The Big Thread of MiniDisc Information

Back in the day you had to go to the hifi store to see the actual device.. just the trip was worth it.

 

Especially since DAT and DCC were also available roughly at the same time, adding MiniDisc to the mix didn’t make for a nice cocktail.
I’m still amazed by the speed of miniaturization of the portable recorders, going from something like the D6(C) to D3 to the Panasonic SJ-MR220 in less than 20 years. (I don’t own a D6, but the dimensions of the D6C are equal.)

 

It in fact was. When you browse through minidisc.org, you will very often find: smallest player/recorder to date, best battery life to date, etc. These rankings must have changed on a monthly base between 1999 and 2001.

 

Love all that Electronics Australia review material. Takes me back to the 1960's building my first valve amps from an EA mag project. Thanks for the share

 

Before any of that the miniaturisation was happening in calculators. I once had a quite large Booklet from Sharp and each year the highlight was how small they had made their latest calculator. The race didn't stop until Casio produced a genuine Credit Card size calculator which was the same thickness as well as outline of a card

I expect there was a lot of cross over between different products.
The other thing that was shrinking was camcorders.

The only modern equivalent race I can think of is with phones, where a 0.3mm drop in thickness seems to be thought to be a newsworthy advance.

 

Well wasn't actually that fast to download under SonicStage on your PC but Atrac is a nice compression technology and Sony spent a lot developing it but of course it lost out to MP3 which was open source essentially for marketing reasons.

 

I use the web application by Stefano Brilli to write MP3s to MiniDisc, no need to try to get the older Sony software to work.
It works great for the N505 and I need to give it a try with my N910.
You can also use it offline by creating a stand alone application from it - just 6MB on my Mac.
https://stefano.brilli.me/webminidisc/

 

Below the test as featured in Electronics Australia, September 1993 of the Sony MZ-1.
The link to the entire issue: https://archive.org/details/EA1993/EA 1993-09 September/page/n5/mode/2up
Relevant pages: 10-14.

 

Below the test as featured in Electronics Australia, September 1993 of the Sanyo MDG-P1.
The link to the entire issue: https://archive.org/details/EA1993/EA 1993-09 September/page/n5/mode/2up
Relevant pages: 6-9.

 

I posted in another thread about energy efficiency of these small Minidisc portables (link).

Model | Total current in Playback mode, motors on/off | Max RPM | Cache size
Sony MZ-N505: 160mA / 20mA | 2700 rpm | 16 Mb DRAM = 2 MB = yy seconds?
Sony MZ-N910: 165mA / 45mA | 3600 rpm | y MB? = 200 seconds

With the motors off, the players are pretty efficient and void of mechanical noises.
Especially the N910 sounds like it is trying to grind the disc during read, most likely due to increased max RPM.
This read to cache period is relatively short, and as soon as the cache is full, the motors are stopped.

Any ideas about the relation 'coasting' to normal pb mode?
The N910 should play for 31 hours straight in normal mode on a Sony NH-14WM.
That gumstick battery capacity is 1350mAh, so 1350mAh/31h equals approximated 44mA.
Very close to the provided total current figure in the service manual, 45 vs. 44.
That would mean that caching / reading content with motors on happens just a tiny fraction of the time.

 

Attached are a number of catalogs, released by Sony in Japan.
Also included in the catalogs are portable CD players, Network Players (MP3 + ATRAC) and cassette Walkmans.
The latest dates from August 2008, these are the MiniDisc portables still available at the time:
3 Hi-MD units: MZ-RH1 (recorder), MZ-EH70 and MZ-EH50 (playback), and
2 NetMD units: MZ-N920 (improved N910), MZ-N520 (improved N510).
It looks like all units were developed for the Japanese market only (minidisc.org, minidisc.wiki), absence of English press releases, etc.

 

Thank you @Emiel