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Mini Disc....again.

cj66

pfm Member
I couldn't find the recent thread where someone said that MD units were unreliable and I reposted that I personally never had any problems.

I've also mentioned that of the many units I had only one portable remained, at the bottom of a dark box or drawer.

Today, I encountered said machine, a Sony MZ-R55 that was a tad grubby from storage, with a disc still inside. I didn't bother try the rechargeable battery and just went for the 2xAA add-on pod...

Instant success after ?years of inactivity. Ya see, reliable! :p
It has earned a clean up and the hooking out of the MD collection :D

I think I have the in-line remote stuffed in another place...

7Rtx7u5.jpg
 
I couldn't find the recent thread where someone said that MD units were unreliable and I reposted that I personally never had any problems.

I've also mentioned that of the many units I had only one portable remained, at the bottom of a dark box or drawer.

Today, I encountered said machine, a Sony MZ-R55 that was a tad grubby from storage, with a disc still inside. I didn't bother try the rechargeable battery and just went for the 2xAA add-on pod...

Instant success after ?years of inactivity. Ya see, reliable! :p
It has earned a clean up and the hooking out of the MD collection :D

I think I have the in-line remote stuffed in another place...

7Rtx7u5.jpg
I had a dark blue one of those.Really liked it.Used to record from radio etc. Sold it for a good price.
 
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In the age of podcasts and Spotify downloads I still use mine for archived radio. Its great.
There's a lot of now deceased disc jockeys lurking in my loft.
 
Yes, I have a couple of them, Both Sony, never missed a beat and battery life is great. Mine don’t have a long play or radio but we always take it along with us on holiday and a real nifty set of foldable Sony speakers. Shame they disappeared off the market.
 
I still have quite a few of them and 100's of discs . I think it was the colours of the discs that I liked. I used to have a walkman pro cassette ( mentioned on another thread here ) got rid of that quick. I think my favourite these days is the Sony MZ-B10. Takes 2 AA batteries, built in mic, MDLP and the speaker as good as many small trannies, optical in. A mini-deck in other words. When I got mine cost me just £50 or so now I see Ebay sellers offten want £200 or so ( good luck to that!)
73-100-609-01.jpg
 
^^^^^^^
Never met that one before!

I found the remote...

msJLyAV.jpg


Hooked out some easy grab discs...

OHQxd55.jpg


Oh, I also found the rechargeable batteries and PSU. The newer high capacity special dodaa battery had topped itself and bled out, the original Sony battery is still good, charged up and running!
 
They were great, weren't they? IMO, Sony did a really good job with ATRAC - far better than MP3, to my ears. I owned near-enough 100 discs, and sold some at a profit, as they were pretty and unusual ones that I imported from Japan when the Yen was at tragic (for the Japanese buyer) levels.

I still own one portable, but the battery will be long dead after more than 10 years in storage.

The thing I liked most was the form factor of the disc - just the right size to fit in your hand. I know you can fit x times the amount on a micro-SD card, but they are just a bit too fiddly...
 
I had a nice Sony portable one but stupidly killed it by trying to edit out too many small spaces of silence after hurriedly recording a bunch of LPs when briefly back in the UK.

Think I must've then binned it and left the minidiscs with family in Thailand.
 
The one thing I really wanted was an MD headunit to go in my camper van. IIRC they were only sold in the UK for a very short time, and for a few months they were incredibly cheap, being cleared because of little demand. I prevaricated, and by the time I had decided, all the cheap ones had gone...
 
My dad still have a MD player at home, I think a Pioneer. I remember transferring CD I rented on MD. He used it for a couple of years until he went back to CD. I really liked it too

I was recently looking at the portable Sony rh1/nh1 but they sell for ridiculous prices on ebay, like 300-400gbp. Doesn't make much sense to me
 
It was me questioning reliability. :D
Maybe the Walkman portable types were reliable. The web is littered with questions about Sony full size players not reading disks and failing to eject.

If someone has a Tascam 350 not being used and working - I'm interested. They are either very cheap on ebay (completely untested or parts) or quite expensive for old technology
 
I gave away about 600 minidisks along with my Sony portable and my Sony CD/MD stereo all in one unit.

The MD player was really incredible at the time. Travelled round the world with me when I was in the merchant navy.P at security used to ask what it was. In Canada they seemed concerned it might have animal based pornography stored on it.
 
The web is littered with questions about Sony full size players not reading disks and failing to eject.

That was a relatively early problem that wasn't really anything to do with the advanced technology behind MD. It was just a fault in the mechanics of the eject function. I had a Sony 510 with the fault and they replaced it with a 530 under warranty - which lasted for years.
 
I still have one of those faulty 510 players. It's a badly adjusted mechanism. Some say there is a cure, but it seems very involved. Not tried it as I might sell it spares or repair.

On my earlier 500 model which still works,
if I try transferring CD to Minidisc digitally, I get copy forbidden.
No problem recording Internet radio or Spotify by digital cable though.
Strange, as I do actually own the cds.
 
I had the Mz-e2 which was one of the first players. Battery life would only last one or two discs, but really nice bit of kit back in 1994
 
if I try transferring CD to Minidisc digitally, I get copy forbidden.

This is going back a few years, but IIRC you need an SCMS stripper.

I've actually got one here that I made 20-odd years ago, but no way of testing it, as I no longer have a recorder.
 


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