Did this obscure audio format REALLY sound better than MiniDisc? 

They sound almost identical. The most important thing is their editing abilities, and MD wins hands down with its ability to erase tracks or move tracks from one position to another and the ability to long play in stereo.

Man, Minidisc was so cool (and still is)! It has always felt like a technology from some alternate timeline.

I should also say that it's harder to tell the difference when using really hot synthwave tracks. Soft orchestral and jazz tracks with plenty of sound stage are the best tracks to demonstrate the loss from lossy codecs...

They all sound great. I think whatever format was more appealing would end up making a final decision. For me, MD had everything I would want. A small form factor and instant tracking. Optical disks always fascinate me and I still spin CDs for that reason alone.

I'm 55 and all 3 sound similar to me. The age of the listener is a big factor.

MD is just so cool. I really felt so special to have everything on MD. At home or on the road. Car stereo, mobile player and home player. I could rent CD's and copy them in super quality. I really enlarged my music collection so fast. It was great!

A Minidisc is awesome! It looks futuristic. That’s why a minidisc was used in the movie The Matrix.

Back in 1992 or 93 my local HIFI dealer held an invitation evening where we could review the DCC and MD players back-to-back together with a CD player. I seem to remember thinking at the time the DCC sounded slightly better but I liked the formfactor of MD. In the end bought into MD in 1998 when the format felt more established.

I remember DCC and thought it was a no go versus MiniDisc because MD was randomly accessed and allowed editing the order of tracks, track labeling, etc. DCC was just tape but sounded "better". MiniDisc felt so futuristic at the time in comparison.

When first released, DCC definitely did sound better than MiniDisc. The ATRAC codec tended to have metallic-sounding artifacts. DCC's PASC codec does suffer a loss of high frequencies above 15 kHz, but if you're an adult male, you probably can hear anything above that, anyway! But Sony kept improving MiniDisc after DCC was discontinued, and the later versions of ATRAC do have improved sound quality.

I remember MD being my first dip into discussing format quality with an audiophile. My explanation was this: I'm getting mp3s usually at 128-192kbps, so using LP2 on my MDs was absolutely fine and suited my use case to a tee.

They both sounded great. There were so much choice back in the day. Great times.

Man, time is a soulless b****. Every time I see one of your magnificent videos makes me pounder in that question. Thank you for all the nostalgia trips❤.

I really appreciate your channel! Your videos bring back so many fond memories for me. I used to daydream of owning some of these devices (Mini Disc, DCC, etc.) when I was a teenager in the 90’s, but I couldn’t afford them. Thank you for the trips down memory lane!

atrac sounds so good, especially on clipped really hot recordings. I think what commenter said below about synthwave is correct- a genre that definitely is recorded very loud and it ends up sounding quite pleasant even though most of the program material seems to be recorded way too hot

On the DCC I could hear some high-end “swooshiness”, like a combination between phasing and low-bitrate quasi-mp3-compression in the treble. The MiniDisc fared well compared to the uncompressed source. Then again, I’m lucky in that I can still hear up to 17kHz, so that may play a role as to why I heard a difference at all.

I'd have been curious to see you take the digital output from both and put it into something like audacity so you can see side-by-side if/how the waveforms have been changed.

Thank you for another great video about DCC and MiniDisc! @3:40 "PASC is a minor tweak to MPEG 1 Layer 1" - "Ackshually" it's the other way around: PASC predates MP1. MP1 expands a little on the possibilities of PASC. In other words, PASC wasn't "based on a third party standard", PASC was what MP1 was based upon. It was Philips who came up with the MP1 standard, not a third party. Apart from the differences in supported bit rates and sample rates, the only difference between MP1 and PASC (and I only found this out recently) is this: when encoding at 44.1 kHz, because the number of bits per second divided by the number of samples per second is not an integer, MP1 and PASC use "padding slots" in (I think) 25 of every 49 frames. In a 44.1 kHz 384 kbps MP1 stream, each packet is either 416 or 420 bytes long. In PASC, those extra 32 bits in 420-byte frames are designated as "dummy" and must be zero (the PASC decoder chips choke on the data if they aren't), but in MP1 those slots can contain data. PASC couldn't do real mono because that would change the bit rate to 192 kbps and the tape speed is fixed at 384 kbps. But there was a Dual Mono mode that was intended to be used for audio books, and provided 4 x 45 minutes (instead of 2 x 45) on a cassette. This was only possible with prerecorded cassettes and the only cassette we have at the DCC Museum that uses this format, is a test tape used for development. As for those frequency bands: We at the DCC Museum talked to the engineer that worked on designing the PASC encoding in the beginning (Gerard Lokhoff; his name is on some of the patents), and I seem to remember him mentioning that they considered dividing the audio into more and/or unequal bands (like Sony ended up doing but of course they had no knowledge about this at the time). But they figured out that it didn't make a difference because the actual lossy compression algorithm would work equally good with equal-size bands, and equal-size bands made the chips simpler. They decided on 32 bands because it was a nice round binary number. I could never hear the difference between DCC and MD, not even in 1992 when DCC and MD came out, and my ears still worked reasonably well. And it's very difficult to compare the formats, because both formats are designed to do really well with music and sound that sounds "really good" or is "easily comparable". For example, a piece of music with lots of dynamic range and lots of carefully mixed instruments that all have different frequency ranges (for example Jazz music) can be encoded well because the frequencies are easily distinguishable and not a lot of sound is masked by your hearing in the first place. Also, obviously, pure tones such as a sinus sweep can be encoded on both systems with pretty much no loss at all because all the bits in the compressed format can be dedicated to an accurate representation of a single frequency, or a few frequencies. On the other hand, music with lots of audio with mixed frequencies, with noise, with sharp drumbeats, with distorted guitars etc. are relatively difficult to encode (i.e. they will probably cause lots of loss from the encoders) but that's exactly where the loss doesn't matter too much because your ears are overwhelmed with sound and you don't hear the distortions from the lossy compression anyway. It would probably be an interesting experiment to use a program like Audacity to subtract the recording with the lossy compression from the original source to find out what was actually taken out by the lossy encoder. But I bet if you listen to "what went out" and then listen to the original recording, you won't go "Oh yes, I recognize that". Both Sony and Philips put a LOT of effort into making their lossy compression sound as good as a CD, and Philips even argues that DCC could sound potentially better than a CD because the encoding is performed with a 24 bit algorithm, so 256 times better accuracy than a CD. We recently released some tapes with 24-bit 48 kHz music and they sound really, really good on an 18 bit or 20 bit player (no 24 bit players were ever made and the encoding was done on a computer). But would they have sounded worse with ATRAC encoding? I don't think I would be able to tell. 10:56 Philips WAS the producer of the MP1 format. I personally speculate that if DCC would have lived longer, Philips might have made improvements too, just like Sony did. For example, it's pretty trivial to encode a different data stream like MP3 on the tape instead of MP1. And for MP3, 384 kbps would be overkill so they could have run the tape at half speed for a sort of "DCC-LP" mode where you could record 2 x 90 minutes (instead of 2 x 45) of MP3 audio at 192 kbps on a DCC-90 tape. Or they could have used the heads of the portable recorders to record and play both sides of a tape at the same time while running that tape at half speed, so you would have 90 minutes of uninterrupted 384 kbps PASC music without the need to reverse the tape after 45 minutes. Or they could have put a DCC head in a microcassette mechanism and combine that with double-sided half speed recording and MP3 compression to get 90 minutes of 192kbps MP3 on a tiny cassette. All of these are possible future projects on my agenda. And then there are other possibilities for improvement that never came to be: For example, the tape used for DCC was basically the same formulation as video tape, but S-VHS used better tape already in the early 1990s. So maybe it would have been possible to use a higher density tape and record DCC with lossless compression at, say, 786 kbps. And by the end of the 1990s, some tape manufacturers started making thinner tapes (like the TDK MA110 tapes and the E300 video tapes where previously the longest video tapes in Europe were E240). That would make for a possibly longer duration if they would have been used for DCC.

10:02 Indeed, one of the audiophile magazines actually mentioned that MD recordings sounded better than pre-recorded MDs (yes, the fact that it wasn't aimed at audiophiles didn't stop the audiophile press from analyzing it to death, graphs and all!)

Wow. What a great video. The production value was top notch. I could believed I was watching something from large studio developed for a cable channels. Great work 👍

I love this history dive on obscure formats, technology, and company history. Keep up the great work 💪

Awesome video as always, Colin! I was a teenager when those formats started to get a foothold in Europe. MD was always going to be the winner for me in no small part because MD seemed to be so futuristic at the time. DCC was novel and impressive for what it was but the MD players got smaller and not having to deal with the foibles of a tape player was so welcomed. I went on to own the incredible Sony E10 when new and even picked up a second years later as a backup which is now in my collection of all things retro. That thing still looks like it is from the future today.

i always enjoy your videos i learn and have fun with retro computing its like a travel but without getting out

I truly loved MiniDisc. I had many players from home to portable to car decks. I owened a bunch of commerically released discs but mostly I had a ton of concert bootlegs on them. I never did get into DCC but I was always curious about it so it's great to have a video of a direct comparison.

I recall seeing DCC in the stereo shops when I was a kid and being in awe of the new digital tapes that I was sure was going to be the next big thing! Great work sir thank you!

Great sounding audio equipment !!! i feel the MD sounded ever so slightly better but that just may be me loving my MD players , installed a MD head unit from Japan so i could enjoy all my old music on drives and i absolutely love it , great "shock factor" when i put on my aviators on and pop in a cassette looking cd in the dash

I would never be able to tell in a blind test. Great video!

It was the convenience of MD that won me over, the ability to edit, name & shuffle playlists was a complete gamechanger. Also the robustness of the discs where they weren't affected by heat or just general day to day handling. Skipping tracks was almost seamless on MD whereas DCC took time to search for the tracks you wanted. Sound quality wise, i was ok with that because i didn't have good quality (read expensive) headphones to hand at the time. Listening was mostly done on the earbuds that the player came with which were fine. I still have & listen to many of the albums i created on MD, & i still enjoy the experience & the memories they envoke. I have many 12" singles recorded onto MD's that I can't find as downloads, so MD will stay with me for a long time to come.😎👍 Great video btw. It's nice to see older tech being aired via YT. Keep up the good work. 👍

Great review love you're work 💞

I was working at Philips when DCC was launched. I was so excited when I got my hands on one.

Minidisc evolved, after Philips abandoned DCC. ATRAC codec evolved A LOT and this lossy format was indeed the same as "CD quality" in the latest ATRAC versions. But please, don't forget about the latest improvement on the Minidisc format, the HiMD minidisc format that recorded every audio in PCM linear. Yes, i still use minidisc today! 🙂

In my country (Greece) both formats were equally obscure!! I remember seeing a pre-recorded minidisc at a record shop once and was wondering what it was! As a passionate music lover, I kept on recording conventional cassettes till the late 2000s! I never had a friend who owned a DCC or Minidisc recorder (portable or otherwise). And, despite being a Philips fan, I finally succumbed to the Minidisc craze in late 2021, early 2022! Possibly after watching your other, very popular, video!!! Keep up the good work, pal!!!!!

I SO wanted a DCC deck back in the day, since I had quite a few cassettes. As for the question of, "do you hear a difference," the answer is yes, but the detail is so minor that you wouldn't notice it unless you were told you were looking for it, i.e. it felt like (for lack of a better term) some of the "shine" was lost on the MD versions vs the source and DCC. Regardless, both sounded great, and considering MD was more intended to be a portable format rather than your main set of HiFi gear, WAY more than acceptable.

Oh that one was so smooth and informative video. Thanks for the effort you put, now i can shove this video to the faces of some of my friends who argue about different media quality and end the debate. The end result is the same we all get older and deaf...

Whoah! This takes me back. First of may I congratulate you on a very well edited and concise video, I enjoyed it a great deal. As a recording engineer I was interested in every new format that came along. I still have my trusty Sony MZ-1 and Philips DCC and are both in fine working order. Here in Norway 2 rather strange cassette tape formats were marketed as well (I often suspected that we were a sort of testing bed for new tech!). One was called Elcaset and was brought out by Sony, Technics and Teac around the mid seventies.. The other, which I thought was far superior, appeared here in 1982 and was the Hitachi PCM-V300 Digital Audio Recorder that used the PCM recording format on a VHS cassette tape. Unfortunately both flopped, but as they say, you can't make an omlette without cracking a few eggs . . . . FOOTNOTE : I still use my Alesis ADAT recorder but have replaced the two HDs with SSDs, invaluable for multitrack live recordings!

To my ears DCC lost some stereo detail for some reason at the second song while MD keeps those stereo wide from the original. kinda weird but I gues it's one of the traits of MPEG-1 audio and I notice it with MP3 also

In the mid aughts when every megabyte of flash memory mattered I remember compressing my music to ATRAC for playback on PSP, lol.

Loved the video as always, but THANK YOU for turning me on to Seth Nova! 🤯

Still rocking my MZ-R70 Minidisc recorder from '98. Everybody knew pre-rec MDs sounded awful so we would buy (and still kept to this day) the CDs I wanted, and we'd record our MDs to play at the beach or in the car or for the train commute to work. My MZ-R70 was ATRAC 4.5 too so was the latest and greatest at the time, and ran off just one rechargable AA battery. Amazing tech. I've noticed MD enthusiasts today use the format for archiving their CDs much more than for ease of transport OF that CD collection. That is the wrong way round. You're meant to play your CDs on your hi-fi _first_ and MD was a portable option for your music. An option which still held it's own on _other people's_ hi-fis too. MD enthusiasts today's go to great lengths designing and printing cases and labels for their creations, overlooking the whole point of Minidiscs being lossy rewritable media which could be erased and reused over a million times. Fun facts: even the oldest MD player can read discs burnt today in ATRAC 4.5. Even if those machines only recorded in ATRAC 1.0 it was totally backward compatible. That is until up until MD-LP and Sonicstage etc (which was basically MP3s on MD). Additionally, when recording analogue from a mic or aux-in my MD recorder uses a 24bit ADC to oversample the input, resulting in much lower noise floor on the resulting 16 bit recordings. Optical recordings are perfect copies as Colin described (before ATRAC compression). The drugs were also much better back then. LoL 👍😎

Great video! Glad you were finally able to cover DCC!

Excellent video ♥ DCC to me has a slightly more muddy sound to it than ATRAC, I wouldn't notice if I was just listening while outside but I did spend more time listening to music indoors than out.

Thanks for adding the featured music in the description.

I had a portable DCC player, back in the day, and it had the best integrated headphone amp I'd heard. The compression was almost an afterthought.

Wow what great music choices. I am definitely adding these song a to a playlist

I love that Seth Nova track. Flashback to Scritti Politti and a hint of Tame Impala.

I could easily notice how worse the quality of MiniDisc is at higher frequencies (atrac v4.5), but it would be better without recompression (youtube, as you said :D). Awesome video btw!!

Both MD and DCC aside, you have some great music taste. I like the first and the second track that you used for your audio test.

Really, it's amazing how well the codecs work at simulating the uncompressed audio. Truly impressive technology. On the first track, I thought I preferred the DCC, barely, like the MD was punching tiny holes in the dynamics compared to the DCC. Ironically on the second demo I thought the stereo image was slightly less on the DCC compared to the MD, and the bass was a little more detailed on the MD, too... so no clear winner. Of course the worst part of this is that what we're hearing is how the RU-vid compression codec handles what's left of the DCC and the MD audio... so what I "think" I was hearing could be the results of the RU-vid codec, not the original codecs. On top of all of this, if you weren't A/B/C-ing these, there is NO WAY I could have picked up on any of this... and if it was a different day and / or a different stereo system, I could easily make opposite choices. They both are outstanding. When I'm not intently concentrating on the audio (like while I'm typing this message) my brain registers NO difference between the three. Thanks for demonstrating how really good both of these products were! I miss my minidisc recorder.

Great video. Thank you very much! Best regards from Chile.

Just listening on my ancient PC speakers at work... I can't tell much difference between the formats in terms of frequency response or detail, but there's an obvious difference in the stereo field. DCC sounds narrower, while MiniDisc seems to be more accurate to the width of the original, if not just a tiny bit wider. Which is interesting to me, because I worked professionally with MiniDisc in my radio career for quite a few years, and I don't recall ever noticing that before. I'll have to fire up my old MD recorder at home later and see if I notice the same thing.

Interesting test, thanks a lot for sharing! I was able to notice a small difference in stereo imaging when switching to MD in the 2nd piece, but not when coming back from MD. Also the sibilance and hissing sounds were different on MD in a few cases - even via youtube compression. The first piece where the subtitle always said "original" had strong artefacts on sibilance, very typical for low-bitrate codecs of early days - you may ask the musician if he took some samples into the piece... I actually participated in the development of DAB and we did a lot of auditions to understand the effects of psychoacoustic compression. There were also major improvements in DCC, not only different decoders, but more importantly better encoders and a switch to 18bit/bitstream converters. You will find these in the DCC951 and the DCC730. I also worked with DAT at that time time and while it was lossless, it actually wasn't, because the machines of the early days really had lots of issues.

An upload of the uncompressed audio comparison would be nice! Would Atrac3Plus and Type S make a difference ?

Nice to see your not just another Sony fanboy . A proper a / b comparison. Certainly The pre recorded MDS weren’t flash .but here couldn’t tell the difference . Well done. Great music to

I really love these transitioning technologies, you got the so modern digital recorded music but in formats more reminiscent of old analogue media, like instead of carrying all your music library in your hand (or not, you don't need to even own it with streaming) these limited media formats that could hold so much so you gotta be more involded, having to create these mix tapes, discs or whatever with the music you really want to bring with you, I guess that's what I really like about these formats, you still get very modern performance but with the interaction similar like old media

That MZ-37R brought back some memories. It was my first MD recorder and I used the hell out of it.

MD was great. I had a MD player at home, a Car radio with MD player and a walkman. I loved the format. Basically CD quality on the go without jumping CD's.

Have you seen that BBC video about a similar prototype that supposedly used ordinary cassettes in 1984? I gotta know how they did that and how it differs.

Great video as always. Does somebody know what the background music is called between 2:39 and 4:00 ? Thanks!

During that first test, to my ears the DCC had a very slight loss of that bright "sheen" on the top end, but was a bit warmer in the bass when compared to the original, while the Minidisc leaned closer to the original, though slightly colored with a bit more body and a slight edge in the treble. Atrac 4.5 might have been just slightly louder than OG Atrac, but listening over RU-vid it's hard to tell the difference. P.S. That Seth Nova track is an absolute banger!

In high school back in the late 90s I worked part time at a gas station, and I saved up my pay cheques to buy an MZ-R37, which was my first of many MD recorders. Today I use Apple Music and Spotify, but I still have a special place in my heart for MD!

they both sound great! i prefer MD overall, it has a bit of a warmer sound that DCC doesnt. MD is also just a really interesting format, need to get my hands on a player and some disks some day 🙏

I still listen to my mini-disc collection... About 50 discs with 4 to 6 albums on each. Also discs that I recorded tv tribute concerts after 9/11. I'll never get rid of my mini-disc collection! Great video... :)

Thanks for this good video. Like some others already commented. The crucial part of the complete chain are the ADCs and DACs and even more important the filter circuits. 😀

Great video! I could not hear any significant differences, and still enjoy using minidiscs.

As an MD mega fan (I personally owned two portable players, one portable recorder, five decks [including the MD-CD combo with high speed dubbing-SWEET!] and an MD car stereo head unit-ALL Sony devices) I vigorously salute this effort. Bravo!

Thank you for introducing me to Seth Nova!

Beautiful explanation! Thank you for this video.

Man, I loved my MD players. I even used to rock college parties with them as a DJ. I held onto my portable plyer for a long time until I switched to a Nomad Muvo mp3 player around 2003.

I started with Mini-Disc in the 90´s. It is the best format in my opinion for recording. Last week i bought one of the best decks ever produced. A mds-ja 50 from sony. A heavy weight and superb manufactured component. I hope it will last till the end of my days. Thanks for this Video and greetings from Germany !

I followed these formats in the 1990s, Gerry Wirtz lead the design team at Philips, and was convinced that people wanted a replacement for the cassette tape that also offered digital recording, therefore DCC could playback analogue cassettes using its thin film heads. People soon realised that track access speeds and convenience were more important. Philips' idea what that DCC would be a companion to the CD, imagine their horror when Sony announced MD! DCC definitely sounded better, higher dynamic range of nearly 18bits. I had and used both, but long term chose MD. Never demagnetize a DCC head, it'll kill it instantly! Nice video x

HEY, thanks for featuring my song! 😃

I listened to both samples on my Bose 700 noise canceling headphones. There was a subtle difference between the original, the DCC and Mini Disc. When the track switches from original to DCC, there's a loss of higher frequency sounds. The track sounds less "spacial" than the original, but the lower frequency bass is maintained. What interesting is that when it switches to the Mini Disc, you get less bass than DCC, but the high frequency spacial sound comes back, maybe a tad less than the original, but enough to notice the difference between Sony and DCC. You can hear the differences more on the second track than the first and third. Either way, it's not that big a difference between the two formats. Especially if you're not listening with high-end headphones or speakers. One last thing Colin, I absolutely love the sound quality and engineering you put into your videos!

Great comparison video! But it was tough trying to spot any differences because you do the sample switches between bars! My brain can't register the differences when the samples switch at the start of a new bar because any differences just sound like it's part of the song!

I'll prefer the MiniDisc because it was king. Product is king. Edit: well I know you guys saw my comment thinking that MiniDisc and DCC are quite great even for music lovers.

I'm wondering if YT is cutting off the bits that would have a difference. I'm listening on a pair of Edifers and I can't hear much of a difference at all.

I'm still using Minidisc in my car. Still my favourite format ever. I record from a flac file over optical and cannot tell any difference from source.

Hey TDNC! I wanted to ask if you know any good place to find retro computers? I’ve looked at Free Geek, but I live far away. Are there any other places you recommend? Thanks!

I can't tell the difference. Thanks Colin!

Patric Baitman would say "Do you like , Huey Lois and thhe news"?

Most people heavily rely on visual cues or predetermined opinions and impart that on the sound in a big way. When listeners compare things in an A/B test and know that one of the codecs has a bigger number or one of the devices is more expensive they will always say that they hear "more detail" or "depth" or whatever you tell them they should hear.

A lot of this is reminding me of how I recently reread “How Music Got Free” which is about the development of the MP3. Fraunhofer’s team were treated pretty badly by MUSICAM/Philips’ team in the early 90s at the MPEG meetings. Apparently they managed to insert MUSICAM’s filter bank into MP3 as well, and earlier versions were more efficient at encoding before standardisation. Of course it doesn’t go much into Layer I and II except that they’re less efficient than MP3! The second example sounds very close on all of them, but the ride cymbal in the first example was turned into a vague shimmery mess by DCC! The MD lost a little bit of clarity but preserved the overall “shape” of the ride cymbal. And that kind of tracks with how, if you divide the PASC bit-rate by 2 to compare against MP3’s coding efficiency, 192kbps MP3s also often destroyed ride cymbals. There just wasn’t enough definition in the high end of the filter bank for the ride at lower bit-rates, which the adaptive-length block size in ATRAC probably helps with. Certainly AAC, Ogg and Opus used much better filter banks, not MUSICAM/Philips’ design. And that’s a big part of their extra encoding efficiency! (The book also details how almost all of Polygram/Universal’s CDs leaked from the pressing plant for a decade, which is very fun to read and also quite nostalgic for the 90s ‘net. There’s stuff with Doug Morris, the music executive, too which I find less gripping but still provides interesting context. This isn’t an ad or anything, I just really like the book!)

I have been using mini discs since 2008 It’s one of the best formats that I use

I have a slightly strange question to ask you. Is the MZ1 recorder in your video, fully working? I had two of these machines back in the day one replaced the other but both had the same fault which was it couldn't record 74 minutes of music continuously. It would always produce a disc error or fault after 60 plus minutes. Do you know whether your machine will record for the whole 74 minutes on a disc or does it have the same problem? I gave up with the MZ1 and waited until the RZ3 was released and then after that I went into the home recording decks. MDS-JA 30ES then 50ES then 555ES and 333ES. I still have them all and they are working perfectly even today. If I had a wish it would be that I could go out and buy a new Sony ES Hi- MD home deck so that the two Hi- MD portables MZRH1, MZRH10 I have can have a rest😂

Whatever the outcome, I have a new set of tracks for my playlists. Gracias.

also great videos Collin ! always enjoy !!!!

I'm still using MD to this day. I just loved everything about them. One AA battery used to keep my MD Walkman going for ages. I now use a Japanese Onkyo mini system with a suhwoofer.

On some occasions, it feels like that the difference can be appreciated only when the bass part of the frequencies is predominant in the song. Otherwise it is really hard to feel any difference at all. From one of your previous videos, I see to remember that DCC, when duplicated to another tape, applied another compression to the audio resulting in constantly loosing something at every duplication step. Did this also happen to MD?

Here's an interesting factoid about ATRAC (MiniDisc). I was an engineer at Dolby Laboratories in the 90's. If you look at the small print on a MiniDisc back label, you'll probably see "Manufactured under license from Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation". It seems that some of the technology used in the development of ATRAC overlapped with existing Dolby Laboratories patents (or patents they had acquired exclusive rights to) that were implemented in Dolby technologies such as Dolby AC-3. If I recall correctly, apparently Sony engineers didn't do their homework in the patent search process and got caught with an infringement far too late to do anything about it and thus paid a few pennies to Dolby Labs of every MiniDisc player at the very time that DCC and MiniDisc were competing with Dolby's own S-type noise reduction on cassette tape. Edit: You covered this correctly. I should have waited to comment. The only thing I'll add is that some of my colleagues at Sony (I dealt with engineering licensed technology so worked with many engineers from many different CE companies) told me it was a very dark day at Sony when the patent overlap was discovered with some very irate executives.

The quality of the original recording, and the techniques used in the studio is by far the largest determining factor of sound quality.

I love your videos 😍

To me, the MD sounds closer to the original source. With DCC I feel that the high-end is less present. However, I do really enjoy the sound of DCC. The differences are subtle.

Have you tried importing the spurces into an audio app and comparing the waveforms?

While I never had a MD player I always have had Sony Walkman mp3 players and would always convert my music to ATRAC to put it on them. I always found they would sound so much better than a regular mp3 at the same bitrate.

Having grown up in the mid-80s taping the Top 40 off hissy FM Radio onto even hissier cheap cassettes with my Philips boombox, any digital format is such a vast improvement in quality that any differences between them are on the proverbial Planck scale to me 😅

coo video on something I was things on reading more into now I don't need to read that your info did the work for me.

I remember doing a listening test with a friend in the 90's. He bought a DCC deck and borrowed a mini disc so we could compare. We used an analogue copy from a cd track so the A/D conversion was also part of the test. The DCC sounded as an identical copy but the minidisc was disappointing. Then we found out that the minidisc had the automatic recording level switched on. After correcting that, we repeated the test and the conclusion was that both sounded equal. Just a few years later, the CDR hit the market so both formats were rendered obsolete.

It was a great system back in the 1990s. I still have the MiniDiscs. Few are still factory sealed including the 1GB version. Sadly my players/recorders no longer work.

I have still working MD deck from Sony (MDS-JB940) which i use for years. Also i use to record my MD MZ-n510 (netMD) and i love this format since day one. For me quality was great and lets be honest DCC can change track in such speed like MD. Also MD disk is extremely stamina. One my disk (74min from Sony) has more than 20 years and was recorded countless times - still works great. DCC with magnetic tape and head which contact directly to tape will never survive such treatment. To be honest MD was one of the best formats. I love to use it.

Your original audio set my tinnitus off, I had to stop playing!

During the second song you played I could hear a very very slight minute difference between DCC and MD. The MD was a touch louder and clearer vocals. I couldn't tell any differences any other times. But I also am not using good headphones right now. Overall, DCC may have been closer to the original source but I still preferred the MD due to making the vocals easier to hear. I miss my MD player, bought a NetMD back in 2002, I loved how it was one AA battery and gave a longer runtime than my portable CD player with two AA batteries. So compact, and I could fit HOURS of music on a single disc. It's honestly a shame MD never really took off in the states.