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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

They say history is written by the winners, but when it comes to technology, history is written by Americans.

MiniDisc was a huge success for Sony, and was the winner of the tape-replacement format war in virtually every country - except the USA.

It was so successful that Sony is still making blank MiniDiscs today. (Though they are not sold there, Americans can type MDW80T into eBay if they'd like some brand-new MiniDiscs.)

I grew up in the UK and for nearly a decade portable MD players were virtually ubiquitous on the Tube. Only the iPod began to end that era, and it certainly wasn't instant.

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I had one of the later models that had LP features, so up to 4x the music on a disc at a lower quality. It was also a recorder, which was so handy, and something no iPod ever offered. Many of my friends had players, 1 even had an in car player. That's in the UK. I think the big issue was that many people assumed Minidisc was supposed to be a replacement for CDs, rather, than a replacement for cassette. It's understandable why it wasn't marketed this way, but if it had, I think it would of taken off much quicker in the mid/late 90's.

Thinking about it maybe I do remember some marketing about it being a cassette replacement. A quick Google brought up this, which is assume is a Sony advert.

https://mobile.twitter.com/doctorow/status/12586000447118090...

Also

https://co.pinterest.com/pin/715579828285803543#imgViewer

> MiniDisc was a huge success for Sony, and was the winner of the tape-replacement format war in virtually every country - except the USA

Well, don't know about "virtually", but in Europe I only know one person who had one, and I don't remember seeing any on the street / bus / metro.

I remember people having tape walkmans, then portable CD players for a short while, than massively switching to MP3 players when they became available, probably because CD players were extremely unpractical. I used to have an MP3-capable CD player, which kind of mitigated the problem, but it was still not great.

I remember looking at minidisc players at the time, and the MP3 CD looked much more practical to load with music and also much cheaper, so I went with that.

> Well, don't know about "virtually", but in Europe I only know one person who had one, and I don't remember seeing any on the street / bus / metro.

I owned a couple of portable minidisc players in the 90s, one of which was stolen. I recall that they were relatively expensive when compared with cassette players, but they were not that rare.

Maybe because people weren't buying pre-recorded MiniDiscs? But as far as I can tell, that wasn't the point...

In the late 90s I had a Sharp 722 (in champagne gold iirc) and you could plug that thing into a pair of decks (UK Garage at that time) and get rich, beautiful sound out of it – fully captured the texture of the vinyl.

CDs were awkward, needed to lie horizontal, and prone to skipping and getting scratched up.

MiniDisc was never a replacement for CDs, but a replacement for cassettes – and at that, they were great.

There was something quite nice about the audible quality of MiniDisc compression.

Is this past year of COVID to blame? I had been rekindling some nostalgia for my brief foray into MiniDisc over two decades ago (it had been too brief). And then my daughter, born after the iPod but likely channelling part of that retro zeitgeist, wanted to experiment with/explore cassette tapes. No, no, MiniDisc, I said. And then I proceeded to buy way too many of the devices on eBay.

I have a bigger collection now of both players and discs than I did when I first dipped my toe into MiniDisc.

I think both she and I enjoy mix-tape vs. playlist. Trying to pick songs to fit within 80 or 74 minutes.

And then somehow the "I want to hear something mellow" and then the physical insertion of a disc.... Something tangible in an increasingly intangible world?

Not everywhere. UK was the second best selling region after Japan. And while you can still buy new blank MDs, you can still buy new tape and tape decks too. They all suck but you can.

In Canada I never saw one outside a store, never saw a prerecorded MD album even in a store. I knew a lot of people who had portable CD players before MP3 players took off.

Indeed. I was in Belgium and was a MD user but they weren't that big in Belgium. France neither IIRC. I was into it because I had family in Japan bringing me the goodies on every visit (blank discs, portable players, etc.).

It was heavily used in radio as well, almost ubiquitous for recording outside interviews etc for later broadcast.

And commercial exhibition, every large theatre/cinema/auditorium/performance space I worked in up until 2008 when I changed track had a rack mounted MD player hooked up to the automation to do announcements.

True. I’m Dutch and have encountered mini discs only in my radio work in the early 2000’s

Sony was really at its peak during early 2000s, MD was the crown of jewel, single battery supporting that kind of play back time with a spinning disc inside is really impressive. However in terms of market share, it is still behind tape and CD even in Asia. New albums released directly in MD is super rare, most of the time you need to have a CD, buy the CD version then record it to an empty MD. When I was a kid, only “rich kids” had a MD and a CD, majority were just using CD or even tape. Cheap MP3s started coming out around 2000 but never took off, then iPod and its mimics basically killed Tape, CD and MD all together.

Sony has to be a case study in something. They had pretty much the Apple stores of the day (though not at nearly the same scale). You'd browse the one at the Metreon in SF to see the cool consumer electronics (as well as some pretty nice laptops for the time). Now? They're pretty much one of the many more or less interchangeable electronics manufacturers. Many categories of which where Sony was a premium (mainstream) provider like home stereos seem much diminished, at least anecdotally.

Sony is a case study in the consequences of focusing on individual hit hardware products rather than sustainable, adaptable software platforms.

That's almost certainly part of it. The Japanese electronics (and camera) makers have always been pretty bad at software--at least above the firmware level. That didn't used to matter so much but now so much about software and ecosystems (or platforms as you put it).

Although it has found a niche it definitely wasn’t a ‘huge success’ in the Netherlands.

> it definitely wasn’t a ‘huge success’ in the Netherlands.

Fair enough, the land of Philips :P

(But in all seriousness, plain CDs were more popular in certain regions in Europe because "why have a different device for music?". It isn't as drastic as in America though, where it is a product that looks like and feels like never released to consumers.)

I remember wanting a Minidisc player, but they were to expensive. In elementary school we had portable CD players and in highschool I got a MPMan which played mp3s off an 128MB flash card.

Nor in the UK

> MiniDisc was a huge success for Sony, and was the winner of the tape-replacement format war in virtually every country - except the USA.

No, it wasn’t. Walkman, discman, ipod. _That’s_ how it went virtually everywhere

Sony didn’t even care about iPod or MP3 for a few years after 2001, as it didn’t hit its bottom line, release of NW-E400 was the turning point, prior to that it is mostly MiniDisc.

I visited Sony Japan in 1999-2000 to give them a demo of the new audio codec my company (AT&T Labs) was co-developing with Fraunhofer. We were trying to convince them to buy into our crazy plan of selling music over the Internet. (Needless to say, neither AT&T nor Sony won that battle, but AAC did.) We spent some time in a studio with some of their top studio engineers playing tracks on AAC and Sony’s proprietary ATRAC3 at different BPS, trying to decide which was better. They agreed that AAC worked better at lower encoding rates, but it didn’t move them —- they were too focused on hardware.

Fun trip though!

I got interested in MD during high school in the late 90s/early 2000s. I was the only person I knew that owned a MiniDisc recorder/player, and my friends and I recorded what were basically podcasts onto my two boxes of blank discs. It's a damn shame the format didn't catch on in the US, I loved the it.

Not a great success in Germany either. I had one friend who was into it, everyone else stuck to tapes for a long time.

Or lugged around great big CD players or that monstrous Creative Nomad contraption.

Minidisc is still going, it’s no vinyl revival but bands are releasing new music on MD, there’s a pretty healthy market on eBay for hardware, albums and blanks! Obviously there’s a hard limit to all this as nothing is in production anymore and minidiscs aren’t as infinitely rebuildable as turntables.

Minidisc was a HUGE commercial flop, with a paltry number of releases. It found utility in some pro audio racks but in no nation did it ever come close to replacing DAT in pro audio applications, or cassette tapes for music copying or distribution.

> Minidisc was a HUGE commercial flop, with a paltry number of releases.

What I remember from my minidisc days were that at least the ones I owned were all recorders. Even though I bought zero minidisc albums, I had a few minidiscs with albums recorded from CDs.

Even though minidisc wasn't ubiquitous, I'm not sure that the number of releases is a good measuring stick.

You are equating the number of commercial pre-recorded MiniDisc with the success of the format but that's just not how it works.

MiniDisc replaced tape, not CDs or records. Its raison d'etre was recording your own discs.

It never even matched tape, in terms of blank media or devices sold yearly even at its peak even in Japan.

Pfft. Where is this true outside of Japan??

And don’t messed this up themselves by not allowing you to do a digital copy from md devices, since they’d just bought a music studio.

Also, rather than use mp3 like everyone else, they created there own format.

In east Asia, it is true that it holds the high end Walkman market till at least 2003. People see MP3s as cheap plastic toys until iPod and iRiver took off.

Minidisc came out at the wrong time. It was just a bit too hard to copy your own music to it. A single record on MD cost WAY too much compared to Cassettes or CDs.

It would've been amazing to buy a whole discography on MD, it would've fit there easily.

MD is on my list of the most coolest technologies that just fizzled out in the mainstream.

Yes if we must call something a failed technology I nominate the discman.

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