One year ago today this little nugget—the same model as the last new Minidisc player I purchased in 2002—arrived in my life, reigniting what I feared it would: an obsession with the MiniDisc format.
During the year and a half prior to its arrival, my love of compact discs had been rekindled, rebuilding and augmenting my original collection that had been sold/lost over the years. The used Yamaha CD player I’d picked up when I started this journey was refusing to play some discs, so I replaced it with a new Yamaha—and several portable players over the next year just because. As as I was pursuing these various player offerings on eBay I kept stumbling across auctions for Sony MZ-S1 MD recorder/players and I’d be overcome with a pang of nostalgia. As tempting as it was to get one, I kept thinking, “Why? I have no discs, and do I really want to get into yet another format? I’d have to buy a full-size deck to go with it, and then there’s the matter of getting discs and transferring all my music, and yada, yada, yada.” But the nugget kept popping up in my searches.
I put up a good fight for the longest time.
But then, one day—logic and reasoning be damned—I gave into temptation. I loved the format back in the day and I justified the purchase by saying I wasn’t getting any younger—and neither was this hardware. I checked, and saw that (at least at that time) Sony was still manufacturing new discs, so I said fuck it. Even with retirement looming and the reduced income that went along with it, I knew the Pandora’s box I would be opening, but I went ahead and pulled the trigger anyway and bought a MZ-S1. That act—as expected—opened a floodgate. I now have more hardware and discs than I ever owned originally. In fact, I immediately followed up the MZ-S1 with the purchase of a MZ-N707 (below) a few days later, simply because it was gorgeous…
And, truth be told, numerous decks and a dozen portable players later, this obsession has also kept me sane over the past four months.
Have expensive mistakes been made? Oh yeah. (I have four shadow box displays of disassembled players to prove it.) Have I learned from those mistakes? Yes—that beyond basic maintenance I do not have the necessary skills to repair this gear. Do I regret any of it? I do not.