Sony Kills off the MiniDisc Walkman

The MiniDisc never succeeded in replacing the cassette tape, mainly because the discs were more expensive than cassettes or blank CDs. However many broadcasters and audio professionals used MiniDiscs. There were two main applications:

1) Studio playback to replace cart machines - they were much cheaper and better quality. They were replaced computer play-out systems which were far more flexible.

2) Portable recorders - better quality than the cassette and portable reel to reel machines, but primarily they were much smaller, lighter and cheaper with a longer running time. Any reporter could afford one. They lasted longer than the studio playback machines as it took longer for solid state recorders to become a viable and affordable alternative. (Many of the consumer mp3 players that could record simply not good enough for broadcast or music recording.

In general dropping any recorder onto a hard surface is a bad idea, but this was virtually guaranteed to break an MD recorder. They were almost unrepairable.

The principal drawback was the real time time transfer of the audio into a computer editing system, the discs could not be read directly by a PC, (except with some seriously expensive hardware and software) and the digital compression system was incompatible with every other system on the market. Towards the end Sony introduced machines with USB, but the transfer was slow compared with memory cards and it required the use of Sony's own software to convert the audio files into something useful.

By the time they came out with this, portable recorders recording to Compact Flash or SD cards had become affordable so MD recorders quickly became obsolete and I am amazed that anyone is still buying them today unless it is to transfer any audio archive still left on MD.

The last users were those who went on long production trips and who needed to record many hours of full quality audio. Memory cards would fill quickly and at first were prohibitively expensive, whereas a new disc could always be put in the recorder. Once SD memory card prices came below the cost of blank MiniDiscs, the last reason for using them vanished.

All in all they were a great tool in their time, and I have used and installed many, but they have long since been supplanted by better systems.