The End of an Era: Exploring the Final Sony MiniDisc Walkman Models
Sony's Farewell to the MD format
Sony made some really sexy devices, but the format itself just came out too late for it to have widespread consumer appeal. MP3 was just way more convenient, and a lot of folks still rocked discmans like myself.
That said: it was actually a very popular format for the media. I was a journalism student 2001-2005 and it was the format we recorded all interviews on. The radio station where I worked at had MD gear, but also used Marantz compactflash recorders, which I personally preferred.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!
where it positioned itself as a promising alternative to CDs.
Well, to cassettes actually... or both.
It was both. They promoted the sound quality and ease of use of a CD, the reliability and ability to recording of cassettes and smaller form factor than both.
MD was superior to CD from a portability point of view, especially in personal players like the Walkman or car stereos.
I had a MD car stereo in around 1997. CD quality sound, without the jumping of a CD every time you hit a pothole.
My friend recorded many concert bootlegs using MD.
Yes! Slip the sound board guy your discman and $20 and get a perfect recording. I remember a few times where there were a stack of discmans and walkmans (Walkman?) recording.
I miss my MD player. Easily one of the best gadgets I ever owned.
I remember having that "net" version of a MiniDisc player, and I would have kept it but it was SO slow to copy music from your computer onto the device.
Plus eBay had those stick shaped MP3 players for about £25 which could hold around an album's worth of music, and transfer times were much faster; although slow by today's standard
I also had the NetMD! Mine was blue
The format never made it big in Canada so I was oblivious.
But I still have many Walkman models, and I love them.
It probably would have dominated the market for a good while if Sony hadnt taken so long to ship mini disk storage drives for computers.
Sony also could have let them play mp3s. The last thing you wanted to do with a poorly encoded 128kbps mp3 was transcode it to another lossy format. But nobody was sharing atrac files.
Never heard of mini disk storage drives, but now I have to search if there is one that works on modern computers.
Great writeup.
I really loved my mini disc player. I used it for years before I finally got an iPod.
Feels like these were barely a thing for a month before mp3 players took off.
I remember people talking about how small media storage was getting
Records - > Tapes - > CDs
People thought they'd eventually all the pill sized but still contain exactly one album or one movie.
We never thought 'what if I could fit every album I own on one Disc?'
I remember showing my iPod to my uncle who had a hige music collection and telling him that his whole wall of albums could fit on this white rectangle and then some. He was impressed but didn't see much value until he thought about driving in the car.
It's so frustrating that every even remotely interesting thing from the past is now part of its own collector scene... You can't find decent models for less than 100€ and even then they don't come with their proprietary battery. Net-MD ones cost even more (without Net-MD you need to spend even more on a HI-FI MD deck to copy tracks over).
The model pictured it one of the later Hi-MD machines that are just Unobtainium these days.
