Minidisc Decks

So recently my love for the minidisc has been rekindled. I have a couple of portable units that sound great. Now I am wanting to purchase a minidisc deck, preferably Sony. Any advice?

 

I would suggest looking for a deck that is newer to support ATRAC Type-S.
For your own recordings and in case you trade any MD around, that version of ATRAC should best support any/all previous from older models.
You may want a unit which not only has analog/digital inputs, but also digital output if you want to use an external DAC.

 

Thanks! Any particular models that are considered superior to the rest?

 

Minidisc Community Portal

is still there (since 1995) with all specs of all known Minidisc models.

 

For some reason the prices on decks have been high for the last 3-4 years. Before that you could find working models for $30-60.

Since I also still use minidisc I’ve watched for a reasonably priced deck but because I remember what the prices were a few years ago I am reluctant to pay for one.

 

Sony JA20ES and JA555ES have some rave reviews.
I haven't heard them, though.
Using a TEAC deck, which has been sounding good.

 

Depends what your needs are. For example, do you want MDLP or not? Digital output? I have owned a bunch of Sony MD decks (4 remain). Of them, I thought the MDS-JA333ES excelled. The JA series was Sony's top of the line. Just below that there is the JB 9*0 series. It's true that the JB980 is the most current; it's also true that the 930 is usually considered the best JB unit.
Oh heck, just look here: MD Community Page Equipment Browser
This is a page in the MD portal noted by @JohnO. What portables do you have? Please note that ATRAC Type S, while a desirable feature, applies only to playback of MDLP.

 

The Techmoan effect.

 

He just published a new video where he shows the results of a bulk purchase from a Japanese auction. Spoiler: that wasn't his best purchase.

 

I hopped on board when MiniDiscs were first hitting the market in the US. At the time I'd been an avid creator of mix cassettes, and loved the ease of use that MDs provided over tape. I would create mix discs from CD using a Sony MDS-503 deck, and then (because I traveled a lot for work in last half of the 90s) I'd carry them all over the Midwest in a buttpack, along with a Sony MZ-E3MD Community Page: Sony MZ-E3 portable player. I ended up abandoning the format when the Hango "Personal Jukebox" was released in 1999.

A year or so ago I uncovered my trove of mix MiniDiscs while cleaning out my storage unit and picked up a Sony MDS-E12 off eBay to play them back. The stuff I recorded back in the day with the early versions of ATRAC sounded decent, but when I recorded a new mix disc with the MDS-E12 I was amazed at how much better the later "R-Type" version of ATRAC sounds.

So now I've got an MDS-JA22ES and an MDS-JB930, and a barebones MZ-N420D "NetMD" portable (which, thanks to the efforts of the open source community and a guy named Stefano Brilli), can connect to a computer/phone via USB for disc editing and file transfers) . The component decks both use the exact same chipsets for DA/AD encoding, and the JA22ES is built...well, like an ES (luxuriously solid), but the JB930 (part of Sony's slightly less expensive "QS" series) is built nearly as well and has the added bonus of having a PS/2 keyboard connector, which makes editing and titling mix MDs light-years easier, so that's my 'daily driver'.

Of course, there are more convenient means of listening to music at my disposal that don't require physical media and make millions of songs available to me on a whim, but there's something really compelling to me about working within the constraints of a physical format to create a mix. Figuring out what you can fit in 74 or 80 minutes is a fun challenge that I feel makes a mix better (no room for filler!), and then having a tangible thing in my hand at the end of the process is really satisfying.

 

I love minidisc. Won't get much love on SHF because it uses compression, but to me it's one of the great "lost formats". The open source software mentioned in the post above is a godsend because the original Sony software was a giant turd. Some of the new releases on the format are silkscreening the artwork right on the disc case itself. Come on tell me this doesn't look cool.

 

I was just listening to MD yesterday at 292 kbps (ATRAC Type R, MDS-JB940). Despite the lossiness, I feel that the format holds its own vs. CD quality.

 

This past year I picked up a MDS-JE505 on eBay for a steal and added it to my main stack. I write my minidiscs on my NetMD walkman (MZ-N510) using the aforementioned open source software. I really enjoy the fact that MDs have track text that appears on the deck display. It's a shame they never added the NetMD tech to the home decks, as writing MDs became infinitely easier when using a computer. Whenever I aquire digital only, I typically write them to MD as a physical format (as I don't do streaming).

The other lost 90s format that I'm curious about is DAT, but I think there are more inherent problems with that tech.

 

What problems does DAT have? It was, pretty much, the standard way to move high quality audio between studios for most of the 90's, until it was replaced with the Minidisc briefly in the early 2000s.

 

The tapes can go bad and the tape mechanisms can be problematic (ie. breakdown). I think the inherent digital technology is great, but with any mechanical tape-based format there will be some issues. I don't want to overstate the problem, but I've just seen lots of DAT decks in need of repair.

 

I think one of the biggest problem with DAT decks is that they are fairly complicated since it is similar to the technology used for a video cassette recorder with a rotating recording/playback head.

Philips managed to mitigate some of the issues with the DCC format. Instead of a rotating head, it used a stationary head with a tape that ran at the compact cassette speed (1 7/8 inches per second). A combination of lossy encoding (related to what became MP3) and dividing the signal between eight tracks allowed it to fit the signal on the tape with a compression to 20 percent of the original data.

To me, minidisc had a lot of potential. I had a deck and a portable and I didn't worry about software since I used it just like a regular cassette deck, recording my music in real time using the analog/digital inputs. For me, 74 minutes on a disc was fine and I didn't need something like LP.

One thing I liked about my portable minidisc player was that it used a standard AA battery rather than a rechargeable battery pack like my DCC portable had. I also liked that I could put metadata on a disc that dispensed with the need to print a track list to know what songs were on the disc.

 

I was always amazed by minidisc while I was growing up. No one really had them, but I would sometimes see them being used by DJs at public events in the 90s, and they always amazed me. Fast forward to 2004 or 2005 when Hi-MD was introduced, and I thought "this looks amazing!" so I picked up the Sony MzRH10. It recorded uncompressed WAV files so it was perfect for recording my band (and bootlegging actual bands ). The Sony software was awful, and iPods were becoming hugely popular at the same time, so it wasn't surprising at all that the format never lasted much longer, but I absolutely loved that little player.

 

Updated my second gen deck to a new one.