Why MiniDisc failed: Exploring the 90s' audio format craze (Revivals series)

the minidisc revival what's that revival series friends believe me this is going to be my most boring video yet and considering my track record that's saying something the minidisc revival i've covered a lot of other formats in my revival series and requests for me to cover minidisc have flooded in no they've trickled in no they've been one or two drips noah hold the ark the problem is that i'm really not that interested in minidisc everything else that i've covered i was intensely interested in when they were relevant back in the past even cassettes yes i had a cassette deck once upon a time should i tell you what i used my cassette deck for get this something that today would be totally legal i copied my own records straight after i bought them so that i could listen to them as many times as i liked without the inevitable buildup of degradation and yes i know people are going to go crazy in the comments bring it on thank the gods of 1982 for cd anyway minidisc i'm guessing that most people still battling through the tedium of this video know what minidisc is but i'll quickly describe it for those who don't it's a disc in a caddy about seven centimeters square there were portable players and hi-fi decks you could buy blank discs and record on them or pre-recorded discs just like pre-recorded cassettes hey they were digital and anything digital back in the 1990s was exciting but the 1990s were a long time ago and minidisc has gone the way of the dinosaurs dodo birds and tasmanian tigers they're all extinct but should there be a revival does minidisc have any merits that would be useful to music enthusiasts hi-fi enthusiasts or audio professionals of today no and no no there should not be a revival because no it doesn't have any merits that are relevant today other than nostalgia of course but you could say that about manual gearboxes in cars comments and a further note is that minidisc wasn't even popular in its heyday in fact it didn't have a heyday the public just didn't like it it did get some niche liking from audio pros but that's not a big enough market to sustain what was meant to be a massive commercial success let's go back pre-minidisc to d80 digital audio tape that failed in the consumer market mainly because the record industry didn't like it it was very popular among professionals and was a wonderful thing to have until we started mixing and mastering to files in our computers that came out in 1987 and did very little business in the consumer market so the big boys of consumer audio sony and philips went back to their respective drawing boards phillips came up with the digital compact cassette which failed pretty much instantly there's probably a good story there but i never used one so it won't be me who's telling it sony decided that a disc format would be a good way to go and it does have some advantages over tape tape is slow when you want to find a particular track disk can be almost instantaneous you can't edit digital compact cassette tape or at least i know of no way of doing it on minidisc there's the possibility of splitting combining reordering or deleting tracks depending on the functionality of the machine what's not to like about that 1992 that's when minidisc excited both the consumer and pro audio market well i'm not so sure about consumers because i could only see minidisc from a professional angle back in 1992 i was using a walkman style cassette recorder to tape interviews with industry luminaries such as ray dolby and rupert neve ray dolby rupert neve hey my video isn't so boring now is it being before the time when i realized that my abilities as a musician would i also use the same cassette recorder to capture musical ideas i know i said a lot about the cassette format in my cassette revival video but honestly it was great for both of these purposes adequate sound and absolute reliability but many discs so tempting so i bought one i probably still have it now somewhere in my loft i think it was the sony mzr3 but i can't say my memory is 100 guaranteed i never did like it where my miniature cassette recorder was solid and reliable my minidisc felt fragile unnecessarily complicated and probably not reliable and yes it did let me down as i learned it isn't a good idea for the battery to run out while you're recording as the machine doesn't write to the table of contents so the audio is on the disk but you can't access it i remember a friend complaining about the same issue and he had found a way of getting the file back i'd like to tell you what his method was but i can't remember i seem also to remember hazely that you had to press some button or other to record from where you had last left off otherwise your earlier recordings would be erased and that could easily be forgotten maybe someone in the comments can remember better than i can so i recorded a couple of disks then went back to my cassette reliability and ease of use are wonderful things to have i should say at this point that i also used minidisc decks with students because they were cheap enough and easy to operate this is before computer audio i can't remember any problems so perhaps there weren't any okay so you probably expect me to have some more moans and groans about minidisc it won't be hard let me go back to dat 16 bit 44.1 or 48 kilohertz digital recording uncompressed digital recording cd quality with no data loss i'm saying uncompressed as though it was a thing back then it wasn't because data compression hadn't been invented i remember back around this time when the pr honcho at ssl solid state logic was trying to persuade me to take a job there damn name dropping again over lunch in the lovely royal sun pub in begbroke he told me about a digital audio system that used a mere four bits and could achieve excellent sound quality seeing that i knew from my akai s900 sampler that 12 bits were already dodgy i didn't believe him or let's say that my level of skepticism was high so now we have mp3 and aac that can achieve good results in the equivalent of less than two bits my doubts have been removed but mp3 well the audio quality is only good considering that it's compressed and guess what minidisc uses data compression 1992 data compression okay the degree of compression isn't that high so there isn't so much quality lost but it's compression nonetheless 1992 technology and lossy compression of course and that was uncompressed is this not a step backward i'm going to get on my high horse here and say that professional audio should never be compressed not until the final output for consumers so this massively rules out minidisc from the production process whether recording broadcast or anything else you can do with sound and make money from it okay rules out might be a bit strong as i'll comment in a moment but professional audio should be uncompressed like that minidisc a giant leap backwards for mankind so where did it all go wrong for sony well professionally we still had that and there's no way minidisc could replace that in consumer land people already had cassette decks in their hi-fi systems and a walkman if they wanted music to go if they wanted better quality audio then there was cd in both deck and portable formats so where does minidisc fit in with this it just doesn't and was there ever a minidisc car player but maybe minidisc would have had a chance if it could have held out long enough give it 10 years and people's cassette decks breaking down or wearing out and minidisc could have been the obvious replacement except for recordable cd 1994 or thereabouts i was at an exhibition where they were showing a recordable cd drive to slot into your computer 500 pounds it cost except that it didn't look like a 500 pound product to me and lo and behold the price skidded down to around 100 very quickly and i bought one and so did plenty of other people then apple started putting them in their computers as standard 1994 blank cds cost 10 pounds 10 pounds each but a couple of years later they were a pound each and soon after even less than that how could minidisc compete with that and then there were mp3 players and then the ipod there simply wasn't room for minidisc in the market it lingered on like a zombie until 2013 when sony pulled the plug if recordable cd and mp3 players had never been invented perhaps minidisc would have succeeded eventually sony improved the sound quality and brought out high md in 2004 uncompressed but too late but i'm going to close with one positive of many disc a fantastically wonderful positive it doesn't need reviving but it was an incredible improvement on what we had previously the minidisc cart machine i have to say that i never used one but i so would have what's a cart machine you ask well it goes back to the nab cartridge from 1959 also known as the fideli pack but i never heard anyone call it that not to be confused with the 8-track cartridge the nab cartridge or nab cart had an endless loop of tape inside and it was used for jingles on the radio or sound effects in theater i used carts a lot in theater back in the 1980s the great thing was that you could shove a cart into the player sometimes a triple stack press the q button to cure it up then press the play button to play the machine would then cue itself ready to play again and a button for stop if you needed it three buttons if it was invented today it would have 30. as a concept the nap cart was great in practice it sounded terrible lubricated tape was not a good start pinch roller drive less than satisfactory and among all the noise and distortion was a mangled fazey sound that really was awful but just good enough to be useful and then the mini disk cart it was the application that minidisc was waiting for all of the convenience of the nap cart and with decent if not perfect sound quality i would love to have used one of these in a 2000 seat auditorium but my memories linger on the nab cart oh well progress is good and that my friends is all i have to say for now on minidisc i'm sure there'll be comments with more memories perhaps good perhaps bad if anything sets off a memory for me i may come back to minidisc again see you soon you

Channel: Audio Masterclass

Views: 25,595

Keywords: MiniDisc, revival

Id: r__eipG0gYs

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 25 2022