I bought from someone who had had the work done on it with a history of what was done which given my days with the screwdriver are long gone is a great help.
Just bought a Sony MZ-N707 from a thrift store for $3. No accessories except the case, but the player itself is in spotless condition and it had a MD popped in it. Took it home and tested it, it works! Same model that was stolen from me in high school, I think. Now to track down a few more blank disks and have a little nostalgia trip.
I picked up a Sony MDX-M690 from eBay a few years back for a project car that is still a project. I have been bequeathed a Pontiac Firebird, so I figured I’d put the deck in the ‘Bird while I’m finishing the other car. It’s a flipdown face deck that shows a cool dot matrix title and spectrum analyzer display in the front position. It also does MDLP and it came with a nice AUX/Unilink hub so it has an AUX jack too. Very pleased, especially after I bought a remote.
Was looking for a specific MD and I stumbled upon these ES Mini-discs that I forgot I had. I found five! They have a real nice solid feel to them. If I remember they were pricey back in the day.
Recently picked up a Sony Mxd-d3 CD/MD combo unit for $75, practically new, still has sticker on it. I've got it hooked up to monitor with the cassette decks and turntable. I also figured out I could Bluetooth stream to my amp, which would allow to Minidisc to see the line in sound. Gonna be recording some of those Phish concerts they play each night on XM radio! Also just had a portable come in the mail today... The model escapes me as I'm not at home. Came with about 10 or 12 blanks for $50! Gonna hook it up to the aux in the car to listen to some of that sweet vinyl records I have.
Of the many MD decks and portables I once had, the following remain (all are Sony): MDS-E10, MDS-JB940, MXD-D400, MXD-D40, MZ-R500. The one that gets the most use is the MXD-D400...great for copying audiobooks @4x @66kbps. On an 80-minute disc, you get 4 CDs. At that bit rate, spoken word sounds fine. My wife uses them in her MD car unit. Even though I'm mainly converted to file-based formats now, IMO the quality of the MD codec (ATRAC, Type R) is very nice. A bunch of stuff in my iTunes got there via MD (MD > CDRW > iTunes). As I was able to circumvent SCMS, all done digitally.
Just thinking out loud here..... Even with standard Minidisc, if I recorded a vinyl record to a Minidisc, then using the portable to play it back, recording on my mxd-d3, can I compress it so I could fit more than one album on one disc? I know you can so things like this with netmd and hi MD , but does the original players give you that ability also? Would love to stuff a few albums on each disc to bring in the car with me.
The MXD-D3 does not have "MDLP." It may have a Mono option for recording, which will double the recordable time. In standard (SP) mode, on an 80-minute MD, you actually get 80:59 of recordable time in stereo. FWIW, the mono SQ is as good. The portable could have MDLP, depending on what model it is. In that case, you could just go vinyl > portable in one of the LP modes. The D3 won't play back in LP, though.
Yea, it's a standard portable, so no MDLP. I'll have to check on the mono recording though. If I could get more time that would be awesome, especially for recording concerts off streaming services.
I was never struck on the sound of MDLP but for the spoken word it's fine preferring if I needed extra space for music that was either in mono or had little stereo information to us Mono mode which doubled the playing time but kept the same quality as regular stereo.
Get ready for awesomeness, then. The D3 does have mono rec, according to its manual. A trick I used many times was to record a couple of CDs on an MD and used Mono for the last track or two so they'd fit. But in all-mono, you'll get at least 3 vinyl LPs on an MD...maybe 4. If you ever bump into an MXD-D40 (or D400)...those decks do have LP mode. BTW, $75 for a like-new D3 would make you the envy of many in MD circles!
Clark - any recent completed projects to share (if and when you have time)? We all enjoy seeing them. Best Wishes, David
Hi, David. I have a few in progress. I am scrapping my old Woodstock MD set in favor of a newer, more complete set of the festival. I'll take a photo when I'm done. By the way, I was listening to NPR the other day and they interviewed a guy who records sounds of elephants in the wild. He made a point of mentioning he uses Minidisc to do this and added that he loved the format. Keepin' the dream alive! (I had to wonder how many listeners knew what a Minidisc was...)
Once awash in minidisc decks—I think at the peak I had 11—I still have a few. One, a CD/MD combo, is used solely for making MD copies of CD audiobooks. When I converted to computer file-based formats for music, I copied all such MDs to CD-RW, including mixes and so forth. Then I'd rip the CD-RWs into iTunes (ALAC). The titling alone took...lots of time. Ultimate SQ seemed to depend more on the quality of the source than on the often-dissed ATRAC codec (SP, 292 KBps). In one case, I'd received an audio CD of a live performance from one of the performing artists. What a mess! But I used MD's excellent editing features to clean it up and make it listenable. Oh, and my stepson and his wife, back...hmmm...well, had to be at least 17 years ago, pre-kids...made a documentary about Nepal. The audio was done on portable minidisc; the photography was nicely done stills. There remains an extremely enthusiastic cadre of minidisc users, who will all but fight to the death defending the format. I'm glad to have known it and like finding occasional use for it.
I still keep my old, takes ages to start, Windows version now out of support, laptop as my machine because it has the working SonicStage on it which you can upload from the special minidisc machine to the pc. If your tracks are grouped by album name and titled on the disc (use SonicStage for ease) then your upload will be titled and grouped. It's great that the user group is thriving, hopefully someone can update SonicStage for a new Windows! .. And tell us all about it, here!
gavinbenda/platinum-md Well-advised to read the README. Not sure how far along this is is, but users have reported that some or much of the functionality works. Some users reported bugs. I do not use SonicStage myself, but if I did I'd take a close look at this.
Oops...yeah, correct...I missed that part. Yeah, you still need Hi-MD to upload digital files. You could ask the platinum-md developer about uploading—I do not recall if that is in the works.. He is the only one I know of who is actively updating that kind of software. One of his big updates, as he announced, was the ability for Sonic Stage to create true SP files, not LP in an SP wrapper.
Here's a retro-themed Christmas collection I created for Minidisc. It consists of five discs: the three volumes of Rhino's "Christmas Cocktails" albums (which are part of the Ultra-Lounge series), plus the "Christmas Favorites" album by The Hollyridge Strings (I found a copy of the rare CD version!) and the "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" album by The Ray Conniff Singers.
Clark - thank you for taking the time to share this with us. Magnificent as always. Best Wishes, David
Man I miss that format. Made music fun. I kind of wish we had had this rather than CD back in the early 80's. That and it was the data standard instead of floppy disks. (Yes I'm over having the ultimate in bitrate/quality/resolution as I can't really tell the difference)
