3 ms·

I am sad that the minidisc lost out to the cd :(

• SageRaven 14y ago
  Maybe if Last Action Hero hadn't been such a stinker, it might have caught on.
• rcxb 14y ago
  The minidisc was a great technology at the time, but it's probably for the best that it didn't catch on. Minidiscs used lossy encoding, so ripping your MDs to MP3s would sound pretty bad. And these days, hard drives or flash storage is far superior. What would have been nice is if DVDs and Blu-Ray adopted the MiniDisc form factor... Scratch-free movies from Netflix, in a tiny package that's far quicker and easier to handle.
• sjwright 14y ago
  No way! The CD is almost everything you could have asked for in a pre-1995 physical distribution medium. Better-than-your-ear sound quality, cheap to manufacture, no moving parts, relatively robust, allowed for very simple playback hardware designs... MiniDisc had audibly imperfect sound quality. The media has a complex diskette design with moving parts, is less robust, and requires more complex playback hardware. It was a backwards step in every respect except size and writability. The perfect product given the technology of the time would have been to just squeeze the regular CD format with all 700MB of data into the 8cm "CD3" form factor. Perhaps adding a "long play" mode suitable for audiobooks (e.g. mono 12 bit/32 kHz PCM).
  • msh 14y ago
    The cd was bad when moving, skipping due to bump was a big issues.