29 Years late Last August at Hamfest I picked up this interesting looking MiniDisc for £1. Obviously I wanted to "Hear the Future" but I have never had a MiniDisc player. When they came out I already had LPs, Cassettes, and CDs and decided I didn't need yet another format. Since August I kept looking on eBay but had decided I didn't want to pay too much to play my one and only MiniDisc. The Buy it now price for working MiniDisc players seems to be over £30 with some people asking that for faulty ones. Eventually this one turned up in an auction "working but with a broken battery door clip - trendy panel pin fitted instead" and I won it for less than £20 including postage. The player is nicely made with an all metal body. An advantage to me is that it runs off one standard AA battery despite being not much thicker than one. Last night I finally got everything together and listened to the disc. It starts with an introduction telling you about MiniDisc and the promise of a competition at the end. Then there are three chart tracks starting with "You Gotta Be" by Des'ree. At the end voiceover guy tells you "Sorry you didn't win but we hope you enjoyed listening to this demonstration of Sony's latest product; MiniDisc. He doesn't tell you what you didn't win. Sound quality is fairly good, obviously with no wow and flutter although I think there are signs of that typical compression crunchieness when drums and things get busy. Amusingly it was only when I came to take photos that I noticed there were track listings on the label and copyright of 1994 on the back of the MiniDisc. Would I have bothered if I had known what was on the disc ? I can see this might have been a good format as an alternative to a Walkman back in the 90s but I was getting far more use out of my cassette based car stereos and home based CD systems.
I guessed that as the headphone socket is a key shape with extra contacts, and there is no display on the unit. Luckily there are enough buttons on the main unit to control it. Here are some details. https://www.minidisc.org/part_Sony_MZ-E33.html I didn't realise it could take an AA or a gumstick battery, but looking at the battery compartment I can see that now as the bottom is flat.
I wonder why this thread just showed up on my feed? At least I now know your not Techmoan! Great find, I would have done the same, it's too bad its not a winner. I was rooting for MiniDisc when it came out but it was 3-4x more than a decent portable CD player, never seemed to go on sale and there was no prerecorded MDs around. I latched on to CDs with the Columbia House/BMG buy 1 and get 11 free deals. Before that Mountain Dew had a promotion for free CDs, I still have Hole and Metallica, maybe more that I got before I even had a player.
No but he is a bad influence on me Each time I lost an auction at £30 I wondered how much he paid for all the players he got from Japan and how much they are worth. Another big mystery is why people are still paying so much for the pre-recorded MiniDiscs that are (were) available around here. Compare these Not just the Bangles, the same seems to apply to most chart artists. Obviously supply and demand although I don't understand why there is a demand for MiniDiscs at that price. p.s. I bought my first two CDs the same day I bought my first (used) CD player back in 1989. Since I drove past a large supermarket on the way home I stopped there and bought Cyndi Lauper - A Night to Remember, and a Richard Clayderman CD because it was only about £7 compared to the average of £12. I continued to buy LPs and cassettes for quite a while as they were much cheaper. A local shop was selling off all its cassettes (mostly early 1980s chart stuff) for just £3 each. At that price you could take a risk on a band you weren't that sure about.
Love that minidisc Longman, very interesting. I was a huge fan of MD, splurging on an expensive all metal unit when they came out and carrying it literally everywhere. If you ever decide to selling it let me know, I'd love to add it to my extensive MD collection.
