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

audio formats have come and gone over time one may have meant to be a replacement while another tried to create its own market but in the early 90s one new form of physical media tried to do both this is the story of minidisc in the early 1980s sony's walkman was a huge success it revolutionized the way the world listened to music it used compact cassettes which were simple rugged and inexpensive enough for playback on the go the format offered a lot of flexibility such as how easy it was to record cassettes at home and the walkman played no small part in the rise of a cultural phenomenon known as the mixtape but as successful as sony was it also recognized that it couldn't just sit back and relax if you ask the public what they think they'll need you'll always be behind in this world sony founder akio morita once said you'll never catch up unless you think one to ten years in advance 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 kicked off research on a new format the company reached out to phillips who it had partnered with in the late 70s to create the compact disc phillips joined on and the two started discussing options things turned rocky pretty quickly though both agreed that a digital format was the way to go but couldn't agree on what 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 disc itself phillips though demanded backwards compatibility with cassettes citing a large installed base and hesitant record companies the two sides couldn't reconcile their differences so they parted ways sony was on its own this time what resulted from several years of research was minidisc it was small durable and recordable everything cassettes were but better minidiscs were about three inches square and similar to computer floppy disks they were fully enclosed to keep the surface of the media clean they were red with a laser just like cds and offered high quality digital sound it was minidisc's rewrite ability that really set it apart it used magneto optical technology where the laser would heat up the surface of the disk so an electromagnet could write the bits of data they could be written and rewritten thousands of times with no degradation of sound quality a common problem with tape what's more audio was written to disks in blocks but unlike with cds those blocks didn't necessarily have to be in sequence the disk's table of contents kept track of them and players were able to skip around the disk to retrieve the blocks in the right order this was possible because a memory buffer was made standard data would be read and stored in the buffer which allowed for seamless playback as the laser shuttled across the disk from block to block but the buffer was also critical to minidisc's usability as a portable format and that it could mitigate skipping if the player was bumped or shaken a few minidisc decks even made creative use of the buffer with a so-called time machine feature where they would store the last few seconds of incoming audio even if you hadn't pressed the record button yet the result was that you'd never miss recording the beginning of a song even if you hadn't pressed the record button yet something that any sort of tape could never touch minidisc on was its powerful editing features tracks could easily be split up moved deleted or merged on the fly and instantly audio data that wasn't needed any longer was simply marked as eligible to be written over just like files on a computer hard drive if you moved track 3 to be track 7 for example the data wouldn't actually change location on the disk instead the table of contents was simply updated as to the new track order mixtapes were now more customizable than ever before because of its small size though 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 runtime of compact disks yet the company also prioritized sound quality believing it to be another incentive to get consumers to switch from tape sony had quite the dilemma on its hands it needed to fit a cd's worth of music at or near cd quality on a disc that was less than a third its size what it came up with was an algorithm that would compress the audio called adaptive transform acoustic coding or a-track it worked by analyzing the sound and throwing out the parts that it deemed inaudible to listeners this allowed the audio data to take up only a fraction of the space at a quality that sony determined would be hard for consumers to tell apart from cds sony had its successor to cassettes it was smaller more robust more flexible and sounded better all the company had to do was get the format to catch on in the united states compact discs had seen decent adoption but cassettes were still the norm the market seemed ripe for disruption minidisc launched at the end of 1992 to great anticipation its advertising targeted teenagers and young adults the so-called mtv generation with whom minidisc would have had the biggest impact but the equipment was prohibitively expensive for them costing upwards of seven hundred and fifty dollars that's a price tag that audiophiles could afford but they snubbed the format because the a-track compression affected the sound quality too much for their discerning taste sales were slow and critics declared that minidisc would turn out to be a flop the biggest threat to minidisc though was a ghost from sony's past after they had parted ways years earlier phillips continued its own research eventually partnering with panasonic's parent company matsushita and just a few months before minidisc's launch they unveiled digital compact cassette or dcc sony's worst fears came to haunt it again a decade after its betamax videotape lost out to vhs it had the makings of another format war on its hands dcc was a compelling medium in its own right while it also used audio compression dcc tapes offered more capacity than minidisc so the resulting sound quality was a bit better it had a table of contents too so listeners could skip between tracks with just a button push but its defining feature was that the media was based on tape and its players were backwards compatible with analog cassettes consumers could upgrade to dcc but still listen to their existing tapes the recording industry was skeptical of minidisc it had been battling sony's other new media digital audio tape since the late 80s it feared widespread piracy due to dat's ability to perfectly copy cd audio so we're very afraid of the possibility of cottage industry because the copying will be so accurate the fidelity would be well actually it's a clone it's not a copy it's exactly like the original compact disk while that had ultimately failed in the consumer market in the early 90s record labels were just as concerned with minidisc's easy and powerful recording features industry executives also worried about confusing consumers with another new optical format in 1992 the compact disk was already a decade old but in the us and many other countries its adoption rate was still relatively low about 30 percent but the format had been responsible for the bulk of the industry's profits and minidisc represented a potential threat to cd's growth dcc looked like a safer option recording labels gravitated towards it because of its backwards compatibility and also because it could be clearly perceived as the successor to cassettes there were also unspoken concerns about minidisc licensing in an interesting twist both sony and phillips were responsible for it the two shared patents around optical media stemming back to their joint development of the compact disc minidisc made use of some of the same technology so phillips had to get involved though it said it would leave the actual licensing process and conditions up to sony this made the music industry a bit nervous since both companies already held control over the compact disk if minidiscs succeeded in replacing tape they'd jointly have the majority of influence over the consumer audio market as a whole with dcc while phillips would still be involved matsushita could act as a counterbalance this had never been a concern with compact cassettes because while they had been developed by phillips back in the 1960s licensing the technology was free of charge that had come about incidentally due to sony in 1963 phillips realized that it needed cassettes to succeed in japan in order to gain acceptance worldwide and defeat a rival tape format made by grundig sony was known as a tough negotiator and the company managed to hammer out an agreement that gave it free licensing after signing the deal though phillips discovered its error if other potential cassette manufacturers found out sony wasn't paying anything they wouldn't want to either and while it was less than enthusiastic about minidisc the music industry wasn't fully trusting of philips either pirated music cds had started to enter the market and there were concerns that phillips was being a bit lacks in its licensing to cd manufacturers labels also became upset over an october 1992 announcement that phillips was working on consumer rewriteable cd technology targeted for release in 1996. these of course would come to be known as cdrws record labels started to draw battle lines around the two newcomers sony had cleverly acquired cbs records in 1987 not just as a way to diversify its corporate portfolio but also to bolster its consumer electronics business cbs had a roster of best-selling artists like bruce springsteen cindy lauper mariah carey the beastie boys and michael jackson and this gave sony tremendous leverage naturally the company was inclined to release titles from its catalog on minidisc but when it tried to court other labels it was given a chilly reception ultimately only emi came on board in comparison matsushita owned mca records and phillips had polygram so they had their own stable of popular artists to compete with sony and as dcc seemed like a safer bet other recording industry heavyweights joined on like warner and universal sony's worst fear was becoming reality with most music labels choosing to back dcc it was starting to look like sony was going to fail again except the format war was a non-starter after a solid initial response dcc sales dropped off dramatically manufacturing defect in the first batches of pre-recorded tapes caused dcc to stumble out of the gates in japan delaying its launch by a month worldwide it wasn't growing any faster than minidisc and as time went on sales continued to decline the economics of both formats simply didn't make sense for the majority of consumers compact disks were reasonably priced at about 15 but pre-recorded mds and dccs weren't much cheaper blank media for either was dramatically more expensive than cassette tapes and as predicted the new technologies caused consumers to become overwhelmed and apathetic analog cassettes were cheap ubiquitous and most importantly good enough so both newcomers suffered sony continued to make refinements to its format newer versions of the a-trac codec offered better audio quality and prices of blank media fell the company cut prices on players and recorders and launched new marketing campaigns market share grew but slowly it was 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 succeed worldwide and being a giant company it continued to throw money and resources at the technology at the time philips was only slightly smaller but unlike sony it also had chronic financial struggles it had taken on some big acquisitions over the years but they weren't proving profitable and technologies that developed like the v2000 video cassette quickly found themselves beaten by rival formats the company brought on new ceo core boonstra to clean up the mess and he found that phillips simply couldn't continue to subsidize dcc it was clear that the format's time had run out so in october 1996 after four tough years dcc was quietly discontinued minidisc had won the format war that never was but it was still facing an interesting dichotomy because while it was slow going in north america and europe there was one country where md was king the music industry in japan works very differently than in the west for a variety of reasons purchasing copies of music has always been an expensive affair a cd that sells for 12 in the us can go for the equivalent of 30 in japan and while consumers in that country generally have a healthy amount of disposable income it's still costly to collect albums in the early 80s music rental shops started to pop up 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 wildly popular for the price of buying one cd you could rent a dozen and as one might expect many people would make copies of the music they rented fearing a loss of revenue the domestic music industry tried to get rental shops declared illegal it lobbied the japanese diet but found itself going up against electronics manufacturers who had been benefiting from the increased sales of blank media and recording devices the manufacturers were effective in their lobbying and in 1985 the government amended japan's copyright law in a way that ended up striking a balance between the two copying rented music for personal use was declared legal but rental shops had to pay royalties to the music labels and a fee was attached to sales of blank media american record labels hated the arrangement but there was little they could do about it the way the japanese consumed music had fundamentally shifted whether the labels liked it or not because of this minidisc became an instant hit in japan consumers founded an easy inexpensive and high quality alternative to tape just as sony had hoped the technology was licensed to other companies such as sharp jvc and even matsushita which further increased sales and while blank mds weren't nearly as cheap as tapes at first they still proved to be good value over the cost of purchasing a cd the irony of being both a leading member of the music industry but also the manufacturer of a popular tool for piracy wasn't lost on sony it knew what its new format would be used for one small concession came in the form of the serial copy management system or scms it placed limits on digital copies from one format to another to block multiple generations of perfect quality pirated recordings some governments required manufacturers of digital audio equipment to include it like sony's minidisc and philips dcc this came about from the recording industry's battle with dat in the united states in japan the net effect was that listeners were more likely to make copies from cds they rented themselves instead of making a third generation recording from a friend and thus the record labels would get their cut of the licensing fees as another way to combat rental copying in japan a few companies launched music kiosks in the late 90s these were usually located in places like convenience stores and held a library of the latest singles and popular songs you'd insert a blank minidisc and the kiosk would copy your selection to 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 poised to become commonplace with one option the music pod from vsync planning to have 6 000 machines located across the country by the end of 2000. over the years minidisc would become a dominant format in japan by 1998 sales of minidisc players even overtook those of cd players it may not have become the worldwide 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 in all sorts of form factors the first minidisc recorder was actually a portable unit the sony mz1 it was a bit bulky weighing one and a half pounds but it featured both analog and digital inputs and outputs along with those impressive editing capabilities it was a great showcase for the promise that the format held but if sony wanted minidisc to be a true replacement for cassettes it also needed to offer home recording decks and over the years it produced quite a number of them some home decks were simple one disc units meant for straightforward recording and playback they offered the full complement of editing features but these tasks were a bit cumbersome due to their basic buttons and controls higher end decks offered more features like a ps2 port for connecting a computer keyboard to make editing and entering track names easier there were also a range of combination units that incorporated a cd player and offered one touch dubbing from cd to minidisc a few of these could even do so at high speed two or four times faster than real time [Music] boomboxes and shelf stereo systems were a logical extension for the format as well some shelf systems even offered features the home decks couldn't such as the ability to set a timer to start recording from sources like radio stations a few models offered not only a multi-cd changer but also a multi-md changer this was a nod to the japanese market as you could load in stacks of cds and blank minidiscs then with a button press the system would copy them all on its own and at least one system also featured a special input that could control a portable player for doing automatic minidisc to minidisc copies in the analog domain as a way to bypass the limits imposed by scms a number of manufacturers also offered minidisc stereos for cars with some automakers even including them as a factory option most of these only played back md's but there were a few models that also had the capability of recording they could make copies of disks in a connected cd changer or record from the radio you could be listening to a favorite show while driving then park your car and keep recording on a timer even after you turned off the ignition and walked away it was a very narrow use case but just goes to show the lengths that sony and its licensees went to in order to grow the popularity of the format but clearly the most popular form factor for minidisc hardware was portable decks some had the ability to record like the original mz1 while others were for playback only recorders typically offered the same capabilities as home decks including editing and sometimes even had additional functionality like microphone inputs as new models came out they got smaller and battery life continued to improve with some players lasting for a dozen hours or more on a single double a cell eventually portable players and recorders shrank to be barely larger than the minidisc inside them there were a few other uses that sony tried to press minidisc into service for over the years but with mixed results because of its random access rewritable nature it seemed to be a good fit for computer data storage but drives could only use special md data media which at thirty dollars each were much more expensive than regular audio blanks performance was poor at only 150 kilobytes per second the same as a single speed cd-rom drive when iomega's zip disk format launched in 1994 it almost immediately rendered md data obsolete the first generation of zip disks held a hundred megabytes less than md data's 140 but it was significantly faster at up to 1.4 megabytes per second and more importantly the media was a lot cheaper at 10 dollars per disk iomega was also able to negotiate deals with computer manufacturers to have its drives built into many models giving it an installed base sony could only dream of a few manufacturers such as yamaha tascum and sony itself released multi-track audio recorders meant for home music studio use these offered a solid step up in sound quality over the typical cassette-based multi-track and had the same powerful non-linear editing capabilities as home recorders while they used the expensive md data media they still saw brief popularity in the mid 90s until computer-based multi-track recording became affordable but one unique minidisc recorder proved very adept at its niche role the sony mdccc2000 was a four-track deck specifically designed for capturing courtroom proceedings it featured two optical drives so recording could continue uninterrupted while the disc was swapped and perhaps most importantly it used ordinary inexpensive md audio media by the mid to late 90s portable md recorders found themselves popular among concert bootleggers their small size made him discreet to carry and their good battery life high sound quality and shock protection were all welcome features many recorders included inputs for stereo microphones and their digital nature meant that copies suffered from minimal generation loss even when recorded through an analog connection in time a number of concert recordings would start showing up on websites like archive.org listing minidisc as the source one final group was much bigger and jumped on board with the format straight away even through the early 90s radio stations continued to make heavy use of magnetic tape those that used cds for music playback still relied on tape for other purposes like advertisements or other pre-recorded programs but tape was time consuming to edit and degraded with repeated use and while computer-based audio editing did exist at the time it was prohibitively expensive for all but the largest stations minidisc's powerful editing features made quick work of putting programs together and reporters in the field could use portable units to record interviews a number of professional quality minidisc recorders ultimately made it to market and saw a quick adoption in radio worldwide this variety of models was a big factor in cementing minidisc as a dominant format in japan and in the late 1990s something curious was happening in europe md sales were suddenly improving after years of production and refinement prices on hardware had fallen to levels that younger people could finally afford in june of 1999 sony started a european ad campaign that helped further growth in the region the company had sold a million players in its first five years but it only took from 1998 to 99 to sell another million and some previous record label holdouts began offering pre-recorded mds spurred on partly by the positive sales outlook but also by so-called attractive terms offered by sony's disc manufacturing plant in austria while the outlook for minidisc was positive in europe the actual sales numbers didn't pose any threat to cds the typical pre-recorded disc only sold a few thousand copies at most and labels were still conservative with their releases by july of 99 emi had only issued 70 titles the format saw a similar uptick in interest in north america but in even smaller quantities by the end of the decade only a million minidisc decks had been sold in the us about a third of what had been managed in europe and while the threat of dcc was long behind it as the millennium was coming to a close minidisc faced a new competitor around the turn of the century digital music took a new direction the mp3 audio compression format allowed high quality music files to take up just one tenth the space as that of a cd and the increasing capacity of hard drives prompted listeners to store those files right on their computers peer-to-peer internet file sharing services such as napster and limewire helped drive this shift and portable mp3 players like the creative nomad and diamond rio looked to capitalize on it by connecting to users pcs directly one could quickly and easily copy over downloaded mp3 files with just a few clicks but those players while fairly compact were severely limited by a small amount of storage the players themselves were affordably priced at about two hundred dollars but only featured 32 to 64 megabytes of memory enough for a couple dozen songs at mediocre quality some offered expandable storage but memory cards were very expensive a 128 megabyte 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 as low as about two dollars a disc if sony could make minidiscs as easy to manage from computers as mp3 players then it might be able to secure a foothold for itself in the changing digital landscape so in the middle of 2001 sony launched netmd it brought a line of recorders that connected to pcs through the increasingly common usb interface the included software allowed owners to manage their music files and write them to minidiscs just by dragging and dropping to extend the run time of those discs two new recording modes were added offering up to 320 minutes of music though at the expense of sound quality sony went all out with net md even building minidisc drives into some models of its vaio computers and with recorders offering easy copying of music to inexpensive media all the pieces were in place to get minidisc to finally take off in the west that is until an old friend launched a revolutionary product of its own in october 2001 apple introduced the ipod an mp3 player with an intuitive interface and simple design it integrated with itunes the company's own music organization program and allowed files to be copied at high speed through a mac's firewire interface but instead of removable media the ipod had an internal five gigabyte hard drive which apple touted with the slogan a thousand songs in your pocket apple had one-upped sony in spectacular fashion the two companies had worked on various projects for decades apple frequently used sony parts and its products like the floppy drive in 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 because of its expertise in miniaturizing components yet the ipod and later the itunes music store proved wildly popular and ultimately sparked a huge decline in physical audio media it was the ipod that ended up becoming the walkman for the next generation but sony gave it one final go in 2004 it launched high md a major upgrade to the format that boosted the storage capacity of a disk to one gigabyte this six-fold increase in size allowed much more music to be stored and also brought with its support for uncompressed audio just like a cd high md recorders were backwards compatible with original minidiscs and featured the same pc connectivity as net md units the majority of high md devices were portables made by sony but onkyo produced a few decks for use with shelf stereo systems and with high md sony tried again to push the minidisc format for data storage the new media could share its capacity with audio data you could record some music to a high md blank and used the rest of the space to store files but zip drives had evolved to store 750 megabytes cd burners were common recordable dvds were gaining popularity and inexpensive usb flash drives were on the horizon there simply wasn't much of a place for high md data and while the format finally offered the pristine sound quality audio files had originally demanded it was a decade too late the new discs were economical about ten dollars each but the world had simply moved on to a more computer-centric music experience minidisc had hung on far longer than it needed to but eventually even the loyal japanese market shifted its focus away from the format sony stopped shipping portable recorders in september 2011 and by march 2013 it sold its last minidisc player the company said it would continue to offer repairs and blank media for a while but 20 years after minidisc launched it was the end while mass market use of minidisc has ended there's been a renewed interest in it as a retro format commercial disk pressing plants have long since shut down but a new cottage industry has sprung up in its place starting in the late 2010s independent artists began offering their releases on md largely centered around the hip hop vaporwave and future funk genres using small fleets of net md decks companies specializing in retro audio media would record the music to ordinary blank disks sometimes these were new old stock but more often they were one specific model of blank imported from japan the only new minidiscs still being manufactured album artwork could be printed directly onto the disks and they'd be packaged up with j cards into custom clear cases quantities of each album release are typically limited usually around 50 copies yet they often sell out quickly buyers are as equally interested in the music as they are in the retro futurism of the format for many it's their first time using minidisc kicking off a new albeit very small generation of fans the trend will naturally have its limits of course the only players available to buy are used ones and someday sony will finally stop making new blank media but until that happens at least the format has found some newfound appreciation for a while most people though look at minidisc and see a format that failed failed to see mass adoption failed to quickly and definitively replace any other medium failed to become a household name with a player in every boombox car dashboard or pocket but perhaps that's not the only way to look at it perhaps just hanging in there and winning small victories is enough minidisc was the right format at the right time in the early 90s analog tape had worn out its welcome but computer-based audio just wasn't ready yet sometimes between major changes and technology bridges are needed to ease the transition not everyone will need to use them but to those that do they're indispensable it didn't become the format sony wanted but as a way to ease us into our new world of online music minidisc was a success [Music] you

Channel: This Does Not Compute

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Rating: 4.9428301 out of 5

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Id: CCK89V4NpJY

Length: 38min 49sec (2329 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/sayhong_]

Nice... prices are going to spike

[u/michaelwhyte]

Just a fantastic video...Any Minidisc fan should give this video a watch...

[u/Tricky_vfr800]

Love this channel, got me back into MD in a big way with his various videos on refurbishing portable and hifi players.

I wish I was quicker on the draw on bandcamp pre-ordered for MD albums tho.

[u/sombreroenthusiast]

This man is the reason why eBay is the primary importer of my disposable income.

[u/pibroch]

I like how many different YouTubers make videos on a subject and they all manage to be distinct and interesting in different ways.

[u/Xjmczar]

Ooooooo, i gotta give that a watch!

[u/Office_Jerk]

I love all his stuff. This video was great.

[u/NeoG_]

The music distribution industry has been a thorn in the side of innovative consumer recording for a long time.

If not for them we may have been swimming in DAT, DCC and MD