Author: Mark Alexander

Back in early aughts, after receiving an unexpected windfall from the sale of some original Frank Lloyd Wright blueprints my dad gave me in the mid 80s that I’d been lugging around for over a decade, I used the funds and got into Minidisc in a big way—shortly before the time it was going to nosedive into irrelevance and obsolescence. (Hence the title of this post.) Despite the lukewarm reception the format received in the United States and the fact that it had been on the market since ’92, I nonetheless adopted it wholeheartedly. I bought a portable player and a full-size deck to incorporate into my stereo system from The Sony Store that had popped up at The Metreon near Moscone Center in San Francisco. While CD-Rs/RWs were coming into their own by this time and it seemed everyone was still carrying around portable CD players (myself included), the iPod—and the ultimate death of MDs it hastened—were still a year away when I made my purchase. I didn’t care about the format’s relative obscurity even then; if nothing else, there was just a cool factor about MD and the players that I found irresistible.

Even after the iPod appeared, I stubbornly continued my love affair with the MD. I replaced my original portable MZ-E75 with the awesome MZ-S1 shortly after moving back to Phoenix in 2002, and a year later replaced my original MDS-630 deck with a MDS-480. Hell, I even put a Kenwood MD deck into my car. I amassed hundreds of those candy-colored shimmering plastic discs that I greedily filled up with not only the contents of my CD library at the time, but also music ripped from my burgeoning vinyl collection. At the time the discs were still plentiful, dirt cheap and recording was a breeze.

For years, I resisted jumping on the iPod bandwagon, believing the sound quality of MP3 files was subpar to ATRAC, which was used in encoding the MD format.

But then in March 2010, after listening to some music on Ben’s iPod—and admitting the sound quality really was damn good—I broke down and bought my own. Not too long afterward—simply weighing the convenience of carrying an iPod containing my entire music collection versus all those discs, I sold my MD gear and practically gave away the discs.

I no longer have that iPod. I think I sold it when we were in Denver and I realized that most of the music I wanted to carry around with me could easily be swapped in and out of my phone. Having a separate device to do the same thing the phone could do was just…redundant. In the subsequent years, all of my listening has either been via vinyl on the “big” stereo in the living room or via headphones on my phone or Mac.

As y’all know, over the past eighteen months I’ve gotten back into CDs in a big way and they are still my preferred method of music consumption. I hadn’t really thought much about Minidiscs until a few months ago when a MZ-S1 popped up in a post on Reddit and I was—as the kids say—consumed with the feels and it triggered something. Did I really want to get back into Minidisc, knowing what it would ultimately entail? Logically, it made no sense. Emotionally, the answer was a resounding, “We’re about to descend into a dystopian hellscape, so why the hell not?” Still, I resisted the urge, but kept checking in on theMZ-S1 listings on eBay, gazing longingly and telling myself, no, no, no…

Until a week ago when I said fuck it.

Of course, the whole Minidisc landscape has changed over the past twenty years and getting back into it wouldn’t be as simple as a trip to Best Buy or Fry’s Electronics (which doesn’t even exist any more). New players were no longer being made, and while new recordable media is still being manufactured by Sony, the variety and the “fun” factor of the disc designs has completely disappeared. If you want new, you basically have a choice of black on white or grey on white. Thankfully, there are still dozens and dozens of folks on eBay selling entire lots of used discs, and—since MDs can be rewritten “a million times” [according to Sony]—there are still plenty of options available to get all the media I’ll ever want or need. On the whole, the hardware—both portable and deck variety—seems to have held up to the ravages of time much better than other “vintage” electronics, and can be found for cheap on eBay.

Which brings me to the present. I just received a MDS-JE480 deck that was in excellent condition that I snagged for a very reasonable amount of money. As of right now I have no remote control or media, but both should be arriving in the next few days. I also broke down bought a MZ-S1 portable that started this whole thing that’s scheduled to arrive on Monday.