Anybody explain minidisc to me?

[FSR-Si]

It just so happens i have a sony minidisc car head unit and 10 cd changer for sale on ebay for £250




they come with a free vw polo 1.4se

link?


edit: found it...it was on at 200 a bargain for sure!

haha could of swore i'd put it on for 250 lol

 

[hydorah]

Mini Disc is cool totally passed me by at the time when all the trendies were buying things in DigPacks... While I continued unwinding tape from my capstans, doing splices with sellotape and winding on spools with a biro

However when I joined a rock band well taking a (what was) stratospherically expensive laptop to rehearsals and gigs wasn't gonna happen so I bought a secondhand Sharp portable MD recorder and three discs for a tenner

Found to my delight that the digital nature made transfer of audio data lossless as long as you use optical or whatever on/off one/zero means are available, not an audio cable

We'd set up a condenser mic, a preamp and the MD recorder, the whole lot fit a corner of my kit bag

And the media is in a little case! How many times have you had a CD go to poo because the back has got a teeny weeny nick in it!

Net result: Lots of dodgy recording of dodgy noise. Happy days!

 

[legrandefromage]

I was a DAT man myself, 48khz recordings (which is what counted for me). Minidsic was a sort of halfway house between cassette and CD sound quality wise (I was using Nakamichi cassette decks at the time!).

I sort of bypassed MD and went straight to CD-R, the real killer of MD?

I did have the 1st ever MD walkman (from the tip), it was also my first ever ebay sale too. I also had a mega rare DAT car stereo for that ultimate coolness - wish I knew what happened to that. I did also have MD changer too. Sadly MD was never a big draw for me despite being a technology follower.

CD was always a disappointment - 'CD quality' is miss-used so much as CD's brick wall filtering (the cut off at where the high frequencies stop) is so poor if engineered badly.

Reel to reel tape is where its at!

''...Most popular music releases are compressed to about 20 to 30 dB, regardless of the dynamic
range the format is capable of handling. With vinyl LPs, this was done because of mechanical
and nolise limitations of the medium. Excessive dynamic energy made the stylus jump out of the
LP’s grooves. Therefore, stereos that were made to play LPs were designed to handle no more
than this narrow dynamic range. Anything more would have been unnecessary. Today, several
formats are capable of HUGE dynamic ranges, yet most stereo systems still have narrow
dynamic range capability. Why? Cost and size. A wide dynamic range stereo is costly and its
speakers are often as large as a person. Most listeners, as a result, have become so accustomed to
hearing highly-compressed music that most will be turned off by recordings with naturalsounding
dynamics. Audiophiles are listeners who have become accustomed to hearing
uncompressed recordings or live acoustic music performances. They are turned off by recordings
with compressed dynamics and they’re willing to pay for the expensive and large stereos that can
handle the wide dynamic range of uncompressed recordings...''

Guilty....

 

[dbmtb]

Personally I think solid state 24-bit recording is where it's at these days... Just need to buy one!

Hi.MD will record at same res as DAT and with less background noise. DACs are also better than on my consumer quality hard disc recorder (Creative JB3) too.... so am still using it to record gigs, last one being the Cult last month.

 

[IDB1]

Used to really like my old minidisc players.. both went awol somewhere down the line..

 

[Drencrom]

minidisc was the superior format, unfortunately sony as usual cocked up...with their frankly rubbish sonicstage software.

OT, but SonicStage was still a big bag of poo when Sony launched the Network Walkman MP3 player, which was way ahead of the early iPod(s). I still use a 20Gb Walkman as a back-up, and it's smooth as you like. The problem lies with the user interface, it's difficult to get music on easily compared to iTunes, which is Apple's real achievement.

We'd set up a condenser mic, a preamp and the MD recorder, the whole lot fit a corner of my kit bag

And the media is in a little case! How many times have you had a CD go to poo because the back has got a teeny weeny nick in it!

Net result: Lots of dodgy recording of dodgy noise. Happy days!

Same here, they were great for rehearsals.