Minidisc to cease production...

Sony MZ-RH1 & "Bit Club" designer MD

Well, I guess it was going to happen at some point? I'm sad to report that yet another physical music medium bites the dust! This time around its Minidisc's (MD) turn...

Although I was a relative late-comer to MD (I got my first recorder in 1997) I can honestly say that I thought it was a superb recording format. Many people derided the lack of pre-recorded material available but to me this rather missed the whole point of MD. Why would you buy a pre-recorded disc when the CD was cheaper and you could copy that on to a blank MD anyway? Most MD fans (of which I count myself as one) appreciated the excellent sound quality, particularly when used for live recordings. Indeed, many radio stations still use the format for field recordings etc.

Unfortunately, MD got a bad press pretty early on in its life due to the price of discs and Sony's worry of copying copyrighted material. However, as MD developed things improved; discs got cheaper, players/recorders got better features and then along came "NET-MD" which allowed you to connect the recorders to a PC for quick transfer. Finally Hi-MD arrived. If this had come out earlier in MD's life things might have been different as it had many of the features that people had been crying out for. PCM (“wave”) recording, no annoying copy protection, 1GB of storage on Hi-MD discs were among the new features. Sadly, it was all a bit too late.

Even now in the MP3-era it’s still a great tool for live recordings which is what I use my equipment for. I've looked at "flash" memory recorders but currently they are still pricey and don't have a lot of the features a cheap, portable MD recorder has. For example; most don't support optical digital (SPDIF) input. I'm sure that these features will eventually arrive, but for the moment at least, I'm sticking with MD...

Some of us have large Minidisc collections...

Home recorder decks were of a very high quality.
This is my Sony MDS-JB940