Mini-disc players.

I always thought DCC was the wrong way round. They should have made a cassette that would play in a DCC deck or in a normal cassette player (like in most cars at the time). Have you seen Techmoan's review and the bit about people starting to snigger when they saw how long it took to change tracks.

 

It's a 2-piece soundcard that I read about back when I was bootlegging to MD for personal use. I really just wanted a good, fixed line-level output to record through and everything I saw about the Golden Tiger impressed me. Now, I just wish the Asus laptop I got in a group buy would just perform as well as it did a few months ago. That, and my 55" Sony was operable. (Bad power-board!) The HDMI-output of the Asus fed to the Sony, and the line-level output of the Sony ran to my head-unit. But, now all that is in storage, waiting for moving day I'm repeatedly warned of. So it's either settle for what comes streaming through the cable-box, and out the speakers of the 40" Element, or plug my best headphones in my phone and adjust the volume and bass-boost to suitable levels.

 

I think DAT should've been pursued further before Sony introduced Mini-Disc, but....

 

DAT required rotating heads which are either not very suitable for real portable use and, according to some web sites, tended to worn quickly. The MD has editing feature which are not even thinkable with a tape based medium (e.g. music can be recorded in random order on the disk to fill unused space but than played back in the correct order).

Had MD been "hi-MD" from the start it would have been a clear winner: longer recording time, possibility of uncompressed audio or ATRAC ... but I guess technology was not mature enough considering the first MD player was bulky and power hungry even if using proven CD technology.

 

Techmoan has covered DAT as well.



He seems to thing that the record labels put pressure on consumer hardware manufacturers not to mass market anything that would allow CD quality copying of CDs.

Of course within a few years CD burners produced by computer companies came down to a reasonable price. Personally I have always thought CDR is an amazing feat. If record players had made the same progress then by the late 1960s you would have been able to buy a record cutting lathe for less than twice the price of a record deck, and blank discs for it for about $1 each

 

That is true, and as Matt says, Sony learned the lesson and between DAT and MD outright bought CBS/Columbia to form Sony Music.
Anyway I do not think the moderate success of MD was due to pre-recorded music; now they are collectible, but back in 90's I hardly remember any MD on sale in music shop while shelves were flooded with CD's.
And I hardly see the point of buying pre-recorded MD and succumb to its convoluted copy protection scheme, while the same album on CD was with lossless quality and free to be copied digitally.

 

The same happened with the 1/4" cartridge tapes RCA introduced in the late-50s; Quadraphonic records and 8-tracks as well.

Note: Still can't believe the "Flashdance" OST was released on on 8-track AND CD at the same time.

 

Well, the big difference is CDs could be used as a data-storage format... something pressed-vinyl records couldn't match match so well. Yes, I know what Techmoan demonstrated... but really: what kind of format is vinyl for precisely reproducing electronic signals?

 

to my knowledge Bruce Springsteen's Live 1975/85 has been released in Vinyl, CD, cassette and 8 track !
Not sure if Sony later reprint it also on MD

 

I guess the initial development costs were covered by the computer market. In a 1992 copy of Personal Computer World (the same copy that reviewed the new Amiga 1200) there is a full page advert for a Philips External CD writer explaining why it is a "must have" for businesses. The writer was over £1000 and the blank discs £20 each.

http://www.computerhistory.org/storageengine/consumer-cd-r-drive-priced-below-1000/

I wonder if they were planning for CDR when then wrote the original specs.

 

I remember first seeing a computer w/CD-ROM in '86-'87, in a DAK consumer electronics catalog. The two-page display showed a man in a lab coat standing next to the unit, drop-jawed and holding a CD... while surrounded by enough books to fill half of the shelves in my junior-high's library.

 

What an interesting thread, which I am now reviving.

Techmoan has revisited DCC recently. The most interesting bit was that DCC had the ability to transfer from a computer way before MiniDisc and even before USB



but only if you had one of the small number of transfer cables made.

 

I was a bit disappointed to find out that when recording minidisc at highest bit rate using the SonicStage software, it is recording the disc at 1x speed, basically like any regular deck when copying from a digital source. Higher recording speeds are only used with lower bit rates.
A PC cannot be used to record a minidisc quicker directly from wav files, I have no idea why but it is clearly limited to 1x for standard recording. I can copy 3 hours of low bit rate music on a minidisc in roughly ~10/15 minutes, but then it takes 74 minutes to record 74 minutes of high bit rate music. Non sense.

 

In the early days of CD Writers buffer-underuns leading to "coasters" was a recurring problem. USB1 wasn't all that fast either which probably added to the problems. I guess sticking to a low recording speed avoided problems.