A Repairman's View of Portable Minidisc Recorders (2000)
minidisc.org
minidisc.org
Exactly 36 years ago, I was 7 years old and I remember going into an electronics shop that caught my eye.
I was literally always interested in electronics. I finally summoned up the courage and went in. The inside this shop that to me looked like a candy shop, was very friendly man. I ended up convincing my parents to buy me my first electronics kit from him, an audio amp.
I soldered the kit, placed it in a fancy metal box, together with heavy transformer, making the thing pretty beefy, all of which was purchased from him. I remember bringing it to the shop to show it off. He was very happy with my work.
My parents ended up buying more and more kits, and I remember very clearly just randomly coming into the shop when I would pass by for many years later. He was always himself, friendly, helpful, busy helping someone or repairing something, smoking, always smoking.
Not too long ago I passed there again and remember seeing the shop has closed. It was a sad moment.
David, believe it or not is literally the guy who is the repairman mentioned in the story must be at the very least 70 by now. I ended up spending half an hour reading some of the stuff he wrote in the guide, just for the sake of some glimpse of good old times.
I hope he still lives! I'm sure there are many other kids and teens he positively touched.
Great memories, never to be forgotten.
Something about the size, intricate control buttons and switches, the jewelled MD disc case just made the whole thing delightful to me as a 15 year old.
Perhaps it was also due to me developing my own taste in music at the time that I am linking the nostalgia of that to the players themselves.
This is especially true for MD as they were a rad less flimsy than CDs. I had a Sanyo portable MD and it was a rock-solid device.
Relatedly, it makes me wonder if there is space for a Minidisc equivalent to https://www.wearerewind.com/
It had a very user friendly and capable UI, for example, with a couple of rotations and clicks of the dial you could stitch together recorded songs. The matrix display was bright and well legible.
You could fit around 20 songs on a very small optical disc. It was quite advanced, it encoded and recorded audio in decent quality real time. It had an optical SP/DIF output.
After some years the recording feature did not work anymore, it now makes sense why, after reading the article.
It was a truely amazing and handy audio recorder/player. If it was still functional, I would still have used it for another 20 years or so.
Edit: found a 1998 review (1) about an MD very similar to mine.
What I really miss about them is they're theoretically great for long-term storage. The case was fairly robust, and data should be incredibly stable because the disc has to be heated past the Curie point during recording.
In many cases I can easily see how they could've designed things such that far fewer sizes were necessary, but they don't. I do wonder if it's an early form of "anti-right-to-repair" obfuscation? For some reason, I've noticed this "design quirk" far more in various import products than domestic ones.
It's also interesting to read statements like this:
The DSP and control IC's in new Sony recorders e.g. MZ-R90/91 cannot be removed from the board due to a packaging design in which the pins are mounted under the chips and cannot be accessed for de-soldering. When these chips malfunction they are impossible to replace and the whole electronic board must be replaced at considerable expense.
...and then realise that, 23 years later, a sub-$50 hot air station can easily do that work (I'm assuming it's referring to BGA packages.)
I remember attaching a thin copper wire to my soldering iron, wrapping it around the tip and then out the front, and using that to work on those tiny pads. Sort of worked. Didn't even have solder tape, just a sucker.
I didn't even understand how a hot air station worked, until youtube showed me years later (I moved onto the software side). The things people could never find out, never know, never even knew existed pre-Internet are staggering.
I don't think anyone under 30 can even begin to comprehend how limited knowledge was before. Quite often, if you wanted to know something, you literally could not find any info about it at all. You wouldn't even know what to ask, when you approached a librarian, even if they could find some book they could get from an inter-library transfer -- which where I lived, took weeks!
Such a culture shift.
But anyhow, I can imagine I'd have destroyed the board trying to get all that back together, via my soldering-iron with wire on end workaround.
https://noahnorman.substack.com/p/what-is-augmented-reality-...
people dont even understand. as a kid i would look at the content of .com files and .exe files in DOS and wonder why they didnt look like BASIC source code. wondering how the heck people made these wacky characters everywhere. had no idea what an assembler or a compiler was, and no way to find out.
as far as hardware.. .at least there was radio shack and those little books by Forrest Mims. Maybe a book at the book store. unlikely. the idea of board level repair to me would have been like aliens describing a spaceship without a translator.
The harder you are working to make the smallest thing possible, the more this happens.
Additionally, since no one has half a million 2.32mm long M1.2 screws just lying around, they're always a custom order. Might as well get the exact length you want.
In the iPhone, for example, each screw gets its own part number and each screw is custom.
The order you repair something isn't necessarily the order it was assembled in the factory(ies).
But in many cases there's just specific needs. Besides length, exterior screws are often countersunk, while internal ones would have flat heads to distribute the pressure over a PCB.
When it comes to stopping customers fiddling with the equipment look at Nintendo that use a different proprietary screw head for everything.
I photographed and labelled everything in the order of disassembly, and I still can't get it back together. I'm not remotely embarrassed by it, either. After what I went through just to get it apart, I'm still astounded by the level of precision in manufacturing Japanese in the 90s were capable of.
The recording quality was phenomenal.
But the power supplies .. my God. The tiniest needle connectors I have ever seen. And super uncommon batteries.
Amen to that - I recently managed to find someone who 3D prints a shim for a standard cell and have been able to start using my otherwise perfectly functional Aiwa again. The original battery is bizarre!
The newer NiCd and NiMh designs would be useless of course, shelf lives of about 3 years for both.
I can't believe how much they're selling for now.
Sony developed the gumstick format over the years, and the final ones were higher capacity - 1400mAh NiMH (so nominal 1.2v), but that's still really awful compared to a pair of AAs that would typically be 1400mAh each for cheap NiMH to 2500mAh each for higher end NiMH, or 2500mAh or so for alkalines.
The gumstick was a truely bizarre choice, the 14450/14550 and 18650 were already outperforming it massively for roughly the same size. And given sony wanted $100 for a replacement gumstick at one point, cost can't have been the reason.
The disc is shown in the first 20 seconds of the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yaXPx6xWEQ
I had one of the earlier Sony models, which was great - but if anything bad happened when "Writing TOC" (Table Of Contents) was happening, everything on the disc became unreadable. The filesystem was probably the worst thing about mini-disc aside from general availability.
The best thing about them was they were next gen mix-tapes, but random-access rather than sequential. It made editing a playlist way easier (sometimes maxing out available storage to the second) plus they were R/W which means they were also superior to burning CDs which were all still write-only in that era.
I had to do this often enough I made a blank disc with TOC covering its full capacity and a track mark every few minutes, to make it easier to skip through and set correct track marks on the recovered disc.
I'm thinking about getting a cheap tiny dictaphone for logging ideas daytime for distilling them to my notebook/journal when at my desk.
ps: I find phone apps too cumbersome to get to the point where the record is running, by that time the idea might slip.
Thanks for sharing!
The H1N is a good compromise between size and simplicity and audio quality - not super cheap, but not professional prices, and a good step up.
To your point, I tried to make voice activated journaling thingie using Shortcuts. Turrible UX.
I really just need a physical "record" button. Maybe the Watch's new customizable action button would work.
Btw my first thought (and the general consensus of the md community) was that the units fail due to dying laser diodes. I designed and built a md laser power meter (https://github.com/fijam/md-lpm) that runs off a coin cell and fits in a md disc case and every failed unit I tested had a working laser diode.
The only annoyance was that I couldn't transfer recordings to my PC in a digital format -- thanks to copyright protection -- though I obviously owned the rights to my own recordings.
Later, the MD recorder gave way to a digital recorder with memory cards and a USB port.
But like everybody else, I loved the form factor and cleverness of the MD machine.
If it was recorded in analog, SCMS should not interfered with a digital copy, and on a PC it should been no issue at all. Slow, because real-time, but should have been near-perfect.
Of course, if you used a few hacks and two critical pieces of merchandise (MDS-W1, the only one I know of that does lossless ATRAC transfers, plus another with the TOC-cloning hack), you could make essentially infinite perfect copies.
Before we had them interviews were literally cut on Revox big reel tape. They came with a cutter just for that purpose. The minidiscs were so amazing.
In the end it was all replaced by PCs of course but they had a good run of about 6-8 years when they were really key to our workflow.