The Big Thread of MiniDisc Information

What dumb ads

 

.....

 

Oh nice one. I was looking for the rear panel shot. What's on it?

 

https://stereo2go.com/forums/threads/hear-the-future.8576/

Amusingly I bought a minidisc player to find out, not noticing the track listing is on both the front and the back of the disc. I presume at least one person got a disc telling them they had won the competition in the outro.

 

Having just remembered this I decided it needed adding to the thread

 

Here's a NETMD commercial from 2002 from the UK featuring the MZ-N1 Walkman, aibo ERS-210, and some sort of unidentifiable VAIO notebook. Talk about an ecosystem... NETMD was a much needed addition for MiniDisc 'burning', as without it, you could only record in real-time.... meaning if an album was 74min long, it would take 74min (+ time to write the TOC of each track) to record it to MD. The player seen in the advert is a MZ-N1, which was a very high-end dockable NET-MD burner. The narrator says you can record up to 32x realtime... I've never seen numbers that quick with my equipment, and I have a MZ-N1. I suppose if you used the best ATRAC encoding, with LP4, MAYBE you could do it? Not sure.

What I am sure on is how cool this commercial is! Using aibo as a guest star is really fun, and Sony was doing this in the UK during this time whenever they wanted to show off something as being high tech. aibo has always been a marvel, and Sony is currently celebrating 25 years of aibo in Japan. The latest incarnation, ERS-1000, is clearly the most advanced yet. Ironically, the aibo just learned how to dance on beat with version 6 of the system software. Haven't tried this on my espresso 1000 yet.



Here's an outakes reel for that commercial... not sure if this was ever intended to air...

 

Nice commercial, can’t recall having seen one back in the day in the Netherlands.
The speed mentioned is for LP4 transfers. For more details, see:
https://www.minidisc.wiki/guides/netmd-speed-test

 

The big difference here in the US is that when our designers try 'cute', they are only doing so for kids. We have this cultural idea that cute stuff is only for children. In Japan, 'cute' is very marketable for adults (maybe more so than kids) plus kids. Thankfully, we zoomers have embraced that design style, and it's not such a 'great divide' like it once was.

That explains it. I've never used LP4 much, although I have a LAM-Z1 system that can copy cds to md without a computer at 4x speed!

Aibo was sold in Europe, and it crushed Sony's sales number initially, so it was definitely something you could get. Aibo was around $2,000US at this point, so not many people bought them. I guess that's why Sony used them in adverts... hi-tech, almost unobtainium, makes cheaper products seem higher-end... like you are owning a piece of the robo pup.

 

Mayne this one https://vaiolibrary.com/index.php/PCG-R505
Of the different Vaios from that era this one looks the closest.