I Lucked Out On This One

Okay, when I bought this Tascam MD-CD1MKIII deck I knew it looked mint, but until I started digging in the menus I never realized it had so few hours on it as well!

CD Playback – 26 hours total
MiniDisc playback – 54 hours total
MiniDisc Recording – 6 hours total

Damn, this thing was hardly touched!

I Was Busy This Afternoon

I saw today that Robert Pattinson has presumably been signed on to play Scytale (the Tleiaxu Face Dancer) and primary antagonist in Denis Villeneuve's upcoming Dune Messiah project. Pattinson is one of those actors I simultaneously love and hate, which may actually be a good thing considering the character he'll be playing in the film.

All this got me to thinking and I realized I haven't read Messiah in probably fifteen years at least, but acknowledging I now have the attention span of a gnat when it comes to reading, I still wanted to give it a go. To that end, I thoought a little musical accompaniment might be in order, so I ripped the various Villeneuve Dune soundtracks I have stored in my laptop to MiniDisc this afternoon.

I have all of Frank Herbert Dune novels in Kindle, so when I was done recording, I put the music on in the background and fired up the app. It seems to have worked wonders for keeping me focused. I'm about a quarter way through the novel and despite my disappointment of certain aspects of what Velleneuve did with the second Dune film, I'm very much looking forward to seeing what he brings to the silver screen with this story.

In My Happy Place

A new toy.

Did I need it? No. Not by a long shot. Did I want it the moment I knew of its existence? Absolutely.

Back in the day (i.e. the 00's) when I was heavily into MD, I had several pieces of gear, among them a Sony MXD-D40 combo CD/MD deck. It facilitated high-speed dubbing from CD to MD and would even properly transfer track marks and CD text (if it was present) as part of the process. I've had that model now on my eBay watchlist for the past few months since it would allow me to consolodate equipment, but it seems the only ones that showed up  were Japanese units and therefore 100V. Yeah, I could buy a step-town transformer to plug it into, but when we start doing that shit I start questioning if my hobby has turned into an addiction. Granted, there are worse things to be addicted to, but I didn't want to cross that line since it seems I'm already straddling it. They were also outrageously priced.

After getting my Tascam MD-350 minidisc deck back in January and being so impressed with the engineering and build quality, I started wondering if Tascam had also produced a combo unit. Of course they did. Several different iterations, actually. Tascam is the professional arm of Teac, one of the biggest and most respected hi-fi equipment manufacturers of the last fifty years—and a name all of us cassette-obsessed boys in the 70s turned to.

The latest model of their combo deck was the MD-CD1 MkIII, available from 2011-2017. A cursory eBay search reported several offerings—again all 100V Japanese units. But I knew they'd also produced this for the US/Canadian market from pictures I'd seen online, so was just a matter of time and practicing a little patience (something I am not good at) before one showed up. To be honest, several US units had appeared over the past couple months, but being originally sold as professional equipment (much like the legendary Technics SL1200Mk2 turntables), they all looked like they'd been ridden hard and put away wet.

No thanks. I can wait. It was, after all, a want and not a need

Patience paid off. One appeared on eBay a week ago. Supposedly a one-owner,  fully functional, 120V unit. Except for a tiny scratch on the top panel at the rear, it looked mint. The seller was offering a very reasonable price. I countered with an offer about $40 less, and he came back with a $20 discount (essentially covering shipping). I slapped the BUY IT NOW button and it arrived today.

Since my mantra for this shit is now "one in, one out," after I'm sure this is actually working properly, I'll put my year-old standalone Yamaha CD player up for bid. Based on what they've been selling for, I should easily recoup what I paid for the Tascam, with money even left over. (I'm also going to sell several of my portable CD players since they're all but gathering dust on the shelf these days.)

So what do I think of it? Well, for starters, I wish I'd known of this model back when I stumbled back into this hobby. It would've saved me a lot of money. For the very short time I've spent with it, I have to say it's also one complicated beast. If there's one major difference between Tascam and Sony gear, it's gotta be ease of use. Sony decks function intuitively; a complete novice could figure out how use one of their recorders without cracking the owner's manual. Tascam? Not so much. Even common functions like splitting, combining, or moving tracks on the Tascam is not as stupidly simple as it is on a Sony deck. (Or maybe I'm just old and used to doing things one way and when presented with something different I go into brain-lock.) I'm not complaining; learning new shit is vital to creating new neural links in an aging brain!

The MD-CDMkIII does everything, but accessing the settings often involves digging several layers deep in the menus. (The owner also supplied the original printed manual, which has been invaluable.) I just dubbed Eurythmics' Revenge, both at regular and  then again at high speed to verify everything was working, and it's perfect. I suspect this deck never saw the inside of a studio and truly was a single-owner unit, used exclusively in a home setup. And as an added surprise, the seller even threw in about a dozen new, still-shrinkwrapped minidisc blanks—something he didn't even mention in the auction. Sometimes the Universe still smiles upon you.

This Guy Gets It

Nostalgia. It's a hell of.a drug. I've said it before.

Randy gets it, and is the first person I've seen so succinctly sum up what I feel whenever I put on a CD or rip a new MiniDisc. It just feels good. And as a collector, the dopamine rush of walking into a thrift store or our local Hard-Off, not knowing what I may find lurking on those shelves, or when a new-to-me piece of gear that I probably overpaid for arrives in the mail is exactly as he points out.

I grew up with vinyl as a teenager, spent my 20s and 30s with the arrival and peak market of CDs (I remember to this day the smell when you walked into Tower Records), and ended my 30s and spent my 40s with MiniDiscs. Even though the whole cancer thing occurred when I was deep into MD (I remember having my Sony MZ-S1 at the hospital, listening to whoever was on my radar at the time) I still have so many fond memories associated with the format.

I look at my music collection and think, "That's me. That's my vibration." And even though my tastes have expanded over the years, every one of those recordings is a part of who I am.

And since everything I buy is used from individuals, it gives a stiff middle finger to the orange felon's tariff madness.

I've Been Busy Today

I've been avoiding social media. Even Bluesky has turned into an endless stream of nothing but angst-producing horrific news.

So I jumped into my hobby headfirst today. Started going through my iTunes collection last night and made a list of what I wanted to transfer to physical media. And of course, once transferred, I had to make labels.

Labels, labels, labels…so many labels. Still, it keeps my mind off the imminent collapse of the United States and/or WW3.

And speaking of WW3…

Have a good evening!

It Arrived…And It's Alive!

Very happy with my first foray into Japanese auctions! Upon arrival it powered up fine with an AA sidecar battery and/or power adapter, but wouldn't recognize a perfectly good, fully charged internal gumstick battery—nor would it charge said gumstick. Even though the contacts on the external battery door looked okay, I knew there had to be corrosion inside, so after shining a flashlight in the battery compartment and confirming the internal contacts were caked with the infamous green corrosion, I gingerly removed the rear case. Armed with vinegar, an old toothbrush, q-tips, and isopropyl alcohol—and having watched numerous videos on how to do it—I set about removing the green gunk. Afterwards I put it all back together—and to my utter amazement, not only did it still work, but now it recognized the gumstick battery and worked great. And that color! Sony sure knew how to do orange!

Blast From The Past

 

I stumbled upon this collection of house music back in the mid 00's and immediately fell in love with it, adding them all to my iTunes library. They were perfect "background" music for working on the computer or around the house.

I eventually got rid of the original CDs (along with most of the rest of my collection) after we moved to Denver and the music pretty much fell off the radar.

But a few weeks ago I rediscovered house music on YouTube via the Yoyaku Record Store and Humano Studios channels, and it was at this point I rememberd Bargrooves, and immediately ripped them from iTunes onto MiniDiscs.

Imagine my shock then when I first listened to my newly ripped discs and uniformly hated every one of them! "I liked this stuff?" I asked myself.

The other day I was going through disks and retitling everything (one of the perks of the format) and while pulling up the track lists on Discogs I realized that the songs I'd ripped to iTunes all those many years ago were completely out of order. It's no wonder I hated the sets…there was no continuity, no "groove" as it were.

Thankfully, another perk of MiniDiscs is that you can rearrange tracks to play in whatever order you want. So—even though they were originally ripped in the wrong order—I was able to reshuffle them into their proper sequence and voila! my love for this music returned.

The only problem is that there's now a break in between each of the tracks (the downside of ripping from iTunes) so I've tracked the original discs down on Discogs—for cheap!—and should be receiving them next week so I can gaplessly re-record them onto MD.

I can hear you all now: "He's such a nerd."

Yup.

Gorgeous!

Not mine, but I have my eye out for one in this color for sure! Sony sure loved their orange. And apparently so did a whole lot of other manufacturers back in the day…

 

An Ode to 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.

Recommended Series!

You can find the CDs new on Amazon, but used copies are much cheaper on Discogs, even when you factor in shipping. I picked up near-mint copies for around $3-4/disc (not including shipping).

Interestingly, when I had these in my collection prior to the purge, I didn't rip them in their entirety to iTunes—something I now regret (and now has been corrected) since I've gotten them back in my collection.

Busy, Busy…

I'm doing everything possible to stay as far away from social media as I can this weekend. To that end, I tackled one of my post-retirement tasks early.

My office closet had become unmanageable. Last weekend I pulled everything out and started going through shit.

The big boxed items hoarding the most space were the two vintage receivers  as well as a vintage amp I'd posted extensively about here but were no longer in use. I'd been planning on putting them all up on eBay for over a year, but they had to be unboxed, photographed, and in the case of the amp, the speaker terminal board needed to be reattached. I kept putting it off because it was all just too much.

Well my friends, now they're up (here and here in case you're interested). And one has already sold.

I also realized my old Yamaha CD player was sitting on a shelf in the bedroom closet, and BAM! That's listed now too.

While there is some sentimental attachment to all this gear, it feels damn good to be getting it out of here—especially since I lost my mind last week and bought another Minidisc deck:

should have sought this one out initially, but until I stumbled across a review on YouTube I didn't know it even existed. It's got all the functionality of the Sony deck I bought, but in addition it has a headphone jack, pitch control, and—most importantly—a keyboard jack so track/disc names can be easily input. Will I eBay the other one? Probably not. It's always good to have a backup…