do it all the time as a kid), but would they actually work well with good quality? Did you have some special headphones for this use case? I knew a guy who said he had some special earbuds designed for recording concerts: they had a microphone pointing outward from each ear, and he'd plug them into his MiniDisc recorder.

gizajob 4y ago
The minidisc I had, and there were lots like them, had a stereo-in that automatically switched between line-level and mic-level. Really amazing considering how small those devices were, because the unit wasn't much bigger than the minidisc itself. The cheap units from Sony and Panasonic (etc) virtually always did this, even though lower budget ones without the recording facility were available. Really a genius move to put a stereo microphone preamplifier into such a tiny unit. The line/mic in was also an optical in at the same time. "Abusing" headphones isn't really the right word to use – headphones and dynamic microphones are almost identical technology. One way, signals go in an drive the diaphragm into producing sound, the other way, audio hits the diaphragm and can then be amplified by a preamplifier, making a microphone. Hence it's really easy to put the earbuds into your ear and walk around recording, and when you play back it's like a perfect binaural recording of what your ears were hearing at the time. I've heard of those earbuds with microphones on the outside, that's a bit more pro. Yes you're correct, smartphones can record really easily, there was just something really aesthetically pleasing about how the minidisc was a device just built to record and playback really well. It was a beautiful way of having a recording device, without the need for dongles or doodads like you need to do it well on a smartphone. I should have also made the point that a piece of technology being limited also encourages one to find ways of transcending the limitation and doing new things with it (see the Gescom album 'Minidisc' that was designed to be played on shuffle). Having a portable field recorder that was affordable to be a birthday or Christmas present endowed one with something more valuable than a mere smartphone with a recording app, for some reason. P.s. try and record something at high volume, like a band playing, on your smartphone with the built-in microphone. You'll basically get a square-wave with interludes. The variable level of the mic preamp on the minidisc made it so you could make decent quality recordings of anything...

Melatonic 4y ago

How good was that recording though? I mean I am sure if you plugged in a decent microphone it would be good. But through the headphones? These days most phones are awesome recorders so I am not sure we really lost that much - I totally get what you are saying for that brief period where ipods were the norm (before phones).

layer8 4y ago
Most MiniDisc recorders had digital inputs, which means you could record your CDs or output from a PC sound card losslessly (before ATRAC encoding, which of course is lossy). While you could also do microphone recordings (I think), that wasn’t the primary use case of the recording feature, at least in my experience. There were various MiniDisc-based dictation machines targeted at business users though (simpler ones than in TFA).
gizajob 4y ago
The recording was really almost perfect. It was compressed with ATRAC3, which was Sony's codec akin to MP3, and probably about 160kbps CBR, I think. The quality was pretty high, anyway. They did some clever stuff to hide the artefacts, and I think some minidisc recorders even recorded to .wav by the end of the format's life. Nevertheless, you could record digital stereo audio live on a device smaller than a smartphone. I knew some electronic musicians at the time who would play gigs live running sounds off of a couple of minidisc's, and a lot of laptop artists would have a minidisc plugged in as reserve in case of some sort of technical failure with their laptop in a club, which happened frequently back in those heady days around the turn of the millennium.