A Sony MiniDisc Odyssey: The History, Players, Discs, and How to Take a Hobby Way Too Far 

Well that was unexpected..I totally believed this to be a Techmoan video, lol. Great video, Chris!

I installed a Sony 4 Minidisc head unit changer in my car. Cost me £1200 at the time. Great video. Brings back so many wonderful memories.

Minidisc is still my favourite media.

I never had, let alone played with a MiniDisc player but what I can say is that I do own the MiniDisc's offshoot cousin that is the Universal Media Disc (UMD) that Sony used for the PlayStation Portable (PSP). Although, I only brought Gran Turismo PSP in UMD format, I can relate to the satisfaction of inserting the media into the player or in my experience, my PSP!

Thank you for making this video, my teen years were very much filled with Minidisc and being a teen in the US during the same time the iPod started I was definitely the weird one. Still have a good amount of my old stuff from 20 years ago.

Wow, MD ! I used to still have a player of this but broken few years ago. Good job! what a memory

Thanks for making this video I absolutely enjoyed watching it

I remember when i bought my minidisc player/recorder. It came with a portable minidisc player. I made mixes for fun on the weekends. How fun!

I have the red 909 in mint condition. Everytime i post it, people go crazy when they see it... It's marvelous !

This is like Teachmoan fanfic. Love it.

I still have my Sony net MD that I bought with my own money at 16 years old. I'm 36 now. That little machine still works, has lots of sentimental value.

Thank you so much for this wonderful video about a wonderful time .

This video was pure joy, A to Z. Thank you, Chris!

I have two portables and a micro system deck. The portables are MZ-510 and MZ-520 My deck is a Sony CMT-M373NT All netMD I still use them regularly, pairing them with a headphone amplifier and Bluetooth transmitter, they sound great through AirPod Max headphones.

Great documentary

I loved the mini disc format myself, I've still got my portable one and a full size " hi fi " seperates model. I remember seeing a minidisc on the Keanu Reeves movie Jonny Mnemonic back in the mid 90's 🙂

wow thats something different then lens reviews... always loved the MD.

Nice one Chris! 👌👌👌👌

I still have my MD player, and i only listen to The Darkness on it

Holy crap dude, memory unlocked lol 😊

Haha great video!

Was just talking to my friend about these i still have mine!

That 14500 battery you are using is dangerous knock-off best to get rid of it before it starts a fire. Majority of 14500 batteries from reputed makers(Panasonic, Samsung, LG and Sony) top around 1100mAh and none are over 2000mAh.

I hope this video takes off, it’s such a treat to hear my favorite photography RU-vidr talk about vintage tech.

Other pro for minidisc players. They use less than a watt to operate so I use the DC plug directly on a small (40cm²) solar panel (with an appropritate voltage regulator module) and like that I have a solar powered audio player device. Perfect to listening to the music in the garden and chill with the benefits of the sun. No batteries, no waste etc...

I absolutely ADORED the MiniDisc format. I was the only person I knew in the US who loved it but I was all in.

The algorithm delivers me a 40+ minute video about MiniDisc? Guaranteed watch. Didn't expect just how unhealthy the obsession would get by the end of the video, though lol I'm under no delusions - my interest in this is purely nostalgic. I had a NetMD portable in the early 00s that accompanied me through most of high school, and a bit into university. It helped me weather the gap between iPods being affordable (my 30gb iPod still stands as the portable music player that I used for the longest time) and the last properly good portable format before it (cassette). For those years in the early 2000s, NetMD was such a sweet-spot on price and performance. In the 90s, MiniDisc was a format that I super wanted to use, because it was so obviously superior to cassette. But, a $500 CAD MiniDisc portable for an 8 year old to take to school every day was a pretty hard sell to my parents. So, I used cassette and a low-end Sony Walkman on the go, and CD at home, recording loads of mix tapes along the way.

When you said "make your own pre recorded" I thought you were just gonna plop a sticker on a RW, print off boxart and plop it into a case, not this insanity lol

Fond memories of doing my paper round with my MiniDisc player also. Currently have a Sony NetMD and a Hi-MD model, The Hi-MD being my late fathers. I believe my original was a Panasonic, but it is long lost to me.

Web Minidisc project allows transfer of music to minidisc without the crappy Sonic Stage software. It only works for NetMD players.

Owning a minidisc Walkman and a Pioneer deck, I was with you.... until the 30 minute mark! Making the covers? Hell yeah! Cracking open the minidiscs and swapping the shells? Well I'll admit I occasionaly did that with cassettes, but I'd never do that to a minidisc! Incidentally I have had two discs go corrupt on me, both second hand Sanyo discs. I mention they were second hand because I do not know their usage/storage history prior to me purchasing them. They were part of a lot of about 20 and, so far, the rest are still fine. I think it was just pure bad luck.

I still used minidiscs for years , my first MD deck is a Sony MDS-JA3ES from the 90,s and it,s works perfect and i love this audio format its very reliable system !! , greetings from Assen in the Netherlands !!

Great video. Brings back memories of great holidays in Sweden around 2000, where my father took his Kenwood DMC F5R with him, which felt so much advanced when compared to both our common Walkman and Discman players. Still, I get the impression that when being put on the market just within sight of the advent of MP3, minidisc players are just something like the audio equivalent of APS cameras.

The pre-recorded MDs are made just like CDs (single aluminum layer), they are not MO (magneto-optical), they will last forever, especially protected in the caddy. The recordable ones are MO, though not to last forever, certainly are not ephemerally brittle like a CD-R which don't last a decade (if lucky). Rewritable MDs are to last 4-5x longer (they have multiple layers of various materials, but I have yet to hear about a "disc rot" case with MDs.

I went all in. Had a complete ES car system, several MD discman and a home unit to record it all. Oh, I forgot that I bought the Sony PCLK-MN10. Sony came up some new format that allowed you to put several hours on one disc. I think the bitrate was less than 88kbps. It was like peas and carrots until MP3 took off. Literally killed the format overnight. My buddy owns the ES home unit. Hasn't used in in over a decade.

It's 2024 and we still use junk CD's. Why this didn't become the standard for movies, games, and music is beyond incomprehensible. The standard CD is outdated and time to be scrapped

I bought my first MD back in 2004, it is a Hi MD/ NET MD player only. Because I bought the lowest priced model, it doesn't come with recording. After years of storage, I tried to use it again and I encountered no disk error, I Googled the problem and track it down to dried up lubrication on a worm gear that moves the optical laser. I took it apart and lubricate the worm gear with light silicon lubricant and it works like new. I bought a MD with recorder and when you play it, it is just pure satisfaction.

Hi Sir. Could you please make a video comparison between Tamron 17-70mm f/2.8 aps-c & Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 FE. As the FE lens has dropped its price, now it's less than the Aps-c in India.

I looked into mini disc a while ago because everyone was selling theirs off. Atrac and all the supposed better variations aren't very good compared to the original sound of a CD. I won't even listen to hi res MP3's because I can hear the difference. I've tried to move my CD's to MP3 and the highest resolution, and I can still tell its really bad. Someone gave me a whole bunch of MP3 files and the sound quality was abysmal, so I deleted all the files. Better off going out and buying actually CD's with the decent sounding original. Compact Disks have a bit rate of 1411 kilobytes per second, which is 4.5 times greater than the bit rate of the highest res MP3 files. Every audiophile source I researched about minidisc Atrac files said they were nowhere near as good as Compact Disc. Minidisc had their place as a way to record CD's with much better sound than cassette tape. Cassette tape was just terrible. CD's were always brilliant, but compressing the files left artifacts and missing sound quality. Minidisc is a dead technology, and CD is still on top. MP3 is still garbage compared to CD. Where its at is CD and SACD. You can burn CD's and listen to your music on that.

I can't believe you destroyed those Suede discs, OMG! Do you know how much they are going for on ebay?? Suede fans will be horrified by this. Otherwise, not a bad video, up until that point. lol

what’s with us camera people that draw us towards old tech, that Techmoan cameo was totally unexpected

Unfortunately I was born a little bit too late to experience this technology (mid 90‘s). But I love learning about such things. I wonder if the small discs in the old PlayStation Portable have anything to do with MiniDiscs? Thank you for this interesting video!

I agree regarding smart phones and music. I use a DAP which is tiny and plays Hi Res audio and stores 2TB. i had several mini disc players and liked them. Indeed phones batteries are chewed up listening to high quality audio and then video and texting etc, always hear colleagues complain about charging their devices and wondering why I'm not.

I am amazed you use Vegas Pro to edit your videos. I thought I am the only one doing that. 😅

Oooooh what a lovely lovely video. Mini Disc 4 eva. Thanks so much for sharing your Love ♥♥♥♥🍄🙏🏻

There might be a business for making (fitting) pre-recorded MD shells ... 🤔

Is that "build" music from The Sims 3 @23:18? 😀I recognize the tune but not sure where I heard it but I know I heard it a lot!

I am having some difficulty how you have no difficulty showing yourself making counterfeit minidiscs

Thank you for this nostalgic video. I have only had one MD player, and I do believe it was the same as your first recorder, only mine was silver. It died at one point, and I bought a 80 GB HDD MP3 player that I replaced with a 80 GB iPod Classic. I actually often think about the MD days and miss my old player, but I’m not going down that road now. Still a lovely reminder of the good old days. Thank you 😊

That's one thing I never had was a minidisc. I already had a CD recorder and various players, so didn't see the need in getting another format. .

I'll still use minidisc to this day, and you want to see the looks I get on the train... Haha it's hilarious.. Haha..

Awesome video my friend .keep up the great work. And thank you for showing your collection. Way cool 😎. Take care. 🤠🇺🇸

I have bought and tested dozens of used minidiscs, only one was defective.

In the last 3 months i have been collecting and have about 15 models , also a onkyo mini stereo and a net md stereo

Just bought the MZR-50 on ebay japan. A few months ago I bought a double din nakamichi MD and CD for my 96 Landcruiser.

Great video that covers all bases of Mindisc, very enjoyable

It's not really a requirement to have vast computer knowledge to get Sonic Stage working on Windows 11. You just have to temporarily disable the driver signature enforcement to allow the driver to load. That sounds like it's difficult but it really isn't. Just go into the power option on Windows, hold down the shift key and select restart. The computer will restart with an option for troubleshooting. Select that then select advanced options. In advanced options select start-up settings and then click on restart. Type 7 to disable driver signature enforcement and the restarted computer will now allow you to install the NetMD driver. When you next restart your machine the driver signature enforcement will be re-enabled but, as your driver is now installed it will still work. The one caveat is that it has to be Sonic Stage 4.3, earlier versions won't work.

Hi Chris use mine all the time 'hot at least 500 mds at home i listen to a lot of audio books on LP4 ' music on LP2 .

Thank you very much for a great video about MiniDiscs. I use MiniDiscs almost every day. I have a player in the kitchen, the bedroom, the living room, the balcony and the office. I also have two portable players. approx. once a quarter I have a party on the balcony, and the rule is to only listen to music from MiniDisc.

Hello Chris, Because of your video I decided to take out my minidisc and make it work again. Your video helped me a lot because I was able to make it work within minutes, thanks to your very useful information. I burned a couple of them and tested the quality of the sound with my 700$ headphones. It’s far from perfect but it’s not bad at all. Thank a lot for making this work again for me. I was also a very big fan of minidisc. Your video was great.

I got the Sony MZ-R55. :)

the problem is if it need a repair and your not a tech and you give it to some one to repair it can get very expensive ?????

Im glad you decided to make a video about this. I saw a mini disc in one of your other videos and left a comment to that affect. Incredible tech that came a bit too late here in the US. By the time it got good, we already had at least 3 generations of iPods.

Love what you're doing with the channel, from reviewing camera bodies to personal projects like this. Great video

There is Googone to take off the stickers

Love it!!!

This went way farther than i thought 😅 amazing stuff. I recently got an R50 and am in the process of going off the deep end 😅 i grew up in Austria, not that far from the UK but for some reason nobody i knew had any MDs. Also just bought my first pre-recorded disc - a Chicane album. Never seen any pre-recorded discs back in the day i think!

Fantastic professional video, I had the same Sharp minidisc portable recorder back in the day and an AIwa for playing back. Fun times! I still have many models today although I know I need to downsize my collection somewhat!

You are very rude about Suede. They're better than the horrendous Divine Comedy in your collection!

sony was really capable of manufacturing beautiful sleek looking portable devices! I wonder if it's true that Apple snatched lots of Sony's injection molding specialists on their plastic shell days. (I think I heard something like that some how)

Hi, you never did review on Nikon 16-80mm. what is your feedback about it?

MiniDisc is nice, I guess, but of course DCC is much better. ;) In the end though, both formats lost to the compact cassette. Chrome tapes recorded with Dolby B actually sounded more than good enough. And it was existing, cheap technology.

I'm loving this video.... I still have some of those old TDK tapes made for better CD reproduction still in the sealed package. I can't wait to get back into playing with audio and everything. Fantastic video! 😊🌎❤️🕺🏻🐶

Unexpected but appreciated. I took a trip to Japan last week with the intent to find some retro tech including MiniDiscs, since I never had the opportunity as an American, but ended up wasting all my time film camera shopping. (Silver lining: I picked up a Nikon F601 Quartz with a Sigma 70-300 f/4-5.6 for a grand total of ¥1000.)

You can clearly tell from the design of the disc that Sony was also the inventor of the 3.5” floppy disk. 🙂

That's so great! At one time I was so intent on organizing, perfecting and displaying my relatively few albums (my era was LP's and cassettes). I really appreciated and listened to each song and album more when they were so tangible. Now that I have immediate access to almost any and every song ever recorded in a digital world, I find that there's too much to listen to and appreciate them less!

That was amazing! Though I've never owned any minidisc playback/recording devices (always used casettes before MP3 players took over), Thank you Christopher for introducing me this piece of technical history!

This was fun Chris . My first Sony Walkman was so amazing to my ears. I’m an 1980’s kid and I have been kind of a tech nerd ever since. PS I shoot the Sony a7rv and zi am in love with that cameras color science 🧬. Good Bless you and keep you! Walter P from Santa Cruz California 😊

Hope we have more videos like these soon!! Follower since the Canon T3i days here and have made a lot of lens investments from your tests, God bless!

Great video mate! Lots of work! I couldn’t believe you went to all that trouble with the ‘new’ prerecorded disc! Excellent job!

Oh I'm so happy you made this I was an early and continue to be, advocate for this media. To buy blanks cost lots now on ebay. An album in the 100s. Great media tho

Truly happy to see one of my favorite channel talks extensively about a topic that is obscure to most people, yet had a significant spot in my childhood! Great work!❤‍🔥

I use my MiniDisc player all the time. It's great for when I go to coffee shops to get some work done.

Thank you for the video! I never had an MD player/recorder, we were using audio cassettes until my father purchased an iPod 4 (a.k.a. "iPod click wheel") in 2004. The HDD is still alive now although I had to replace the battery multiple times and it's a bit tricky process and I am using it more or less regularly for twenty years already!

I love my MD players it brings back the memories of the good old days! After so many years mine still in good working condition! Nowadays I used to play music through streaming services but sometimes I just want to go back to the fun time with physical media.

just added to watch later, i used to record with a yamaha md8 eight track board, and commute with the sony minidisc walkman, i was all-in haha

Unexpected but a pleasant surprise ! Can’t count the amount of times I’ve came back to view your videos! Deff one of the best channels out there !

I thoroughly enjoyed this! And thank you for the usual test footage of the stabilization system in the first five minutes. This is always important for people buying into a Sony crop format system.

I thought this was techmoan seeing the notifaction but nice see its you chirst I like when channels take side stories like this

Waoooo minidisk I remember when I got mine in the 90's there were so great ❤ love this vídeo, keep up the good work

Excellent timing and perfect my lunch hour. MD was the best. Thank you.

So awesome. Very nice video!… oh wow ! The end just got me with the lavalier mic 🤯

Well mate, time for you to get into Mrwalkman powered Walkman portable music players 🤘 Wm-A55 and wm1a/wm1z

No mention of high end Sony ES MD devices?

Cool excursion, enjoyable to watch.

Good one Chris. I love it when you branch out.

Feels like you and techmoan would get on.

I love your camera and lens reviews Chris.

What did I see Divine on your playlist? That I didn’t expect 😂

Like father like son :)