Sony MiniDisc Walkman to stop spinning in September (video)

[coolness]

Aside from with a handful of stateside early adopters (and a few million others in Japan) eager to embrace any new technology, Sony's rather extensive line of MiniDisc Walkmans never had a chance to dominate the portable audio market. But for one reason or another, the company kept up production of the optical player / recorder combos for nearly 20 years, after the first Sony MZ1 launched in Japan in September of '92. With a countless selection of more affordable solid-state alternatives available today, however, it's certainly not shocking to see good ole MD go the way of the laserdisc and the cassette. Now, only one question remains: How long until we see the compact disc suffer a similar fate?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a3bMFRYj78[/youtube]

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[AlanJohn]

Oh memories..

 

[Veho]

Aw man, MiniDisc. I have this one, it kicked so much ass back in the days of cassette players. I wanted to get a HiMD player when they were introduced but then I got a solid-state player instead... I feel like a traitor now

 

[ChrisRX]

Yet another one of Sony's proprietary technologies that they tried to force on the public. Glad to see it go.

 

[Veho]

Yet another one of Sony's proprietary technologies that they tried to force on the public. Glad to see it go.

You have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

 

[spinal_cord]

Yet another one of Sony's proprietary technologies that they tried to force on the public. Glad to see it go.

I was under the impression that minidiscs as well as betamax were used a lot in the media industry because of their higher quality.

 

[Destructobot]

They may have had higher sound quality than audio cassettes, but not CDs. They didn't hold nearly as much data as a CD so they used lossy compression to store a similar amount of audio. I had a friend that used to use a minidisc recorder to record live concerts, but because of the lossy compression the resulting audio did not translate that well to other lossy formats like MP3. It sounded okay converted to CD, but DAT was superior for that sort of thing.