Sony MiniDisc Walkman Discontinued

Ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered here today to mourn the passing of the Sony MiniDisc Walkman, which was tragically murdered by its older CD-playing brother Discman, as well as co-conspirators iPod, iPhone, and, to a much, much lesser extent, Zune.

Japanese newspaper The Nikkei reports that production on the MiniDisc player will officially be discontinued in September, though Sony will still manufacture the physical discs.

The MiniDisc Walkman was, even from birth, the Discman's weird, unlikeable brother--though it was cute, in its own way. Birthed from Sony's prolific womb in 1992 and hailed as the future of music-listening, the MiniDisc Walkman played MiniDiscs, ugly gray (and, later, ugly garish) floppies that could hold up to 74 minutes of CD-quality audio. MiniDiscs were less than half the size of CDs, but they never caught on--not with musicians, not with reporters (the MiniDisc Walkman featured an onboard microphone), and not with listeners, either. When Sony released 1GB discs in 2004, it was already too late for the MiniDisc Walkman, which suffered a long, inconvenient coma of low sales and general public disinterest almost from its inception.

Though 22 million MiniDisc Walkmans have apparently been sold in the almost 20 years of its shelf life, Sony has bowed to the sad and obvious truth that no one wants to carry around an ungainly bundle of MiniDiscs in their pockets in order to listen to music. The decision also probably stemmed from the fact that no one knew that MiniDiscs (MiniDiscs!) had even been made since 1998.

This is certainly a tough day for MiniDisc Walkman enthusiasts the world over, who are probably silently weeping while listening to their MiniDiscs of "Mambo #5," watching "Hangin' with Mr. Cooper" reruns, and reminiscing about the good old Sizzlin' 90s. It was sad enough that the Cassette Walkman (Cassette!) was discontinued in October of 2010, and not a year later, the MiniDisc version will follow its brother to heaven.

Sony has said that the CD Walkman will remain in production, though with Cassette and MiniDisc biting the bullet, one must wonder how much longer the most iconic Walkman--the CD Walkman was always the Alec to the Stephen and Billy of the Cassette and the MiniDisc--will remain on the shelves.

Comments

[taylor316]

03:10 AM on 07/12/2011

i bought my first MD recorder when they came to the U.S. expensive as heck, but it was thrilling. i remember thinking to myself "the future has arrived!" a year later, i put it away and never touched it again. RIP MiniDisc, you were awesome in your day!

[Greg 135]

11:47 PM on 07/11/2011

Would have been great if you could hook it up to a computer and move files, music, data on and off of the disc (at least mine, bought in 1998, didn't have that capability). Other than that it was great for doing interviews.

[J-Rome]

05:30 PM on 07/11/2011

Still have mine, and it works great. Just don't use it as much anymore. :)

[mrrobinson2u]

03:30 PM on 07/11/2011

I always wanted one, but it was always too much $$...I thought 'BRILLIANT!..CD's without the scratches! Smart technology...and I didn't realize they could record and re-record on the player itself!

[Stefan Dembowski]

03:28 PM on 07/11/2011

(sigh)
Surprised it took so long. I had one a few years ago and the sound was the best available.

[helioszephyr]

01:37 PM on 07/11/2011

I didn't know they were still selling.

It was one of those "in-between", short lived products that was leap-frogged by more pratctical technologies... similar fate as DAT.

[Cash4Gold]

12:58 PM on 07/11/2011

Hmm, that reminds me. Have the sales of music CDs rebounded?

[stepintothelight]

10:09 AM on 07/11/2011

Wow .... and I just figured out how to wire mine to my Commodore Vic 20. It doesn't do anything but it really looks cool!!!

[Kasado]

09:53 AM on 07/11/2011

It was explained to me that the reason MD's didn't make it big was that the compression rate was too high, so audiophiles snubbed the tech.
Well now, we have MP3's that has a higher compression rate, but are very popular. I guess convenience overrides quality.

[Deftguy]

05:14 PM on 07/11/2011

Its not that the compression rate was so high, it was that ATRAC1 was not very well implemented in MD. When compared to Ogg Vorbis, AAC, and LAME VBR MP3, ATRAC3 was the poorest performer. When I used mini disc to present temp mixes to my clients, they never liked the way their mixes sounded through the ATRAC encoder. The decoding system is basically dummy, with the emphasis of all of the special processing in the encoder itself. ATRAC has been used in minidisc and SDDS theatrical system, and had a higher bitrate than Dolby Digital, but not nearly as high a bitrate as DTS.

Almost everything ATRAC related has now been discontinued. Dolby, DTS, and several other codec designers did a better job at encoded lossy data than ATRAC could.

[Pandoras Folly]

08:31 AM on 07/11/2011

etu Laser Disc.

[Vic22]

11:04 PM on 07/10/2011

I loved my minidisc player

[David305]

07:04 PM on 07/10/2011

I had a player installed in my jetta back in '98. I feel nostalgic.

[Ben Kent]

06:06 PM on 07/10/2011

I used to work in Theater, we used MD all the time. It was the perfect medium for sound playback. I guess the MD machines are being replaced with computers now though.

[omg wtf lol bbq]

05:53 AM on 07/10/2011

I remember being in middle school and high school and using one of the original portables to record a demo. The sound quality was great in the overall sense, and it was much more affordable when compared to CD-R drives and media at the time (CD-R drives still cost around $2000 and blank CDs were somewhere around $10 or $20 each IIRC, at least in 1994).

Compared to our other options (analog cassette sounded crappy but was good for distro to friends, digital compact cassette sounded inferior to MD, DAT was too hard to obtain around this area at the time), MD was the best option. We'd usually record in multiple takes and then add additional layers on the computer to some songs using CoolEdit; since hard drive space was tight back then (you were lucky to have more than 500 MB), it was a process of doing one song at a time and then mixing the layers to a single track if we wanted more than 4 additional layers to a song.

MiniDisc, you will be missed. Your DRM won't, but the fun times we shared will.

[bilateralbow]

01:32 AM on 07/10/2011

My only experience with the mini-disc was Yamaha MD- something- and was an eight track home recording studio. To my knowledge, it was the first multitrack recorder that offered 8 tracks for the consumer. It had its own mixer on it and i used the hell out of that thing in the late 90's till early 2000. And i was the coolest!!! Cause i dont think audio recording on a computer was an option yet.

[omg wtf lol bbq]

05:54 AM on 07/10/2011

You could record with a computer, it was just ungodly expensive until the late 1990s.