Sony Minidisc

Sony makes great products. I'm usually very happy with their quality. What I don't like is the proprietary nature of the storage media they choose for their products.

Sony digital cameras, for example until recently would only take the memory stick or memory stick pro duo memory cards, while most other cameras were using the cheaper, more popular SD or XD cards.

M.A.L. and I have a few different portable music players. We mostly use the so-called "mp3 players." I say "so-called" because the ones we have will also play some other formats besides .mp3, like .wma (and in one case, the open source .ogg format, which I prefer to use).

The mp3 players built into our cell phones are particularly nice, and quite convenient.

However, I still find myself going back to my old Sony MZ-S1 Minidisc players.



I tried a few different Sony Minidisc players, but settled on this more bulky version because of the solidly-built exterior. Less sturdy versions tended to break too easily when dropped. Sony wasn't very successful with their lineup of Minidisc players; flash mp3 players, of course, have proved to be much more popular. They're certainly easier to carry around. But Sony's ATRAC3 format for music is, in my opinion, superior to .mp3 format in terms of sound quality. In fact, it isn't even close.

Unfortunately, ATRAC3 can't be played on any mp3 players; and, I don't know of anything but Sony players that can use their minidiscs.

The Sony Minidisc players use the NetMD and Sonicstage software applications for ripping and recording music. Sadly, those applications run only in Windows, and there's no open source alternative for Linux that I know of.

Fortunately, we keep Windows XP on a computer in a back room.

I have dozens of minidiscs laying around, containing hours and hours of music. My two MZ-S1 players are still running fine, and the music simply has a better, richer quality than I've been able to get from any of our mp3 players.

And these things run forever on a single AA battery -- 54 hours, according to the specs.

Sony supplied cheap, pitiful headphones with these players. A good pair of earbuds is a must; once acquired, they do justice to the great ATRAC3 formatted music.

So, despite M.A.L.'s chuckles, the old man continues to turn to the tried but true.

I'm gonna run these Minidisc players until they wear out.

Here's a Wikipedia article on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc

Also, check out these pages at minidisc.org:

http://www.minidisc.org/index.php

http://www.minidisc.org/part_Sony_MZ-S1.html