Skip to main content

The Story of the MiniDisc, Sony’s 1990s Audio Format That’s Gone But Not Forgotten

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Whether or not pioneering carmaker Henry Ford actually uttered that quip, it has long held near-Biblical status in the realm of American business. On the other side of the Pacific, Sony founder Akio Morita put it less memorably but more generally: “If you ask the public what they think they’ll need, you’ll always be behind in this world. You’ll never catch up unless you think one to ten years in advance, and create a market for the items you think the public will accept at that time.” And had Sony, creator of the Walkman and co-creator of the Compact Disc, asked its customers what they wanted in the late 1980s, they may well have said digital cassette tapes.

In fact Philips, Sony’s partner in the development of the Compact Disc, did want to make a digital cassette tape. But Sony saw the future differently, imagining optical discs that were even more compact, and rewritable to boot. The result was MiniDisc, which within a few years of its launch in 1992 managed to see off the Digital Compact Cassette, the competing format Philips ended up developing with Matsushita. But then the story gets even more interesting, and you can see it told in detail by the half-hour This Does Not Compute documentary above. Though the MiniDisc wasn’t a straightforward success, it turns out neither to have been the sort of Betamax-style failure many Americans seem to remember today.

As a consumer audio format, MiniDisc actually became a massive phenomenon, at least back in Sony’s homeland of Japan. The peculiar economics of the Japanese music market, especially back in the 1990s, made CDs about twice as expensive there as they were in the United States. Enter the music-rental shop, where customers could check out a dozen albums for the cost of buying a single one of them, then go home and copy them all to their MiniDiscs. Veritably printing money, Sony and other MiniDisc hardware manufacturers came to the defense of music-rental chains when the displeased Japanese record industry took them to court. By the time the issue was settled, MiniDisc had already entrenched itself in the Japanese market to the point that its devices surpassed CD players in sales.

Confused by the sudden preponderance of options, most of them pricey and of uncertain value, American music consumers of the early 1990s stuck with what they knew: the high-quality CD for home listening, and the “good-enough” analog cassette tape elsewhere. In the world of professional audio, and especially among radio producers, the flexibility, reliability, convenience, and clarity of MiniDisc proved undeniable. But never cheap or widespread enough for the average listener, nor quite high-fidelity enough for the exacting audiophile, it spent most of its life in the West as a niche product. Today, a decade after its discontinuation, the history of technology has come to recognize MiniDisc as the evolutionary link between the Walkman and the iPod, each of which revolutionized the way we listen to music. And what with the newly retro appeal of 1990s technology, its aesthetic stock has never been higher.

Related Content:

The Story of How Beethoven Helped Make It So That CDs Could Play 74 Minutes of Music

All Praise Lou Ottens: The Inventor of the Cassette Tape Dies at Age 94

Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the Music Industry Waged War on the Cassette Tape in the 1980s, and Punk Bands Fought Back

A Celebration of Retro Media: Vinyl, Cassettes, VHS, and Polaroid Too

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

The Story of the MiniDisc, Sony’s 1990s Audio Format That’s Gone But Not Forgotten is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2SSeO9A
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Voltaire Meant When He Said That “We Must Cultivate Our Garden”: An Animated Introduction

“Voltaire’s goal in writing [his 1759 satire Candide ] was to destroy the optimism of his times,” says Alain de Botton in the School of Life video above, “an optimism that centered around science, love, technical progress, and a faith in reason.” These beliefs were folly, Voltaire thought: the transfer of faith from a providential God to a perfect, clockwork universe. Candide satirizes this happy rationalism in Doctor Pangloss, whose belief that ours is the best of possible worlds comes directly from the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Leibniz . The preponderance of the evidence, Voltaire made abundantly clear in the novel’s series of increasingly horrific episodes, points toward a blind, indifferent universe full of needless cruelty and chaos. “Hope was, he felt, a disease,” de Botton says, and “it was Voltaire’s generous goal to try and cure us of it.” But as everyone who has read Candide (or read a summary or brief notes on Candide ) knows, the novel does not end with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more