I had a couple of cassette Walkman type players years ago. My first cassette was a Ross. I think it cost me about $20. Looked just like this:
Sound quality was crappy but we didn't care. I was driving a van around delivering stuff, had a 12" speaker in a box on the floor plugged into the headphone jack, and a rechargeable NiCad batteries that I charged every night. I could listen to music I wanted. I sure wouldn't do that today, but hey, it was around 1970. It beat the crap out of an AM radio with a 5x7 speaker in the dash. Every once in a while, it would chew a tape up and we would have to make a new tape, or just listen to the old one with the accordion creases in the middle of a song. It was only a 5 or 10 seconds of a 45minute side.
I don't think the MD player gave much of an advantage over the portable CD players. Besides, most people already had CD players in their stereos, and their favorite albums on CD. Also blank Minidiscs weren't especially cheap as I recall.
I've got two portable CD players upstairs that ran on batteries. I could put it on my desk at work and plug earbuds in to listen to music. Then I got my RCA Lyra which played MP3/WMA files, was the size of a pack of cigarettes and could hold 5 or 6 albums on 4 or 8GB Flash Cards. Sound was OK but it was really portable, especially when you were in a hotel or on a plane. I still have a little Coby MP3 player with 16GB and a bunch of albums on it. I use it when I'm cutting grass.
Today I have JBL BlueTooth earbuds that I can use with my phone for casual listening and the sound is better than any of those. Why would I want to go backwards, either in sound quality or convenience?
I strongly suspect it was a combination of the music industry not wanting a copying system even better than cassette* and Sony/Philips who were heavily committed to CD which, at the time was not recordable.
*Who here remembers the "Copy code" debacle?
Dave.
Hey, you can't hear that 3840Hz notch in the frequency response, even if it is right in the middle of things!
The copy protection wars were a really big deal. Then Napster was created and people basically gave the record companies the finger. That genie has never been put back in the bottle.