How Many People Are Using Cassettes Here?

The other problem with minidisc was transport reliability. I’d wager any cassette transport lasted longer than minidisc in terms of hours of operation before failure. But it was kinda neat while it lasted. Tascam, Yamaha and Sony even made Portastudios using the format…4-track, and even an 8-track offering from Yamaha.
 
sweetbeats said:
The other problem with minidisc was transport reliability. I’d wager any cassette transport lasted longer than minidisc in terms of hours of operation before failure. But it was kinda neat while it lasted. Tascam, Yamaha and Sony even made Portastudios using the format…4-track, and even an 8-track offering from Yamaha.
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I bought a S/H portable MD with a load of discs for my son and it lasted him pretty well. I think he lost it at Uni!
I have two mains units, a Sony and a GRUNDIG by crikey. They always worked fine. I must dig them out sometime as I always intended to use one as a quick start scratch recorder on my TV/HI FI, Tannoy/MOTU M4 rig...ONE of those jobs one will get to one day!
And to be fair to MD S? They had a long time to get cassette mechs' right (some never got there!) MD seemed to fade fast.

My local Sainsburys was selling blank MDs for very silly money back then. I don't think they knew what they were precisely so I would go in every week and buy a pack of five at a time. I have sheds of mini discs!

Dave.
 
I've only ever met one person in my entire existence that used minidiscs. I must admit, I always thought "What was the point ?"
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sweetbeats said:
The other problem with minidisc was transport reliability. I’d wager any cassette transport lasted longer than minidisc in terms of hours of operation before failure. But it was kinda neat while it lasted. Tascam, Yamaha and Sony even made Portastudios using the format…4-track, and even an 8-track offering from Yamaha.
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I have a still functioning Yamaha MD4 Portastudio.

Can’t sell it no, one wants it, so I use it. Wish it was an 8track, I’d probably use it more ;)
 
grimtraveller said:
I've only ever met one person in my entire existence that used minidiscs. I must admit, I always thought "What was the point ?"
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The "point" sir was that at the time the only easy to use recording medium for Joe Public was the cassette. This had and still has some short comings in both audio quality and reliability. Yes, the very best transports were very good as were the best cassettes but the latter especially need a bit of care in handling. Leave them scattered on the carpet or the passenger seat of the car the tape would become loose in the pack and tangle up in the player. This was a common problem with car front loaders. Recordable CD was yet to come and in any case you needed a computer for that.

Some said MD sound quality was compromised by the ATRAK compression but I did CD comparisons and really could not tell them apart (to be fair to cassette I also had a Denon dual loop capstan machine with micro-proc' tape optimization and that, with TDK SA and Dolby C was very nearly as good. An expensive setup however and hardly portable!)

Mdiscs are 'self protecting' from the ingress of dust even if you don't put them back in their sleeves. They are also beautifully compact and unlike cassette can record at half 'speed' in mono for speech logging purposes. They also had S/PDIF in and out allowing easy connection to sound cards. Later machines I understand allowed discs to be copied over as a "dat dump"?

My son used his to mix down tracks form his A3440 4 track and then bounce them back to tape with no loss of quality or noise build up (people might have slated ATRAK but MD was infinitely better quality than OR tape)


I firmly believe that MD had great potential to be developed further but "politics" killed it off.

Dave.
 
ecc83 said:
The "point" sir was that at the time the only easy to use recording medium for Joe Public was the cassette.......Recordable CD was yet to come and in any case you needed a computer for that.
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By the time I came across minidiscs, the recordable CD had appeared and ∴ I couldn't see the point of minidiscs. They were literally CD's baby sister to me.
The first CD recorder I bought was in 1998. I still have and use it !
 
grimtraveller said:
By the time I came across minidiscs, the recordable CD had appeared and ∴ I couldn't see the point of minidiscs. They were literally CD's baby sister to me.
The first CD recorder I bought was in 1998. I still have and use it !
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Fine but, CDs are big compared to MD, easily damaged and of course the first batch were 'once only record'. We had a 25 pack of the later CDRW and they were a total pain! You only had to LOOK at them hard and they would not work next time. Son used MDs over and over again.

Oh! And we used one machine as a D/A converter from a Delta 2496 card...can't do that with a CD recorder! (AFAIK)

If you were local friend I would lend you a machine and a dozen discs and you could give it a do!

Dave.
 
so-awesome said:
I grew up around this time and the reason was that minidiscs were freakin expensive as compared to cassettes.
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Well you say that but I was in at the start of the cassette when the only 'hi fi' ones were those by companies like Neal and a US company I cannot recall the name of. Good quality cassettes were not cheap either
Mds on the other hand gave you 80 minutes in one hit (yes there were C120s but only one hr per side and they were very thin and dodgy) You can record protect an MD or turn protection off as often as you liked. No effin' about with Silver fag paper! Plus the discs did not seem to wear out.

Well, bugger me! I've just found a Sony MD still sealed in its wrapper. Got sheds to use so won't break it open.

Dave.
 
ecc83 said:
Well you say that but I was in at the start of the cassette when the only 'hi fi' ones were those by companies like Neal and a US company I cannot recall the name of. Good quality cassettes were not cheap either
Mds on the other hand gave you 80 minutes in one hit (yes there were C120s but only one hr per side and they were very thin and dodgy) You can record protect an MD or turn protection off as often as you liked. No effin' about with Silver fag paper! Plus the discs did not seem to wear out.

Well, bugger me! I've just found a Sony MD still sealed in its wrapper. Got sheds to use so won't break it open.

Dave.
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You can use the minidiscs over and over and over with no signal degradation (unlike cassette)

I’ll use my Yamaha MD4 the same as a cassette 4 track portastudio.

When I’m done, I just transfer my work to the computer, erase the minidisc, and I’m ready for the next time.
 
ecc83 said:
Well you say that but I was in at the start of the cassette when the only 'hi fi' ones were those by companies like Neal and a US company I cannot recall the name of. Good quality cassettes were not cheap either
Mds on the other hand gave you 80 minutes in one hit (yes there were C120s but only one hr per side and they were very thin and dodgy) You can record protect an MD or turn protection off as often as you liked. No effin' about with Silver fag paper! Plus the discs did not seem to wear out.

Well, bugger me! I've just found a Sony MD still sealed in its wrapper. Got sheds to use so won't break it open.

Dave.
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True. I just know my own experience. Never used minidisc tbh. Now I know they are far superior. But ... just imagine being a teenager and going down to the electronics store and you look at prices, and you see: $15 for one minidisc. $10 for 6 cassettes. I'm sure those aren't real numbers and I'm totally misremembering things, but it was some similar experience to this. So I was like ... of course I'm buying cassettes ha ha
 
As a youngster with little money in the mid 70s, I found cassettes expensive.
If I could have afforded it, I'd have gone with MD, but they did not yet exist.
I was not even an early CD adopter, due to poverty.
 
Slouching Raymond said:
As a youngster with little money in the mid 70s, I found cassettes expensive.
If I could have afforded it, I'd have gone with MD, but they did not yet exist.
I was not even an early CD adopter, due to poverty.
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I was in my 30s in the 70s but, with a wife, 2 kids and a mortgage spending on obvious luxuries like cassettes was severely limited.; My first decent cassette machine was a Yamaha and that was purchased on the drip from my wife's Empire catalogue.

I only acquired a half decent computer for my 60th birthday and the MD machines a bit before that.

I also have a Philips DCC machine. I suspect that was developed to compete with MD? It didn't and died very quickly.

Dave.
 
I have 2 Tascam 246 4 tk machines in great working condition that I have fun with. Also a rare Tascam 225 syncaset deck.
Also have a Sony mini disk recorder. I really liked that format and wish it would’ve stayed around. I would mix from my Tascam 388 to the MD.
 
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You obviously had ones that didn;t work for you. I for one regret their passing. The sound quality thing was hyped up badly. None sounded bad, all sounded better than cassette, and the ATRAC system worked pretty well. I had a couple of HHB portadiscs and they were great, and for live sound playout and local radio, MD was so good. Track renumbering and titling being the really, really useful thing, plus editing to trim off beginnings and ends. Quality was close to CD, and better than mp3, which everyone seems to not find a problem now? I don;t know why purists hated it so much. The 1U Sony's were brilliant. The Big Tascams did a great job with big play buttons, and the amateurs all used the domestic Sonys and Tascams happily because they could do what nothing else at the time could. Qlab hadn't been invented, so MD was the goto medium. Reliability was very good until it suddenly wasn't and most folk just threw them away, rather than try to repair them. Alignment was preset and while you could tweak, they were never reliable.

As a medium for domestic audio it failed miserably, but the sales to pro users were substantial enough to give them a number of upgrades, new models and continuation. They just didn't catch on with domestic users, hence why the multitracks came out and did pretty well.

I stopped simply because the machine supply dried up, then I simply moved to computers, where we are now. When computers were not like they are now, MD was 100% viable, sounded great and nobody ever complained about sound quality. The pros outweighed the cons by a long way.
 

clamsterdamm,​



Clamsterdam m, despite your unfortunate prejudice against MD I would like to ask if you are located in UK? From your sobriquet I suspect not but if so I would like to ask if you are still servicing cassette machines?

I have two that have transport woes but I do not want to ship them abroad. It is enough hassle posting stuff to France now!

Dave.
 
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