Category: MiniDisc

 

After watching Julien's homage to the MiniDisc yesterday, I felt compelled to relate my own MD odyssey. While Julien got a lot of the details wrong about the various devices in his collection and the format itself, there's no denying his love of the medium itself.

Since I'm not a video-oriented guy (I've had no desire to record myself since my voice went to hell from the cancer twenty-five years ago), you'll have to settle for the written word. And if you have no desire to read this, just skip ahead to the next nekkid menz post.

I had to post something than more end-of-the-world Orange Felon crap for my own sanity.

I don't remember why the MiniDisc bug originally hit me, because initially with my vinyl-is-holy attitude that gripped me in the early aughts, I wrote the whole thing off as a waste of money, but realized some time later it was only because I couldn't afford it and I was more than a little envious:

23 January 2000 While waiting for the movie to start (we all got to The Metreon at 7:30 for what turned out to be a 9:20 showing), we grabbed dinner at Firewood, and afterward wandered over to the Sony Store.  As always, Sony was interesting.  The place has the most amazing collection of hi-tech gadgets you could easily spend an entire paycheck—or more—on.  And yet, while I certainly admired the design and engineering of a lot of what I saw, as we wandered through the compact disc collection, I commented to Jeffrey how I felt myself to be somewhat of an anachronism with my turntable and vinyl collection.  On the other hand, while it's obvious the design of these new products is great, they certainly don't seem to be made as well as any of twenty-odd-year-old equipment I've purchased in the last six months.  I seriously doubt if someone's going to be auctioning off one of the blue metallic pocket-sized mini-disk players I saw tonight on e-Bay twenty years from now.  It's far more likely they'll all be at the bottom of some landfill if only for the reason the players—like their own up-and-coming software and compact disks before them—seem eminently disposable to me.

Well, twenty years later, people are auctioning off these devices, and in many cases they're going for as much money as they did when they were new (adjusted for inflation) as a small but dedicated group of enthusiasts are—like myself—rediscovering the format.

Anyway, I don't remember what swayed me after that initial proclamation I wrote in my journal, but it was scarcely two months later—after receiving an unexpected windfall from the sale of some original Frank Lloyd Wright blueprints I'd been lugging around for the previous twenty years—that I owned one of those "blue metallic pocket-sized players" along with a full size deck that I added to my existing stereo system.

Funny how life works. Anyhow, I do remember that once I got my hands on those little plastic discs and started using them, I was immediately smitten. At the time I was still living in San Francisco and commuting via train to and from downtown every day. I'd been using my portable CD player for listening to music on the trip and later—because I got tired of the constant CD skipping—a cassette walkman. Even though the MiniDisc format was already on its way out (at least in the United States), I proudly showed off the new player at work. I was disappointed that my colleauges weren't as excited as I was. I remember hearing a lot of "They're still a thing?"

Undeterred, I continued on, recording my CD collection as well as a lot of my vinyl. I didn't care what anyone else thought…

After returning to Phoenix in 2002 my love affair with the medium continued. As I got further into it, I learned of the LP2/LP4 play feature that Sony introduced after I bought my original equipment, effectively doubling or quadrupling (if you didn't mind the loss in quality LP4 inflicted) the recording time of the discs. Naturally I had to have this, so I sold both my original devices and replaced them with units that had the feature. (Looking back now I don't know how I justified going from my original deck—a MDS-JE630—to the LP2/LP4 deck (MDS-JE480) that had significantly fewer features and functionality, but I was able to.) I replaced that glittering blue portable player with the funky MZ-S1 "Sports" MD player/recorder. Though it—like all my MD equipment of the time—was now long gone, seeing that model again online ended up being the whole reason I got back into this quirky format six months ago.

I don't remember exactly when it was that sent my equipment and rather sizable collection of decks packing. Memories are hazy at this point but I want to say it was either immediately before or after I met Ben and made the jump to the iPod.

I hadn't really given MiniDisc much thought since then. I've spent the last couple years getting back into CDs as my preferred listening medium. I've acquired a small collection of portable CD players, and it was shortly after I added Sony's quirky white and orange S2 "Sports" CD player to the collection that I was overcome with nostalgia for my old S1 MD player.

As I've written before, every time I looked one up on eBay I told myself, "No, no, no…you don't need it. You'll have to buy discs and transfer all your music and it will be a pain!" But eventually nostalgia (it's a hell of a drug) overcame that little voice in my head and I gave in and bought one. It had a wonky latch, and in my attempts to fix it, I ended up borking (is that still a word?) it completely and had to buy another one.

Since that time, I've acquired three other—different models—portables (see Marge, above), a Sony MDS-JE780 and a Tascam MD-350 deck (whihch and I now have more discs than I probably had in my original collection.

Do I need any of this? Of course not. Does it offer at least a small respite from the shitstorm brewing in this country around us? It does. Does recording and labeling the discs—while sometimes very frustrating for a variety of reasons—actually bring me a small modicum of joy? Yes. And I guess that's all the justification I need.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.