I have so many Hi-Fi components already, why not add another? This time it's a Tascam MD-350 minidisc recorder. Lets look at it closely, explore some of its features, and I'll even record my first minidisc!
I got 2 minidisc decks and a minidisc walkman all still working and I still use it to record my songs from a DAW to minidisc to listen how it would sound in the real world... it is a awesome format and still very usable as it was 2 a 3 decades ago
I used minidisc in 1993 , and my first minidisc deck is the Sony MDS-JA3ES , and i used it still today, and i,am very happy with this audio format , greetings from Assen in the Netherlands !!
I've revived my Sony MD portable player/recorder. 4LP. I have several talking books and old music compilations that I can't find 'streaming'. My partner had a similar ~Sharp portable device. We had the matching Sony radioi/cassette/CD/MD mini tower - which we used to use to record BBC radio plays for use in the car or walking - it was the only way to get time-shifted drama at the time. easy to change the titles and add/remove breaks. 4LP for talking books (CC --> MD) worked really well - no 'turning over' the tape. Breaks easily removed. Best and most flexible physical format. Agree about Techmoan's programmes about MD. I used to be able to transfer early MP3 & podcasts from Windows --> MD via the little fibre-optic accessory. I used to put 2xCDs in 2LP mode onto a single disc for music 'on the go'.
Ciao and thank you for your nice Video, which i like to share at Facebook and at Mewe, personally i had a Minidisk Recorder in 1998 or so, it was from Sony.. i remember, the audio compression was atrac.. many greetings from brunswick in Germany and please stay safe 🙃
I always wanted a Minidisc player/recorder, but could never afford one back when they were popular. I remember a portable CD player being around $300, and a portable Minidisc player being over $1,000 when the first came out around '92 or '93. Back then I was young and super poor, I was given a gift of a CD player as a gift, which I loved, but they were very bulky! You really needed a big jacket pocket to fit it in! Minidiscs themselves were expensive too. By the time I could afford one, I'd kind list some interest in them, I think this was around the time the NetMD players came out (around the early 2000's). I still like Minidiscs though, there's something cool about them, I like the idea of the protective shell, it's really like a built in case, and the size is ideal for portability. They're kind of like a mini CD-RW in a floppy disk style enclosure, with an early form of audio compression (proprietary Sony ATRAC, similar tech to Mp3's.
I'm always amazed by how expensive this stuff was at the time. People would spend weeks worth of paychecks for the latest technology like this, and it was a gamble if your format of choice would win out. At least we can enjoy these formats now for what they are without having to worry about the competition.
@@BrettDarien The RIAA were a big part of MiniDisc not taking off in America. They tied Sony up in loads of lawsuits and red tape and by the time they got going the MP3 revolution took off and, in spite of the far inferior quality, they were much cheaper.
I got into MiniDisc this year so I would have a way to record my vinyl records and take them with me. I also got a mini-stereo with a MD player/recorder, it has timers so I can record radio shows.
If you record via the digital input directly from a cd player, you just put it in REC/PAUSE and when you press play on the CD, it will start recording and automatically insert track marks. Depending on the unit it could also pull CD-INFO into the names. Digital recordings will never go into the red, unless the source goes into the red. It's essentially a direct digital copy. You can't make a digital copy of a digital copy. Lot's of interesting tidbits in this format.
When the format was released, I went to Best Buy and purchased the Sony bundle, it was a deck and a portable, for $399. Over the years, I have collected more decks, portables, and a lot of blanks. For a while, the stuff was everywhere, cheap. But not anymore. I noticed,you recorded digitally but also did manual track marking. It marks automatically from digital. I think that's how the two extra track marks happened. Both you and the deck were doing the same job. You might want to put a track mark in the middle of a recording to reference a specific passage: that would be a good instance of using the manual track mark function even when recording digitally. It will mark the tracks when recording analog too, IF the silence between the tracks is silent enough to trigger the machine. The auto- track marking can be turned on and off, in case you want an album to actually be just one "track". The original "war" was MD and MP3. The original "war" with DCC was with DAT. (two kinds of digital recording to tape) I'm old... I loved your video.
@CraiginOhioUSA I was unaware of minidisc when I was younger. I don't remember seeing any minidisc media or hardware. But I'm excited to be experiencing it now. I just bought a new minidisc album on bandcamp. I noticed my machine is sometimes slow to respond to button presses. Not sure if it's a fault or just the nature of this deck. I had to manually mark the tracks because the deck wasn't always detecting enough silence to do it automatically. I'll admit my recording method wasn't ideal though. It was more of a test recording.
I have sort of developed an obsession with MiniDisc over the past 5 years. As well as 3 decks, I have 3 micro systems and about 50 portables. The later MiniDiscs are type S recorders which produce better quality recordings than the earlier type R models. As it is only the way they record and the compression techniques that are affected, the better quality sound can still be heard on a type R players when playing a type S recording. You can quite often pick up one of the later Sony decks really cheaply with a C13 error and a load and ejecting problem. This is nearly always down to the drive belt that can be replaced really easily and at very little expense. The earlier models, pre 2000 tend not to use drive belts so require a greater level of expertise to repair that I don't have, so I tend to avoid them if they aren't working. The last line of MiniDiscs were HiMD which could record lossless files and the discs were 1Gb so could hold a lot more if you recorded in SP mode. There aren't many HiMD decks, I know Onkyo produced some for the Japanese market but I am not aware of any Sony ones. As you can also connect your portable HiMD machines to a HiFi system that isn't a major problem but, aesthetically, it isn't as nice.
My understanding was that type S only improved the quality of LP2 and LP4 recordings. Type R was the last update they did for SP recording. I do wish this deck supported type S though. It's the only feature it's missing. I can do without NetMD as I have no plans to use minidisc while mobile.
As MiniDisc was designed as a portable format, the quality of the output is more than adequate for on the go listening. Not many car speakers are going to play anything at audiophile quality anyway and without a side by side comparison you're not going to be aware of any difference.
I have used minidisc since 1996. My wife is Japanese so i was introduced to the format while visiting in-laws and have used it ever since. I have a sony minidisc portable-player and sony minidisc home player. In addition I have a sony dat machine too. Even though I have a Nakamichi 700 cassette deck, I think minidisc & dat sound better. My Revox A77 reel to reel does give the digital machines a run for the money. I like recording so i record off my streamer to either minidisc or dat or reel to reel. Guess i am just an old head when it comes to music.
I'm with you. I enjoy recording on these old formats much more than making a digital file. DAT might be the next format I experiment with since it's uncompressed audio on recordable tape. Sounds like a match made in heaven.
Many agree that minidisc sounded inferior when it launched but the sound improved as they updated the ATRAC compression. I've never heard any direct comparisons though. This particular machine is highly regarded for its sound quality.
@@BrettDarien It's like comparing a fast food meal to a home cooked dinner. They both do the same thing but they serve a different purpose. The sound quality of MiniDisc has always been more than good enough for listening on the go. It never claimed to be audiophile but you try carrying a turntable on the train or when jogging. The main purpose of MiniDisc was to replace the cassette and CD walkmans as it managed to combine the best of both of them.
@@deacbeugene When I used to record vinyl to MD, I used to record a full album side, and then "divide" the tracks, to eliminate any non-music portion of the stylus riding the groove. Then I'd simply delete the tracks that were just 'blank'. At other times, giving more attention, I'd manually fade the recording level of each track (on the record). That gave a smoother listening experience. There were even times when I would edit out a particularly offensive click or pop, using this same editing procedure. You can edit within a fraction of a second, with MD. Lots of fun! I felt that MD improved the sound of vinyl. The concept of the whole thing, is that the system eliminates parts of the signal that (supposedly) are beyond the range of human hearing. With vinyl, I think it simply eliminates some of the flaws of vinyl playback, and the resulting attrac file is more pleasant to the ear than the original source. But with CDs, I was able to hear a reduction in detail. Even at the best setting, I could hear the difference between MD and CD every time. Not that it sounded bad. It sounded great. It seemed a shame that the iPod became the winner, instead of the MD. It's certainly more fun to make a compilation from my collection, than to sit and look at the computer screen and move files around. And, although it's possible to connect a turntable to a computer, it's absolutely not a bit of fun. It's been decades now, and I still haven't had a mini-disc fail to work. All of my decks still work, too. I know those lasers eventually burn out. But it looks like my decks are going to last for the rest of my lifetime. I can't even say that about my toaster.
@@CraiginOhioUSAThank you for sharing! At the moment I'm just having fun of buying "non working" portable MD recorders off EBAY and trying to make it work and then I'm recording minidiscs from CD's and use MD on the go. I just completely missed all this MD technology when I was young because in my country this equipment was too expensive back then. As of MD sound quality I would agree, with some music and good headphones I can hear some difference between CD and MD recording. But for "on the go" purpose it is absolutely fine with me.
I had this very same model back in the day. I made many recordings on the blank disc and never did i got use to that horrible digital compression audio. It sounded worst then mp3! I decided to throw it out in the garbage bin. Never look back from that point forward!
Can you describe how it sounded? Did it sound thin to you? I noticed while editing this video that the minidisc recording had less peaks in the audio, but that could be attributed to differences in volume levels. As for MP3s, I thought they sounded fine as long as they were at least 128 kbps. Minidisc records at 292 kbps in SP mode, so on paper it should be better. ATRAC3 at LP2 records at only 132 kbps.
@@BrettDarien ATRAC is a more intelligent compression system than MP3 as Sony designed it to reduce frequencies that were typically inaudible to the human ear. Having extensively used MP3 and MiniDisc I always found the MiniDisc to be a superior better sounding medium. The biggest downfall was the connectivity to PCs. The NetMD models used a proprietary program called Sonic Stage to convert digital files to ATRAC and save them to disc and it was slow. This program was originally a little flaky and unreliable too, although later versions were better. Nowadays there is an online program that you can use but I haven't been able to get it to work for my HiMD models so still have to go back to Sonic Stage to use them.
I've always preferred tape for recording, but tape is all I had as a kid. I'm happy to finally have minidisc now and I'm sure I would of enjoyed using it years ago if I could of.
Sony still produce the Neige 80 minute discs. They are really expensive but there are a lot of still sealed old discs available on eBay which are pretty inexpensive and used discs are even cheaper and easy to wipe and reuse with no deterioration. I don't think I'm going to need any discs for a while anyway as I have a stock of about 500 now.
