Did you love Laserdisc? Were you bonkers over Betamax? Do you cry yourself to sleep because BeOS never hit the big time? Fret no more -- superdork Captain Tech is here to travel back in time and save the format losers that should have triumphed.
2. Betamax
3. Laserdisc
4. 8-track
5. High-definition audio
7. BeOS
8. DTS
9. Atari ST
10. What life would be like
MiniDisc
What it was
A miniature, recordable CD contained in a protective plastic case that produced near CD-quality sound -- another design classic from Sony.
Why it lost
Like Betamax before it, MiniDisc is another proprietary Sony product, which meant that it didn't have widespread industry support and only a few manufacturers ever made hardware. CD was also well established by the time MiniDisc arrived, so there was very little interest in pre-recorded MiniDisc music.
Why it should have won
MiniDisc was fantastically versatile. You could buy pre-recorded music on the format or simply use your hi-fi to copy a CD to a blank disc. MiniDisc's hard outer case meant the surface of the disc was far less likely to become scratched and damaged over time.
One of the best things about the format is the size of the players and the media. Initially the hardware was quite bulky, but as time went on, portable player/recorders were developed that were just a little bit larger than a MiniDisc, which made them ideal portable music players.
The single factor that enabled MiniDiscs to be so small was the use of a lossy compression system developed by Sony called ATRAC. On MiniDisc it operated at 292Kbps, which is a considerable saving on the CD rate of 1,411.2Kbps, but music still sounded great. MiniDiscs also contained track information that allowed the player to display the artist name and song title on the built-in display.
Later on, further innovation came with the NetMD range, which allowed you to copy music on your computer to a MiniDisc at high speeds. MP3s would be transcoded in Sony's ATRAC format before being copied over to the MD recorder, and it was possible to use long-play modes to squeeze even more music on to the diminutive discs.
Our fantasy outcome
Captain Tech would need to obliterate CD players across the globe -- and later the iPod -- before MiniDisc could dominate Generation X's music playing. He'd also need to make sure there was a decent catalogue of pre-recorded music on MiniDisc -- including Nirvana, natch -- for people to replace their CDs with.
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canberra_photographer
30/12/2007 01:16 AM
Doesn't wear out over time? Laserdisc was netoriuous for so called "laser rot" and the size and materials used meant that discs were easily scratched. I'll take VHS anyday, though I would have prefered beta!
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canberra_photographer
30/12/2007 01:32 AM
DTS a failure, every news Special Edition DVD has DTS from the major studios. They remastered the entire James Bond series into DTS and proudly make it a selling point. DTS is a success. MiniDisc over iPod, the iPod can hold uncompressed WAV audio, MP3, AAC. MD hold... ATRAC... and... well nothing else, just heavily compressed ATRAC. DTS is the only things in this list deserving of being saved. Even high def audio isn't. The world is moving towards digital content delivery through the internet.
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abuska
30/12/2007 07:07 PM
absolutely brilliant article guys.. thankyou
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Peterk
04/01/2008 10:59 AM
Our friend from the ACT is not aware of Hi-MD introduced in 2003/4. 1 gb minidiscs that could record many hours of music (highly compressed) and be used for jpeg, word and other comptuer files. ATRAC still sounds far superior to MP3
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canberra_photographer
11/01/2008 09:56 AM
An iPod is way better than those mini disc players because u would have to carry those mini-discs everywhere, and the iPod stores everything on its hard disk.
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two-ears-good,four-ears-better
29/05/2008 06:33 PM
Comparing iPod with Mini-disc is not really the point. The two are different products for different purposes. Can you do high-quality field recordings with an iPod? I doubt it. OTOH for the convenience of carrying around a great deal of reasonable quality music just to listen to, there are many MP3 hard-disc players around (not *just* iPod, let's remember!) which offer a more compact solution than Mini-disc. There are many other issues like battery life, battery replacement, add-ons, etc, etc. Neither technology wins on all points.
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