MiniDisc - Why Would You Bother With Them In This Day And Age?

I is Tony from cassette combat calm now would have a bit of a different video of today now as a person I don't believe in time my flight to any one thing unless I really have to I like to enjoy everything that's good out there so when I see comment from people good you should try minidisc it smells bogus yeah I do trap many discs why wouldn't I try many discs why would I only be a man that only tries one thing and says this is a person everything's rubbish you know I call the people to say ooh reel-to-reel so much better oh absolutely until you try and take in your car or ticket when you travel or play it on the move then reel-to-reel isn't better in every aspect but regardless I love many discs I've always looked minis have loved mini distance they first came out mini this was one of the reasons I stopped with cassettes first time around because they were wonderful and they still are now this video isn't here for all the mini dis experts who probably know a lot more than me about it to try and you know brush them and say hey guys you know I like you to be my fur it's not there's a lot of people out there that minute is completely passed them by and especially in America where I have some friends were American and it wasn't common there and it's hard to get many discs and stuff over there this is really not a common format this is about why if you love recording stuff which I'm supposing you do because you follow this channel why you would possibly want a mini disc well let's just take some leaders shall we and here's the thing a lot of the my love for cassettes is from nostalgia combined with their physical characteristics the way they look the way they have character and mintages to me also have a lot of these qualities that I like I mean you know just just you know these are ones I've been myself just have a look at a minidisc yeah just have a look at it just look at it right this this to me still looks like the future this to me looks like a high-tech gadget out of an 80 sci-fi film these are beautiful little pieces of technology I mean you know there's a hell of a lot more character in one of these than there is in an SD card there's still beautiful things and again part of it is in German yes I am kind of sad I've I've made all these myself I've done the GA cards you know I've done the labels and I enjoy doing that so if I enjoy doing that what's the problem but don't simply dismiss minidisc is being just another useless digital format there's a lot more to minidisc than meets the eye so at this point I'm gonna switch into presentation mode and just try to explain a bit how it works not in great depth just if you curious and thinking what's it all about this will explain to you how a minute this works because one thing about mini disco for everything else I love is well I'm not gonna tell you right now but there's something about this format which no other format in my opinion can match up to Sonya that's er going to the boring bit okay so this is a boring bit and there's basically two types of mini disc you're gonna see out there this type which is the consumer recording format and this type which is the pre-recorded format now can you see what the main difference between these two discs are the both optical discs are both inside hard cases so fingerprints debris etc very unlucky if you get it on there that makes them very sturdy I mean I've got SD cards I didn't last 18-month I got many of this which have been with me for 20 years the main difference is this there is a door on the front or the top I should say off the recordable mini dis which is absent from the pre-recorded bombs now I'm gonna explain to you why this is as well as give you a little overview very simply of how a mini disc works basically if we look at this this mini disc is being looked at on the side so we're good at laying flat we're looking at the side we've got the top on the bottom the top is where we can see this door on this sony mini disc and the bottom there is also a door as well and what happens is is that that door slid open and the laser is applied to the bottom of the mini disc now what this main laser does is it heats it to what's called its Curie point now believe or not this is a magnetical media it's not purely optical because the Curie point basically means that the magnetic layer is now able to be written to so it heats it up to the magnet to the Curie point magnetic layer is written to and then at the top a right head will write the data to the mini disc it will write the pits on there that's why prerecorded do not have a door at the top because you're not going to be writing to them so it's not there but once it's written and it cools pretty instantaneously away from the Curie point the data is written into the magnetic layer when you're reading it again you use a laser which is at the bottom which just reads it the pits and it decodes the digital data into analog so simply speaking that's how the mini disc is written and read and as regards to pre-recorded unless you're into collecting there's no point really because ones that you record yourself will sound just as good they don't sound any better in fact some of the early ones do not have as good a sound quality because they're written with an older version of the encoding engine and what is that encoding engine our track adaptive transform acoustic codec now this was developed by Sony initially for their SDSS I think it was cinema system which is like that Dolby Digital competitor but they adapted it into the format for mini disc and you got to think Sony's a massive electronic company this was a format that we use in cinema systems and they were also going to use on the newest home based recording format that they wanted to take over the world mp3 developed by amateurs given away for free I'm not saying mp3 didn't get better over time but there's nothing wrong with a track there really isn't it's a very good compression format and personally I can't tell the difference between that the source if you want to break out the oscilloscopes or monitor it you might say oh yes this isn't as good but I don't care it sounds brill to me now there are different versions of it so you can look at the front of players except when you can see stuff like this a track a track 3 DSP type s and you've also got type R as well but let's just step back a second and look at the actual mini disc themselves a maximum running time of a regular mini disc will be 80 minutes depending on what it is I mean the different sizes but the biggest ones you can get 80 minutes using SP recording which is standard recording that records at 282 K bits a second so if you think about an mp3 running at 320 K bits a second they sound pretty close to the source nothing tangible that you can really hear differentiates it so a track is very good a track 3 is mock will mostly use and and this is where you've got different multi LP to an LP for I won't go into all this boring jargon here but basically LP 2 doubles a recording time at a sacrifice for the bitrate an LP fall I could say this is at 66 K bits a second that allows 324 minutes to be recorded in a two-minute mini disc so it's up to you you know if you want to record voice or lectures like some people did then you know you can get 324 minutes on one mini disc and that's pretty good going for an artist technology me personally I'll leave you a regular SP 292 and Nova eighty minutes is a maximum I'm gonna get on a disk but we'll show you later on a bit about recording them so this is from minidisc org and it's just about type r type are faster DSP less two bit allocation algorithm that looks for redundancy makes better use of available bits blah blah blah blah basically it's a better encoding mechanism but this is a beauty because this next bit about Type S you know this is one which isn't common type s it's an upgraded a track 3 codec with apparently improved decoding parole performance but the word apparently there because Sony never really released open technical documents on a track why would they they spent so much money developing this for their own use why would they just share all the secrets of how it's been made with everyone they didn't it's only you know the same people that tried proprietary card for the PS Vita you know they couldn't use SD cards oh oh no we could have another proprietary format Sony likes the proprietary formats but to be fair to them they did put the money in developing them but this is the thing here the encoder ie recording side of a track of his room for improvement from one generation to the next thus m.d record is made on a newer machine with a better 8-track encoder will sound better than old recordings even when played back on an old machine the decoder has a fixed structure so it decoded all the same and although a track chips are all generally expected eco would kneel the same quality increase in digital signal processing accuracy may allow slight audio quality improvements if those improvements have not or would be made by modern era chips now this is the appointment since the 8-track encoder plays the largest role in Howard MD Sam's the implication for making digital copies between two MD units is to use the older unit for playback and the newer one for recording when making analogue copies the relative quality of the a/d and d/a converters must be borne in mind so what he is saying is it's a bit like I say with cassettes record your cassettes on the best deck you've got the best way when you play him back they'll play back well on any deck pretty much because the recording has been done right the Bisons been done right the leveling has been done right it's set the magnetic signal on the tape so that when it's played back it doesn't really matter as long as the deck azimuth is correct and it's a decent quality deck it will sound good and the same is here you record mini discs with the best version of a track that you can once that's recorded it doesn't matter what deck you put them in to play it back because the Hank the decoder is fixed so if it been recorded well in the latest codec it'll play back better than if it's recorded well and one of the older codecs but we'll go into this a little bit more later on with what you should look for so that's basically the basics of about the compression about the minidisc format what the dislike and how they're written now let's spin on and have a look at some of the hardware so yeah so it is a format that is compressed but like a say to my ears I can't really hear indifferent the button are saying before there's something about this format which i think is unmatched and what is that it's the engineering of this format for example sure this is one of my favourite little players right now we looked at the size relative to a mini disc it's it's virtually no bigger than a mini disc but this thing is an engineering marvel no audio format especially when it comes to portables I think has been engineered like this think about it right this mini disc Wortman here right this has a laser which can heat a disc to a Curie point and a laser that can also read the data it has a magnetic head which writes the data it has a motor which spins the mini disk so that this can be read and write it also has a DSP chip in it which does all the art track decoding and encoding it has a headphone amplifier and it has an LCD display and these buttons which work with it yeah and all of that lasers read heads decoding amplifiers displays is all powered by one single double-a battery all of that done with a single double-a battery I mean look at this thing I mean the beautiful I mean this is metal oh it's just beautiful it still looks like the future I'm sorry but a modern mp3 player doesn't hold a candle to how good this looks and it's not just this one I mean look at this beautiful one this is one of my all-time favorites which is the m's at our 37 look at this thing look at it metallic LCDs buttons it's just a beautiful thing that can play digital music while we go everywhere it can record it it can encode it it's just a beautiful beautiful thing and there's another one which I which is my arms at b10 this one was more designed for like lectures it's got a flat mic it's got a built-in speaker you press the record you record your lectures on this but again it's just the engineering of these and as it turns out you know even though there's 25 years on these they work they work like they did the day they were made if you keep the heads clean and the lasers clean with a little cleaning disk they just work and the beautiful beautiful things and let's be honest now if you're recording on any format than your computer are you doing it because you want to not because you have to the most convenient way to record anything is to just rip it on a computer and dump it on your phone so if you're gonna go out there recording things because you want to because you want a physical connection with what you're recording you know with beautiful things like this you know if you want that then your bar as well go the whole hog and get stuff that you really really like looking at that has quality that you can marvel at because the engineering in them and that's one of the things I love about many discs just beautifully engineered beautiful players and right now they're not expensive they're really not you know something like this you whip this thing I mean I don't know what age group everyone who watches this channel is but if you're younger while opera house is listening on your phone can you imagine how cool you be just whipping this out and listening to the latest choose which you put on this that's one of the beautiful things but now we're gonna go into how easy is to actually get music onto a mini disc okay so how do you actually get the music from whatever in this case and under a tablet with the streaming service how do you get that onto the mini disc well the several ways but I'm going to show you my preferred way my third way is to take a nice mini disc I mean this is a 70 formerly disc oh isn't that pretty look at them they're so pretty anyway 74 million discs I'm not gonna use any low bitrate I'm not gonna use slow play or long play I'm just gonna use regular a track 3 yeah so I will fit 74 minutes on this and no more but I am using the highest bitrate which to my ears to be perfectly honest I can't tell the difference between that the source it's good enough in fact good enough not the wrong right word it's good it's got simple so and I'm gonna use this player for doing it this is a little player and if you look at this bit worn out there this player has been well used and well-loved these are very cheap but the thing is important bits of that net nd I'll show you what that is in the next bit and Type R so I'm gonna record this a track 3 type r direct digital and it's gonna go digital out of here just tilt into my little audio interface oh now it's a Behringer get behind me Satan nothing wrong with baron just have out light baron just stuff I find a value for money and it performs very well it doesn't matter that the DAX may not be a beurre Brown super special in this because we're not actually using any conversion to analog it's just going digital digital digital it's all we do is then now just take her let's be difficult click it in there put this into if you look it says line in and also says optical so this can take a standard three and a half inch Jack from the headphone socket straighten if you want can record it analog I've done that on the movement I've been bored recorded from my mobile phone from the headphone jack straight into a mini disc but I'm going to use optical as you can see there it's red straight into here pops the lunar disk in lit spin up it should find that the spinning disk is blank yeah it says blank so pause record what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to slide to a track you're not going to hear it because I don't any YouTube hits Brown just lights in the track here and all I do when I'm ready to record oops just rerun this to the back pause in play and that's it this is now recording the truck on it simple as that now afterwards if you want to do an entire album you can just leave the entire album going if there's a sufficient enough space between the tracks the mini display will detect it and automatically do a truck end or afterwards you can go through it and manually add the brakes for each track but that's about it that's how simple it is to record from an Android tablet in this case from a streaming service in digital quality onto a mini disc maybe going nothing complicated there okay so this next bit is gonna be about the net and D facilities now what is net MD well as I showed on this lot of play before it's got the net nd it's got a USB connector at the side then what this is basically it's a way to connect a minidisc player to a PC and through a bit of software called sonicstage it allows you to rip CDs directly to a minidisc player bearing in mind it does that there's lots of copy protection involved a you can't then take them in the disc rip files and then copy them to another mini disc but it does that mostly in mp3 it doesn't do it in the a track on the fly which is why I don't really like it but I'm sure the software more importantly what's good about it is it helps you label the mini disc because many discs can't have the title of the album on there it can also have the title of each individual track so you can't do it you know by going through the menus and pressing this and pressing that but it's a pain in the bum some players you can get external keyboards for but they're expensive but me personally just pull the USB cable into the mini disc if you look at the display now as it changes it's gone PC MD that means it's connected to the PC all we do is go into this software called sonicstage so if I go to this transfer a bit we can see we've got a net MD there and we can see it's got one truck on it that's that single track which I recorded earlier from the tablet and all I'm going to do is press f2 and type in your nut car and I think that was called or I forgot what it called Braille just gonna call it first track yep and hear that that's the MD writing and I can give the disc inator I'm gonna call it test disc yeah and you can see here I've got the boy racer by Morrissey if I want to I can transfer that across as well which is an mp3 presser is converting it into mp3 I never got the boy racer by Morrissey is also on the mini disc as well nope still going status transfer Eric's converted it that was transferring it like I say it's not mega fast but it was done I think all of this to keep pace with mp3 players but you know that solid-state this isn't and I just prefer using a track and recording it digitally because at the end of the day there's no need for for this at all i do know got play with many discs because i like many discs it's as simple as that if i wanted it all digital I just ripped it to me for an Austrian darts or Spotify so if you look at the two different types we've got here that's the one which I recorded direct through the optical this is one which I've just transferred from the PC and this is an LP 2 so you know this is in long play I almost have been the way I've got this this set up but as you can see it's easy enough to do once you set this up and once you're finished you just close the program unplug the mat MD and it should right of contents now I so I've done it but if we let actually look at the if you play it we can see 446 the by racer that's named properly now and that's what's playing and if we switch tracks we've got the unica track which are labeled through the net nd software through sonicstage and that's that that's that's how hard it is to get music onto this we got to think the quality personally is brilliant it's got so much character they're not expensive I'm just going to switch this off now I'm not going to switch it off now he doesn't want to play with me I'm just going to get the disc but there we go it's all on the disc now and you can do that with multiple tracks from different sources different levels there's a lot of variety but the thing is these discs are very very Hardy I don't know of any that really have out new layers of rock but we'll talk about discs in the last bit so hope this has been useful for you if you've wondered what the appeal at minidisc is the appeal is it's a beautiful format wonderfully engineered technically now still very smart I mean come on you know a lot of people that are on Patriot right whatever which you think had more development money and more development tank put into the mp3 format which basically was developed by amateurs always as a standard that has given away free or a compression format developed by the biggest electronics company in the world to be used in a brand-new format that they wanted to take over the world with you know 8-track forget what you read if you might still listen to an oh I'm sorry you've had nothing to listen to in this but there's no point because it sounds just so like the source I didn't think there was any point in claiming any minidisc really dark let's focus on how easy it is to record this to father in pure digital from what you've got combined with how easy is to title them and to rip CDs etc to it so if you want some buying tips try and get yourself a player Highwood which is at least got this is a Type S but at least type are and then get yourself an attendee one as well the other thing I want to mention is batteries now I liked about these lot of players that all take a single double a battery be careful of buying them whether it's at the battery sat in there forever and they've gone wrong and moldy acceptor I'm in the can be externally powered but you can get a lot which are powered by little domestic batteries and some of these now are very rare and very expensive you really don't want to be doing that there's such a big selection of these that take good old double-a batteries and like I say tak this one there's a Type S with net MD it's got the long play if you want it you shouldn't pay more than maybe thirty pound for one of these maximum but there's so much variety and again the discs I mean do you recognize the style of this the good old max out like cell to but the mini discs look at this the I've got the matching cassettes for these a lot really cool max Hal made good Andy Sonne did I mean I've been showing you the sony premium I showed you one earlier beautiful things Fuji's there TD Kaiser and before you ask TDK MDR XG yeah they do an MD XG yes before you ask it does have an alloy frame yes TDK made him any disc with an alloy frame like the ma XG but them any this version and yes they are stupid expensive 50 60 pound and this is the point regarding the actual discs themselves now because this is a digital format pretty much all the discs when the recorded properly sound the same there's nothing in it choose between the discs for two reasons one esthetics you like the look of them I've told you these looks so cool they still look like the future to me these are the last real home recording format to be released apart from the old you know solid state disks and and s DS which all look the same pop from the sticker this is the last one which had any variety and this is the last one really before we went all digital so choose ones that you like the look of size-wise you've got seventy fours you've got eighties you can also get sixties if you want but it doesn't really matter you know get the biggest one you can unless the big financial difference the second reason to choose them is that the main problem with these is not sonically it's more reliability and that there's two things which can be deemed maybe unreliable on some discs and I'm gonna mention Memorex II cuz they're one of the biggest ones for it is the build quality these doors for example on the Sony's brilliant NASA smooth on some it's been known that the door makes can actually wreck your mini disc player itself because they the plastic part snapped and it's just Wrexham up I've never had one personally from any make but then again I've always avoided Memorex because of this the other thing is is the actual magnetic layers themselves from what red even though the magnetic lazy no the heated up like what says the Curie point and then you have a head right on them right the pits on the magnetic that's pretty standard some layers aren't as good as others and sometimes it takes more time there's a bit of jitter I've never personally experienced it so what I'll say is stick with this from makes you know max Atlanta TDK Fuji Sony they're all like their stick to this you know and basically the only difference is these have they look they all perform pretty much the same it's as simple as that so I hope this has been an interest to those of you who don't really know anything about many discs because like I say this came from a chat been having with a friend of mine who's says I keep looking at many discs but I don't know this is just to let you know about how the format works what to expect and how to use it so yeah I also have many dis available on my site and it's cool because that come back but we've got manages there as well because I love the format and I hope some of you might be tempted to go forward and try it because it is truly the last great audio format for the consumer because after this we all went digital and like I said they're just so pretty I mean look at that look how pretty that is order or metal beautiful thing yeah so cool that's been useful but until next time happy taping or mini diskant and I'll see you soon buh-bye you

Channel: Cassette Comeback

Views: 63,417

Keywords: Cassette, cassettes, cassette reviews, blank cassette, blank cassettes, tape, tapes, blank tapes, tdk, maxell, that's, ferric, type 1, normal bias, cassette comeback, review, onn, Type 0, aliexpress, wish, saehan, Type 3, Nakamichi, Nakamichi Dragon, SKC, Type 2, High Bias, High bias cassette, type 2 cassette, chrome bias, chrome cassette, pure chrome, Type 4, Metal Cassette, BASF, Metal Maxima, Metal Tape, Minidisc, minidiscs

Id: 4_spMVVatgE

Length: 31min 6sec (1866 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2019