So a couple weeks ago I decided I was going to start a new hobby, combining my love of minidiscs and of taking shit apart. No, I wasn’t going into the repair business (although I understand that can be very lucrative). No, I’m going to create ahhhhhhrt.
Inspired by this photo as well as a video from a few months back I can’t seem find anywhere now, I decided I’m going to try this myself. I’ll buy up a few cheap “non-working” or “untested” MD players, disassemble them, and mount them in a shadowbox like this. Hardcore Minidisc fans will lay out good cash for this shit…
TRUE NERD stuff, I know, but hey…it will at least temporarily get my mind off the decline and fall of civilization.
To that end, I found three players online that were cheap as dirt and at the very least “untested,” if not outright “not working.” Two of them, Sony MZ-E75s, were the first model of portable player I owned back in 2000. I got rid of mine in 2002 when the new MDLP (long play) format became available because discs were still relatively expensive and you could now double the amount of music you threw on one disc. (A real boon for those pesky double LP/CD recordings in your library.) . Through some black magic and voodoo known only to Sony engineers, you could now double or quadruple your recording length on any given minidisc—although it should be noted that the quadruple length mode was only satisfactory for something like the spoken word; it sounded awful when recording music because of the extreme compression use The LP2 mode sounded —even to my much younger ears at the time—indistinguishable from regular SP (standard play) mode. The only downside was that if you recorded a disc in LP2, you couldn’t play it on a non-MDLP player. It was not backward compatible; hence the reason I needed to throw everything out and start fresh if I was going to adopt it.
So back in the day, I sold both my MZ-E75 portable and my MDS-JE630 deck and upgraded them both.
I received the first of those two E75 players today (“no battery, untested”). The battery terminals on the device were pristine, showing none of the all-to-common corrosion from 20+ years of leaking batteries, so I figured what the heck? Pop in a battery and see what happens. I gingerly inserted one of my gumstick batteries, connected the inline remote and popped in a disc. Surprisingly, the player came to life and the disc was registering on the remote. I connected my headphones, pressed play, and…no sound. The display on the remote showed it was playing and even showed changes in volume, but it remained stubbornly silent.
Even though this was bought with the sole intention of tearing it apart and mounting its bits and pieces for display, I was still kind of disappointed because I was secretly hoping it worked and the seller really didn’t know what they’d sold me. I was about to get out my screwdriver and begin disassembly when I popped out the disc and looked at what I had been playing.
Suddenly it all made sense. It was Sylvester’s Greatest Hits (the disc I featured a couple days ago); recorded from a two-CD set onto one mindisc using LP2 mode.
No wonder I got no sound!
I popped in a disc I knew had been recorded in SP mode and…you guessed it. It played fine.
So now I’m in a quandary. I bought this to disassemble, but it works and is in near-mint condition. It’s far too nice to take apart but I really don’t need another player—especially one that only plays SP discs.
I will admit, however that to my utter surprise, this little nugget sounds good. Maybe even better than my MDLP players. Oh lord…am I going to have to go back and re-record everything in SP mode now?
But I think I’ll hold off deciding anything until the blue one arrives. If that one’s truly not working as well, I’ll swap the outer shells (because my original one was the blue color and it’s very, very rare to find one these days) and then mount the non-working guts with the red shell in the shadowbox. If they’re both working, I’ll probably just throw the red one back up on eBay and hopefully get more money back than I paid for it because now it is tested and working.