Sony MiniDisc: The (Not) Forgotten Audio Format That (Never) Failed

Audio

format

s have come and gone over time, one may have been intended to be a replacement while another tried to create its own market, but in the early 90s a new form of physical media attempted to do both. This is the story of the

minidisc

in the early 80s. walkman was a huge success it revolutionized the way the world listened to music it used compact cassettes that were simple, sturdy and cheap enough to play on the go the

format

offered a lot of flexibility, as It was easy to record cassettes at home and the Walkman played no small part in the emergence of a cultural phenomenon known as the mixtape, but despite the success that Sony had, it also recognized that it couldn't just sit back and relax if you asked the public what they think they will need.

You will always be behind in this world Sony founder Akio Morita once said that you will

never

catch up unless you think one or ten years ahead and create a market for the items you think the public will accept at that time. . Linear tape was a dead end and Sony knew it, so in 1986 it began research on a new format, the company approached Phillips, with whom it had partnered in the late '70s to create the compact disc. Phillips joined in and the two began discussing options. Things got difficult pretty quickly, although they both agreed that digital was the way to go, but couldn't agree on which technology to use.

Sony argued that optical media was the future with its random access nature and the fact that there was nothing to wear out on the drive itself, although Phillips demanded. backwards compatibility of cassettes citing a large installed base and hesitant record companies, the two parties could not reconcile their differences so they parted ways. Sony was alone this time, the result of several years of research was the

minidisc

, it was small, durable and recordable, all types of cassettes. Minidisks were better, they were about three inches square and similar to computer floppy disks. They were completely closed to keep the media surface clean.

They were red with a laser like CDs and offered high-quality digital sound. It was the minidisk's rewritability that really set it apart. Additionally, it used magneto-optical technology in which the laser heated the surface of the disk so that an electromagnet could write the data bits, which could be written and rewritten thousands of times without degrading the quality of the disk. sound, a common problem with tape and, furthermore,

audio

. Disks were written in blocks, but unlike CDs, those blocks didn't necessarily have to be in sequence, the disk's table of contents recorded them, and players could jump around the disk to retrieve the blocks in the correct order.

This was possible. Because a memory buffer was created, standard data would be read and stored in the buffer, allowing for seamless playback as the laser swept across the disk from block to block, but the buffer was also critical to the minidisk's usability. As a portable format and could mitigate skipping if the player was bumped or jarred, some MD platforms even made creative use of the buffer with a feature called time machine where they would store the last few seconds of incoming

audio

even if you hadn't yet pressed the play button. recording. The result was that you would

never

miss recording the beginning of a song, even if you hadn't pressed the record button yet.

Something that any type of tape could never touch on an MD was that its powerful editing functions could easily split tracks, move them, remove them, or remove them. were merged on the fly and instantly audio data that was no longer needed was simply marked as eligible to be written as files to a computer's hard drive - if you moved track 3 to track 7, for example, the data They wouldn't actually change location on the disk, instead the table of contents was simply updated as to the new order of the tracks, the mixtapes were now more customizable than ever due to their small size, although some compromises had to be made, only so many bytes of data can be packed onto its surface.

But Sony knew that MDs had to at least match the playtime of compact discs, but the company also prioritized sound quality believing it was another incentive for consumers to switch from cassettes. Sony had in its hands the dilemma it needed to adjust to the value of a CD. of CD-quality or near-CD-quality music on a disc that was less than a third its size, what he came up with was an algorithm that would compress the audio called adaptive transformation acoustic coding, or a-track. It worked by analyzing the sound and discarding the parts it considered inaudible to listeners, this allowed the audio data to occupy only a fraction of the space with a quality that Sony determined would be difficult for consumers to differentiate from CDs.

Sony had its successor to cassettes. It was smaller, more robust, more flexible. and it sounded better all the company had to do was get the format popular in the United States compact discs had seen decent adoption but cassettes were still the norm the market seemed ripe for disruption minidisc released in late 1992 With great anticipation in its advertising, it was aimed at teenagers and young adults of the so-called MTV generation, among whom the minidisc would have had the greatest impact, but the equipment was prohibitively expensive for them, costing more than seven hundred and fifty dollars, a price that the Audiophiles could afford it, but they rejected the format because the compression of track A affected the sound quality too much for their more demanding tastes.

Sales were slow and critics declared that the minidisc would be a failure. The biggest threat to the MD though was a ghost from Sony's past after they split years before. He continued his own research and eventually partnered with Panasonic's parent company, Matsushita, and just a few months before the launch of the minidisc, they unveiled the digital compact cassette, or dcc. Sony's worst fears came back to haunt it a decade after its betamax video cassette lost to VHS. It had someone else's ingredients. format war in their hands dcc was a compelling medium in its own right, while also using audio compression.

DCC tapes offered more capacity than MD, so the resulting sound quality was a little better. It also had a table of contents so listeners could jump between tracks with the press of a button, but its defining feature was that the media was tape-based and its players were compatible with analog cassettes. Consumers could upgrade to DCC but still listen to their existing tapes. the recording industry was skeptical of the minidisc; had been fighting against the others from Sony. New digital audio tape media since the late 80s. Widespread piracy was feared due to the dat's ability to perfectly copy audio from a CD, so we are very afraid of the possibility of a cottage industry because copying will be so precise that fidelity would be good.

Actually, it's a clone. It is not a copy, it is exactly the same as the original compact disc, although it ultimately

failed

on the consumer market in the early 1990s. Record labels were equally concerned about the minidisc's simple and powerful recording functions. Industry executives were also concerned about confusing consumers with another new optical format in In 1992, the compact disc was already a decade old, but in the United States and many other countries its adoption rate was still relatively low, around 30 percent, but the format had been responsible for most of the industry's profits and the minidisc represented a potential threat to the growth of the CD.

It seemed like a safer option. Record labels gravitated towards it because of its backward compatibility and also because it could be clearly perceived as the successor to cassettes. There were also unspoken concerns about minidisc licenses. In an interesting twist, both Sony and Phillips were responsible for it. The two shared patents on optical media that arose from their joint development of the compact disc minidisk made use of some of the same technology, so Phillips had to get involved, although he said he would leave the licensing process and actual conditions up to from Sony. This did the music industry. a bit nervous as both companies already had control over the compact disc, if minidiscs were to succeed in replacing tape, they would jointly have the most influence over the consumer audio market as a whole with dcc, while phillips would still be involved. matsushita could act as a counterweight.

This had never been a concern with compact cassettes because, although they had been developed by Phillips in the 1960s, the technology was free, which arose incidentally because Sony in 1963 realized that it needed cassettes to be successful. in Japan. Sony was known as a tough negotiator and the company managed to reach an agreement that gave him a free license after signing the agreement, although Phillips discovered the error of his ways if other potential cassette manufacturers found out. Sony wasn't paying for anything they didn't want either and although they weren't very enthusiastic about minidiscs, the music industry didn't fully trust Philips or pirated music CDs had started to enter the market and there were concerns that Phillips was being lacking. in their licenses to CD manufacturers the labels were also upset by an announcement in October 1992 that Phillips was working on a consumer rewritable CD technology scheduled for release in 1996.

These, of course, would become known like cdrws. Record labels began to draw battle lines. around the two newcomers

sony

had smartly acquired cbs records in 1987 not only as a way to diversify its corporate portfolio but also to bolster its consumer electronics business cbs had a roster of highly successful artists such as bruce springsteen cindy lauper mariah carey the Beastie Boys and Michael Jackson and this gave Sony tremendous influence, naturally the company was inclined to release titles from its catalog on minidisc, but when it tried to court other labels, it received a cold reception, in the end only emi was released. united in comparison, in comparison, Matsushita owned mca records and phillips.

Polygram, so they had their own group of popular artists to compete with Sony and as DCC seemed a safer bet, other recording industry heavyweights joined in such as Warner and Universal Sony. Sony's worst fear was becoming a reality and most music labels chose to support DCC. It looked like Sony was going to fail again, except the format war was a non-starter after a strong initial response. DCC sales fell dramatically. A manufacturing defect in early batches of pre-recorded tapes caused DCC to stumble out of its doors in Japan, delaying its release. released in one month worldwide, it was not growing faster than the minidisc and as time went on sales continued to decline, the economics of both formats simply did not make sense for most consumers, compact discs They were reasonably priced at around 15, but before Recorded mds and dccs were not much cheaper blank media, as both were dramatically more expensive than cassette tapes and, as predicted, new technologies caused consumers to They felt overwhelmed and listless analog cassettes were cheap, ubiquitous and, most importantly, good enough to make both newcomers suffer.

Sony continued to make improvements to its format, newer versions of the a-trac codec offered better audio quality and prices for blank media dropped, the company reduced prices for players and recorders and launched new marketing campaigns. Market share grew, but it was slowly becoming obvious that pre-recorded music was going to remain only a small part of minidisc sales. Despite continuing to court record labels, only a few hundred titles were released. . Sony wanted the format to be successful around the world and, being a giant company, continued to invest money and resources into the technology at the time. It was only slightly smaller but, unlike Sony, it also had chronic financial problems;

It had made some major acquisitions over the years, but they were not proving profitable and technologies that were developed such as the v2000 videocassette were quickly overtaken by rival formats that the company introduced. New CEO Core Boonstra cleaned up the mess and discovered that Phillips simply couldn't continue subsidizing DCC. It was clear that the time of the format hadfinished, so in October 1996, after four difficult years, DCC was quietly discontinued. The minidisc had won the format war. that was never the case, but it still faced an interesting dichotomy because, while it was slowly advancing in North America and Europe, there was a country where md was king, the music industry in Japan works very differently than in the west, for one For a variety of reasons, purchasing copies of Music has always been an expensive affair: a CD that sells for 12 in the United States can cost the equivalent of 30 in Japan, and although consumers in that country generally have a good amount of disposable income, it was still expensive to collect albums in the early 1980s.

Rental stores began to appear as a way to fill this gap. You could rent music from chains like Jio Rekuru or Tsutaya for the equivalent of two dollars a day. These stores soon became very popular for the price of buying a CD, you could rent a dozen. and as expected, many people made copies of the music they rented for fear of loss of income. The national music industry tried to have rental stores declared illegal; put pressure on the Japanese diet, but found itself facing electronics manufacturers who had been profiting from the increase in sales of blank media and recording devices, the manufacturers exerted effective pressure, and in 1985 the government amended the copyright law. author from Japan in a way that ended up striking a balance between the two.

Copying music rented for personal use was declared legal, but rental stores had to do so. pay royalties to record labels and a fee was applied to blank media sales. American record labels hated the deal, but there was little they could do about it, since the way Japanese people consumed music had fundamentally changed, whether the labels liked it or not because of it. The minidisc became an instant hit in Japan. Consumers founded an easy, inexpensive, high-quality alternative to tape, just as Sony expected the technology to be licensed to other companies like Sharp JVC and even Matsushita, further increasing sales and, at the same time, mds.

Blanks were not as cheap as tapes at first, but they still proved to be good value for money compared to the cost of buying a CD. The irony of being both a leading member of the music industry but also the maker of a popular piracy tool. Sony didn't miss out, it knew what its new format would be used, a small concession came in the form of the serial copy management system or SCM, it put limits on digital copies from one format to another to block multiple generations of quality pirated recordings perfect. Governments required manufacturers of digital audio equipment to include them such as Sony's minidisk and Philips' DCC.

This arose from the recording industry's battle with DAT in the United States in Japan, the net effect being that listeners were more likely to make copies of CDs that they rented themselves. to make a third-generation recording of a friend so record labels would get their share of licensing fees. As another way to combat rental copies in Japan, some companies launched music kiosks in the late '90s, which generally They were located in places like convenience stores. and contained a library of the latest singles and popular songs, you inserted a blank minidisk and the kiosk copied your selection onto it in just a few seconds.

Songs cost between 250 and 500 yen depending on how recent they were and despite the prevalence of CD rental services: these kiosks were about to become commonplace, with one option, the vsync music module, planned have 6,000 machines located nationwide by the end of 2000. Over the years, minidisc would become a dominant format in Japan, in 1998 sales of minidisc players even surpassed those of CD players. It may not have become the global replacement for cassettes that Sony wanted, but it certainly had momentum at home in its efforts to spur minidisc adoption. Sony packed in as many features as it could. Players and recorders came of all types.

Of form factors the first minidisc recorder was actually a portable unit the

sony

mz1 was a bit bulky weighing a pound and a half but featuring both analog and digital inputs and outputs along with those impressive editing capabilities it was a great showcase of the promise that the format would hold up, but if Sony wanted the minidisc to be a true replacement for cassettes, it also needed to offer home recording decks, and over the years it produced quite a few of them. Some home decks were simple single-disc units intended for simple recording and playback and offered the full complement of editing functions, but these tasks were a bit cumbersome due to their basic buttons and controls.

Higher-end decks offered more features such as a PS2 port to connect a computer keyboard for easier editing and entering track names. There were also a variety of combo units that incorporated a CD player and offered one-touch dubbing from CD to minidisc, some of which could even do it at high speed two or four times faster than real-time boomboxes and systems. bookshelf stereo, they were a logical extension for the format, as well as some bookshelf systems even offered features that home equipment couldn't, such as the ability to set a timer to start recording from sources such as radio stations.

Some models offered not only a multi-CD changer but also a multi-MD changer. This was a nod to the Japanese market, as stacks of blank CDs and minidisks could be loaded and then, with the push of a button, the system would rip them all on its own, and at least one system also featured a special input that could control a portable player to make automatic minidiscs. copies in the analog domain as a way to circumvent the limits imposed by SCM. Several manufacturers also offered minidisc car stereos and some even included them as a factory option. Most of these only played MD, but there were some models that also had recording capability, they could make copies of discs into a connected CD changer or record from the radio, you could be listening to your favorite show while driving, then park your car and continued recording with a timer even after turning off the engine and walking.

By far it was a very limited use case, but it only goes to show the lengths Sony and its licensees went to increase the popularity of the format, but clearly the most popular form factor for MD hardware was portable decks, some of which had the ability to record. Like the original MZ1, while others were playback-only, the recorders generally offered the same capabilities as home decks, including editing, and sometimes even had additional features like microphone inputs. As new models came out they got smaller and battery life continued to improve with some players lasting a while. dozens of hours or more on a single dual cell, portable players and recorders eventually shrank to barely larger than the minidisc they contained.

There were a few other uses that Sony attempted to bring the minidisk into service over the years, but with mixed results due to its random access rewritable nature, it seemed to be a good choice for data storage on computers, but the Drives could only use special MD data media which, at thirty dollars each, were much more expensive than normal audio blanks, performance was poor, at only 150 kilobytes per second, the same as a CD drive. Single speed ROM when Iomega's zip disk format was released in 1994, it almost immediately made md data obsolete. The first generation of zip drives contained one hundred fewer megabytes than md data's 140, but was significantly faster, up to 1.4 megabytes per second and more.

Importantly, media was much cheaper at $10 per disc. Iomega was also able to negotiate deals with computer manufacturers to integrate its units into many models, giving it an installed base. Sony could only dream of a few manufacturers, such as Yamaha Tascum and Sony itself. multitrack audio recorders released for use in home music studios, offered a solid step up in sound quality over typical cassette-based multitracks and had the same powerful non-linear editing capabilities as home recorders while using the expensive data md. They still had brief popularity in the mid-'90s until computer-based multitrack recording became affordable, but a single minidisc recorder proved very adept in its niche role: the Sony mdccc2000 was a purpose-built four-track deck. to capture judicial proceedings.

It featured two optical drives so that recording could continue uninterrupted while the disc was changed and, perhaps most importantly, used ordinary, inexpensive md audio media. In the mid to late 90s, portable md recorders became popular with gig bootleggers, their small size making them discreet to carry and their battery good. High sound quality and shock protection were welcome features. Many recorders included stereo microphone inputs and their digital nature meant that copies suffered minimal generation loss even when recorded over an analogue connection; Over time, a number of concert recordings would begin to appear on websites. like archive.org which lists minidisc as a source, a final group was much larger and joined the format immediately, even in the early 90s radio stations continued to make heavy use of magnetic tape, those that used CDs to play music still depended on tape. for other purposes, such as advertisements or other pre-recorded programs, but tape editing was time-consuming and degraded with repeated use and, although computer-based audio editing existed at the time, it was prohibitively expensive for all stations except the biggest ones.

The minidisc's powerful editing functions made quick work of putting together programs, and reporters in the field could use portable units to record interviews. Eventually, a number of professional-grade minidisc recorders hit the market and saw rapid adoption in radio around the world. This variety of models was a major factor in establishing the minidisc as a dominant format in Japan and in the late 1990s something curious was happening in Europe and sales suddenly improved after years of production and refinement, hardware prices had fallen. at levels that younger people could finally afford. In June 1999, Sony began a European advertising campaign.

That contributed to further growth in the region, the company had sold a million players in its first five years, but it only took between 1998 and 99 to sell another million and some earlier record labels began offering pre-recorded mds driven in part due to positive sales. prospects, but also because of the so-called attractive conditions offered by Sony's record manufacturing plant in Austria, while the prospects for minidiscs were positive in Europe, the actual sales figures posed no threat to CDs, the typical disc pre-recorded only sold a few thousand copies. at best and labels were still conservative with their releases in July 99, emi had only issued 70 titles, the format saw a similar rise in interest in North America, but in even smaller numbers, by the end of the decade, only One million units of minidiscs had been sold. in the United States about a third of what had been managed in Europe and, although the threat of the DCC was long behind us, as the millennium drew to a close, the minidisco faced a new competitor towards the change of century, digital music took a new direction: the mp3.

The audio compression format allowed high-quality music files to take up only one-tenth the space of a CD, and the increasing capacity of hard drives prompted listeners to store those files directly on their computers. Peer-to-peer Internet file sharing services, such as Napster. and limewire helped drive this change and portable mp3 players such as creative nomad and diamond rio sought to capitalize on this by connecting directly to users' computers, downloaded mp3 files could be quickly and easily copied with just a few clicks, but Those players, although quite compact, were severelyLimited by a small amount of storage, the players themselves were affordable at a couple hundred dollars, but only featured 32 to 64 megabytes of memory, enough for a couple dozen songs of mediocre quality.

Some offered expandable storage, but memory cards were very expensive: 128 megabytes. The upgrade retailed for almost the same price as the player itself. Sony recognized the opportunity. Blank minidiscs only came in 60, 74 or 80 minute varieties, but prices had fallen dramatically to around two dollars per disc. If Sony could make minidiscs as easy to drive from computers as MP3 players, then they could secure a point of purchase. support in the changing digital landscape, so in mid-2001 Sony launched netmd, which brought a line of recorders that connected to PCs via the increasingly common USB interface that the included software allowed owners.

To manage your music files and write them to minidisks by simply dragging and dropping to extend the runtime of those discs, two new recording modes were added offering up to 320 minutes of music, although at the expense of sound quality, Sony made everything possible with net md. Even incorporating minidisc drives into some models of their Vaio computers and with recorders that offered easy copying of music on inexpensive means, all the pieces were in place for the minidisk to finally take off in the West, until an old friend launched a product revolutionary of its In October 2001, Apple introduced the iPod, an mp3 player with an intuitive interface and a simple design, integrated with iTunes, the company's music organization program, and allowed high-speed file copying through the Mac's FireWire interface, but instead of removable media, the iPod had a five-gigabyte internal hard drive that Apple promoted with the slogan a thousand songs in your pocket.

Apple had surpassed Sony in spectacular fashion. The two companies had worked on various projects for decades. Apple frequently used parts from Sony and its products, such as the floppy drive. The original Macintosh and Trinitron tubes in its monitors Sony had even designed and manufactured one of the company's first laptops, the Powerbook 100, due to its expertise in miniaturizing components, but the iPod and later the iTunes music store turned out tremendously. popular and ultimately caused a huge decline in the physical audio medium, it was the iPod that ended up becoming the next generation walkman, but Sony gave it one last chance in 2004 and released High MD, a major update to the format that increased the capacity of storage from a disk to a gigabyte in this six-year period.

The increase in size allowed for much more music to be stored and also brought support for uncompressed audio like a CD. The high md recorders were compatible with the original MDs and featured the same PC connectivity as the net md drives that most high md devices had. laptops made by sony, but onkyo produced some platforms for use with bookshelf stereo systems and with high md sony tried again to push the minidisk format for data storage, new media could share its capacity with audio data, something could be recorded of music to a high blank md and used the rest of the space to store files, but zip drives had evolved to store 750 megabytes.

CD recorders were common. Recordable DVDs were gaining popularity and inexpensive USB flash drives were on the horizon. There just wasn't much room for high md. data and although the format finally offered the pristine sound quality that audio files had originally demanded, it was a decade too late, new discs cost about ten dollars each, but the world had simply moved on to a more music-centric music experience. the computer, the minidisk had held firm. much more than necessary, but eventually even the loyal Japanese market turned its attention away from the format. Sony stopped marketing portable recorders in September 2011 and in March 2013 sold its latest minidisc player.

The company said it would continue to offer blank repairs and supports. for a while, but 20 years after the launch of the minidisc, it was the end, while the mass market use of the minidisc ended, there has been renewed interest in it as a retro format. Commercial record pressing plants closed long ago, but a new cottage industry has emerged. Its place starting in the late 2010s, independent artists began offering their releases on MD focused primarily on vaporwave hip hop and future funk genres using small fleets of NETMD platforms, the companies specializing in retro audio media. They recorded the music on common blank discs, sometimes these were new old stock, but more often they were a specific model of blank imported from Japan, the only new minidiscs still being manufactured, the album covers could be printed directly on the discs. discs and were packaged with j-cards in custom clear cases.

Quantities of each album release are typically limited to about 50 copies, but often sell out quickly. Buyers are equally interested in the music as they are in the retro futurism of the format. For many, it is the first time they have used an MD, starting a new, albeit very small, generation of fans. Naturally, it will have its limits, of course, the only players available to buy are used ones and one day Sony will finally stop making new blank media, but until that happens at least the format has found some appreciation for a while. , although most people look at the MD and see.

A format that

failed

to achieve mass adoption failed to quickly and definitively replace any other medium and failed to become a household name with a player on every dashboard or boombox pocket, but maybe that's not the only way to look at it, perhaps. Maybe it just stays there. and getting small victories is enough. Minidisc was the right format at the right time in the early '90s. Analog tape had fallen out of popularity, but computer-based audio wasn't ready yet. Sometimes, bridges are needed between major changes and technology to facilitate the transition. Not everyone will need to use them, but for those who do they are essential.

It didn't become the format Sony wanted, but as a way to introduce us to our new world of online music, the minidisc was a success.