Mini-disc Or Ipod?

[Dellmon]

I currently have both a personal mini-disc player and an iPod.

I have not used my mini-disc for a while and stumbled across it yesterday, having spent some quality time with it I find myself wanting a reason to use it over my iPod.

Can anyone give me one?

I have already ripped my cd collection into itunes and can store all of it on my iPod, without ever having to swap discs etc.

With mini-disc its going to be pretty much an album per disc, lots to carry around, need to buy blank disc etc.

You may be thinking why am I asking after that, but there is just something about mini-disc..something that pulls me to it.

If for example mini-disc had better sound quality than my iPod then that would be reason enough for me to switch..but as far as I know, it doesnt (im storing tracks on my iPod using the Apple Lossless codec).

If anyone can help me "convert" I would be very grateful

[ROMBUSTERS]

better battery life

[Fast Eddie]

Better sound quality? It doesn't have that 'lemming' factor either.

[aeriyn]

better battery life

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At the expense of a weaker headphone output. Also, hard drives eat a lot of power while optical-read drives don't.

Better sound quality?  It doesn't have that 'lemming' factor either.

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That's entirely subjective.

But I'll bite. The only MD units that I even consider to sound "as good" as the iPod 3G/4G/Mini are the Sharp Auvi units. Most of the newer Sony units are typical Sony "No-mid-fi: we're all bass and treble baby; we have no midrange!"

I'm the first to admit that the iPod has a clean, neutral sound. Some people consider it to be sterile; personally I just think it's a source that doesn't get in the way of the music. =P

And casing it up in one of the thousands of different types of cases made for the iPod, oh and ditch those white earbuds and the lemming factor is gone.

The IEMs that I want to get sometime in the near future are about the most godawful ugly things ever but man, do they sound sweet. =P

[Fast Eddie]

And yet he still feels drawn to his minidisc.

[Dellmon]

Hmm, seems like the iPod is winning at the moment.

The battery life on my mini-disc is indeed far better than my iPod, but like you say the iPod is a lot louder. My iPod would need charging every night if I used it daily.

I expected a flood of mini-disc votes with this being the forum that it is, maybe the fact that I havent is quite telling...

Thanks for your input so far

[aeriyn]

I try to be honest. I used MD as my primary portable audio for a good year and a half. I'm much happier with my iPod. Does it sound all that much better than my Sharp MD player did? Not really. But it's a hell of a lot easier to deal with. I like to call iPods "Portable Music for Dummies" because they really are that freaking simple. And even an ubertechy person like me really appreciates simplicity and minimalism in design.

And in my honest opinion, if you're not going to record, you don't need MiniDisc. dex will tell you this too. Chris and the other mods and most of this forum, however... they're more or less proponents of the format in of itself, and I am kind of on the outside. I still think that the collector's discs from Japan have an awful lot of cool factor, but every time I think of that I just remind myself of how much easier it is to get high-quality music on my iPod Mini.

[Fast Eddie]

I expected a flood of mini-disc votes with this being the forum that it is, maybe the fact that I havent is quite telling...

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Well you've had two out of three votes in favour of minidisc. The only vote for the Ipod is from the forums resident Ipod user.

I don't have an Ipod myself (or plan to get one) but my cousin bought one and it died after two months. So he lost his faith in it, especially when he had to return it online and found he had to tick a box out of several 'things that have gone wrong' to let them know what had gone wrong. Made him think that ipods tend to break down quite frequently.

Edited February 14, 2005 by Fast Eddie

[Dellmon]

Well you've had two out of three votes in favour of minidisc.  The only vote for the Ipod is from the forums resident Ipod user.

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Fair point

Not sure how I came to that conclusion

[Dellmon]

I don't have an Ipod myself (or plan to get one) but my cousin bought one and it died after two months.  So he lost his faith in it, especially when he had to return it online and found he had to tick a box out of several 'things that have gone wrong' to let them know what had gone wrong. Made him think that ipods tend to break down quite frequently.

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I cant complain with either format for reliability really, ive had my mini-disc for 2 years and my iPod for just over 1, both have been faultless.

[ROMBUSTERS]

anyone notice that this is a netMD vs iPod fight? lol what kind of matchup is that. netMD is years older than iPod, so of course iPod's going to have certain advantages. The HiMD vs iPod is a closer match.

-However for your MDlike i said (and i dont care where the power goes the fact remains) your MD's batterylife will more than likely *always* be better than an iPods.

-Also the removable media ensures that your dont loose any info in something like a random hard drive head-crash.

-both devices look great

-if your going to listen just to some music every now and then, iPod is probably your way to go. However if you do any travelling MD using easily found AAs or AAAs is a better option.

-Like you said you would have to recharge your iPod every night or so (obviously dependant on use). Why not alternate between the two? While one's charging use the other! Perfect harmony! lol

[Fast Eddie]

I like minidisc because it's proven. I've never had a disc die on me. I might at some point consider a HDD jukebox, but I'd always live in concern that one day it might just stop working.

I have Hi-MD right now, which is fine for my needs. 27 hours battery life on a single AA and 16-20 hours of music per disc.

[Michael1980]

Recording. Even if the person thinks he does not need, soon he may find it interesting as there a lot of good sources to record from and that expands the boundaries of music available to you.

[Christopher]

Yes, are we speaking of Hi-MD or NetMD? I can't recommend NetMD over iPod, but I can justify Hi-MD.

[Ug]

I like minidisc because it's proven. I've never had a disc die on me.  I might at some point consider a HDD jukebox, but I'd always live in concern that one day it might just stop working.

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I too, and i prefere use the Md whitout a pc

[aeriyn]

I can't recommend NetMD over iPod, but I can justify Hi-MD.

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Hahaha. The only MDs even comparable to the iPod (or the Rio Karma for that matter) in sound quality are, unfortunately, still the Auvi units made by Sharp, and they're mostly not even NetMD, but old-school no -computer-connection MDLP units.

[Christopher]

You're lucky I'm keen on you otherwise I'd change your graphical rank to Troll..

[D-EJ915]

I like to call iPods "Portable Music for Dummies" because they really are that freaking simple. And even an ubertechy person like me really appreciates simplicity and minimalism in design.

Actually, recording on an MD unit is a lot easier, you just hook it up and go into record mode...wow, with mp3 players you have to rip the songs, and then convert them...

so MD's more plug-n-play than mp3 players.

The question I tell people to ask themselves is: do you use your computer to store all of your music in the MP3 format? If so, buy an MP3 player. If not, MD is a good choice since it sounds great, is small, and has awesome battery life, not to mention is a heck of a lot cheaper to replace.

I myself only use NetMD for titling purposes (in which case it's really useful), but if I want some songs I'll burn a CD since I use my D-EJ2000 in the car, and I just record it to my MD unit and use them for portable use.

I don't know where I'm getting at...anyway, have fun!

[Dinko]

I might at some point consider a HDD jukebox, but I'd always live in concern that one day it might just stop working.

HDD players are highly overrated I think. The Sony NWHD1 has excellent battery life for an HDD player, but it's still short, and pretty annoying when you need to recharge it every two or three days.

HDD players are good if you go on travel: no need to bring a load of MDs with you. But then... as previously said, it's horrible if you go travelling with it: how do you recharge it in the middle of the forest? Just bring an AA battery for the MD player and you're all set. Even in the city, you'd almost need a spare iPod/HDD player in case your battery dies. When you could just enter any store and buy a couple of AA batteries.

I quickly came to grips with reality: I didn't even need LP4. 300 minutes of music was too much for the average day in the city.

20GB HDD players are overkill if you leave in the morning and come back in the evening. But then, given battery life, you don't have much choice but to use them like that. They're a pain to browse through, no matter how well organised. There's too much content for too small a screen.

Putting 20GB of music on it at a decent rate (say 128 or 132kbps) takes a long time. That's a few hundred CDs you need to spend hours ripping to your PC before transfering them to the HDD player in a couple of minutes.

If it breaks, it's over. Not only do I need to get a new player (even if it is a warranty replacement), I also need to spend at least a day filling it with music (unless I keep a back up 20GB of music on my PC, but I have better things to do with my hard drive than keep it as a back up for my portable music player).

On the other hand, if the MD player breaks, you still keep your music.

With the advent of HiMD, HDD players are even less attractive. 16 hours of good quality audio (132kbps on 1GB HiMD) & long battery life. I considered getting an iPod. Costco now has them for a very low price. But what's the point? I see very few advantages to iPods over HiMD (or even NetMD) players to justify buying one.

Edited February 15, 2005 by Dinko

[aeriyn]

I'm not a troll, Chris. I just tell it like it is!

HDD players are highly overrated I think. The Sony NWHD1 has excellent battery life for an HDD player, but it's still short, and pretty annoying when you need to recharge it every two or three days.

I don't find recharging my iPod Mini every other day to be overly annoying. Plug it in. It recharges. It's not rocket science.

HDD players are good if you go on travel: no need to bring a load of MDs with you. But then... as previously said, it's horrible if you go travelling with it: how do you recharge it in the middle of the forest? Just bring an AA battery for the MD player and you're all set. Even in the city, you'd almost need a spare iPod/HDD player in case your battery dies. When you could just enter any store and buy a couple of AA batteries.

I don't travel. But I do understand where you are coming from. Non-removable nonstandard cell types are not the best for true portability.

I quickly came to grips with reality: I didn't even need LP4. 300 minutes of music was too much for the average day in the city.

Agreed, although I can hardly call LP4 "music." It's more like "clipping and distortion with some words thrown in."

20GB HDD players are overkill if you leave in the morning and come back in the evening. But then, given battery life, you don't have much choice but to use them like that. They're a pain to browse through, no matter how well organised. There's too much content for too small a screen.

The strength of high-capacity HDD players is not in quantity but quality. Many 40 and 60GB player users use lossless formats such as FLAC and Apple Lossless, which are considerably larger than your average 128kbps crap MP3. Also, I find my iPod Mini to have near-painless navigation even containing the 32 albums it does at the moment.

I select... Music > Artist > Album > Track 1 and hit select. I can do it one handed, I can do it while driving and the screen is backlit and easy to read even at arm's length. I find this much more preferable to squinting at the tiny MD remote, or ignoring the screen altogether... "How many times do I have to hit Folder+ before I find the album I want to listen to...?"

Putting 20GB of music on it at a decent rate (say 128 or 132kbps) takes a long time. That's a few hundred CDs you need to spend hours ripping to your PC before transfering them to the HDD player in a couple of minutes.

Ripping CDs can take a while, but iTunes does it relatively painlessly. Pop CD in, click Import, go surf the net till it's done. Rinse and repeat.

And a 40GB iPod can be completely filled up in around 12-15 minutes. Hi-MD takes around 25 minutes per 1GB disc. Where's the advantage there?

If it breaks, it's over. Not only do I need to get a new player (even if it is a warranty replacement), I also need to spend at least a day filling it with music (unless I keep a back up 20GB of music on my PC, but I have better things to do with my hard drive than keep it as a back up for my portable music player).

On the other hand, if the MD player breaks, you still keep your music.

Er, why would you erase your PC's music library? I mean, seriously. Hard drives are cheap. You can get 80GB hard drives for fifty bucks. If you drop your MD player there's a chance it'll suffer an optical pickup block fault, which is as disastrous as a hard drive head crash. When it comes to data, even relatively unimportant data such as music that you already have CDs on, it helps to always have a backup.

With the advent of HiMD, HDD players are even less attractive. 16 hours of good quality audio (132kbps on 1GB HiMD) & long battery life.

"Good quality audio" is entirely subjective. I don't consider anything less than 192kbps MP3 to even be listenable. My normal bitrate is 224kbps AAC for portable and straight CDs at home through my home system (it's in my sig).

I considered getting an iPod. Costco now has them for a very low price. But what's the point? I see very few advantages to iPods over HiMD (or even NetMD) players to justify buying one.

If you think that you can deal with all of MD's failings and still enjoy the device, well then more power to you. But I don't like to recommend MD to newbies who do not care anything about recording, because MD is a pain in the ass to use. My six year old cousin, she is quite capable of putting the music she wants to listen to on my iPod Mini; I've watched her do it before. I'm twenty years old and trying to get SonicSludge to work once gave me insane fits of frustration.

Actually, recording on an MD unit is a lot easier, you just hook it up and go into record mode...wow, with mp3 players you have to rip the songs, and then convert them...

I'll have to agree with you there... old-school MD recording is pretty simple (synch-record rules! ) and a cheap DVD player with an S/PDIF optical output is all you need. The only problem is time. Even with ripping CDs factored in, it still takes a lot less time for me to put 30 albums on my Mini than it would for me to record 30 albums in real-time...

[me]

Ripping a CD with iTune couldn't be simpler.

You only need to click a single button. Plug in the iPod and it even copies the music automatically if you want it to.

That's like plugging in the lead from your optical out to your MD's optical in and not doing anything else.

If you're a perfectionist, you can use something like www.exactaudiocopy.de and have it rip a CD. This requires maybe 3 clicks. Once on FreeDB to get the CD information. Twice to rip it to compressed audio, and thrice to tell EAC where to save the file.

Also Aeriyn the strength of the high capacity HDD player is both quality and quantity. You can have a choice of 5000 high quality songs. Since you can either have "all my songs" or "a select portion that i'm likely to listen to", having them all there is the easiest. The second option requires organisation skills that sonicstage didn't have. Itunes is better.

This makes me wonder if second generation HiMD might do something like iTunes. Insert HiMD disc A, sonic stage recognises as "playlist A" and auto syncs from "playlist A" songs which could be the top 250 most listened to songs. Insert another disc for the songs you imported in the last 3 days. A third disc for essentials, which have more than X number of plays on them.

If HiMD could do that..

Oh, and you need to know that this elusive sound quality business has more than one aim. The Kenwood MD i'm trying to sell makes me smile when I listen. Fun sound. My ipod required isolating earbuds to hear properly. What's the point of that? I got a nicer sound from b00sted bass than from something audiophile.

Audiophile is for home.

Edited February 16, 2005 by me

[aeriyn]

Bottom line:

If it sounds good, it is good.

[Michael1980]

My only gripe with iTunes it is it's bad mp3 encoder. If it had lame, I would have never used EAC as iTunes' error correcting seems good enough.

[kappa22]

Just thought I'd drop my two cents in here somewhere.

Sound quality: My friend got an iPod Mini for his birthday about a month ago. Well, I decided to compare sound on the two, so I first hooked the iPod up to my TriPort headphones. The verdict? Nothing spectacular (this was music transferred using the lossless Apple codec). Sounded like every other mp3 player I've ever heard. Next, I hooked up to my "outdated" MZ-N10 (yes, I still use NetMD) and let 'er rip. And my suspicions were confirmed: mp3 players still sound like crap next to MD (and I typically transfer in LP2). Actually, the iPod sounded worse than a Creative Zen Extra 60GB that I had also tested. If you actually strap on some good headphones, it's easy to tell who has the edge in qualtiy.

And then of course, the N10 is magnesium, has survived a drop from my second-story dorm room to the sidewalk with not but a single scratch, looks better, has an internal battery worth 22 hours plus a single AA expansion case for another 20+ hours, has optical and mic/line inputs, has an EQ, is half the size of an iPod, has a remote, and cost me all of $170

Apple, you may have drawn half the population into your little world, but you have yet to impress me with anything...

Here's to MD!!!!!

Edited February 17, 2005 by kappa22

[Dellmon]

This really has been a feirce battle lol.

I find every day I come away thinking something different, yesterday I started playing with my minidisc, this morning ive put my iPod on charge

Now after reading the last post, im getting all starry eyed over minidisc again lol!

Ive not done much A-B testing myself, all I have done is played my portable minidisc and ipod through my hifi, from that, I would say the iPod has a fuller mid range (although the only minidisc I had to hand was recorded at LP2) but the minidisc had fuller bass, something my home hifi as always been slightly lacking.

It would be interesting to hear a hifi minidisc deck, rather than a portable.

There was some interesting reading on this very site regarding minidisc SQ and the fact that it would be possible for it to surpass CD...

Does anyone think minidisc is a viable alternative to CD for a high end home hifi?

[me]

If you actually strap on some good headphones, it's easy to tell who has the edge in qualtiy.

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Only too true

[aeriyn]

kappa22, now that I think about it, I'm actually not surprised the N10 sounded better to you, for two reasons. One, you're probably not the type who owns expensive audiophile equipment and the sort of audiophilesque "neutral" coloration of the iPod is quite a shock when compared to typical Japanese/Sony low-end products' "no-mid-fi; all bass and treble." Two, the little tiny and crappy headphone amp on the N10 was probably running out of headroom due to its miniscule supply voltage and causing soft clipping in a way that made the music sound "punchier" by smearing the midbass.

[aeriyn]

Does anyone think minidisc is a viable alternative to CD for a high end home hifi?

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No. Garbage in, garbage out. You can have the best amp, preamp, speakers and digital player in the world, but if you're feeding it distorted lossy source material, it's not going to sound very good.

[kappa22]

kappa22, now that I think about it, I'm actually not surprised the N10 sounded better to you, for two reasons. One, you're probably not the type who owns expensive audiophile equipment and the sort of audiophilesque "neutral" coloration of the iPod is quite a shock when compared to typical Japanese/Sony low-end products' "no-mid-fi; all bass and treble."

You know, Aeriyn, you're probably right; your gross generalization fits me perfectly. I could really care less about sound quality, which is part of the reason I own two pairs of Event TR8-N's, some TriPorts, v6's, and HD280's. With all the time I spend on live recording and A/V mastering contracts, how could I possibly find time to care about how my music sounds?

Two, the little tiny and crappy headphone amp on the N10 was probably running out of headroom due to its miniscule supply voltage and causing soft clipping in a way that made the music sound "punchier" by smearing the midbass.

If you have a decent pair of headphones (or better yet, an amazing pair) that can actually provide full sound at moderate volumes, keep the volume in the mid range, actually make use of the EQ, and play your music HOW YOU WANT TO. Not everyone listens to music the way you think they should, so you really can't lay judgement here. It's true that, with $20 headphones, volume at 80%, and no adjustments, the n-10 will sound quite muddy. However, every side-by-side comparison on high quality equipment that I've ever seen has repeatedly demonstrated that MD CONTINUES to sound better than HDD or flash players no matter how you slice it. And if you want the best quality, direct recording from CD -> optical -> SP recording mode (or even just direct CD rip -> SP), and you can forget even trying to compare.

[me]

Pick your colour.

I find that an ipod sounds as good as an MD deck. Although my MD deck probably wasn't the best soundwise (kinda old, MDS-PC1).

At the time I owned DT880 by Beyerdynamic. Now i've got MDR-SA1000.

[aeriyn]

I find that an ipod sounds as good as an MD deck. Although my MD deck probably wasn't the best soundwise (kinda old, MDS-PC1).

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Actually, me, the PC1 is one of the best sounding MD decks available short of the ES models. It's got the guts of a JB920 in it.

And regarding the other comment, fine, I give up. I'm leaving this board. Sorry Chris, but I can't deal with people who want to have their cake and eat it too. You can't handle the heat, stay out of the kitchen. If you don't want to hear me say the iPod is better than something else, don't say something else is better than it.

[me]

Actually, me, the PC1 is one of the best sounding MD decks available short of the ES models. It's got the guts of a JB920 in it.

And regarding the other comment, fine, I give up. I'm leaving this board. Sorry Chris, but I can't deal with people who want to have their cake and eat it too. You can't handle the heat, stay out of the kitchen. If you don't want to hear me say the iPod is better than something else, don't say something else is better than it.

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Yeah, I know that but it's got the recording qualities of ATRAC 4.5, which would have been the highest ATRAC version I ever used.

I still think it's nuts to rule out all HDD players. Of course the HD3 etc sound exactly the same as MD.

[Christopher]

This thread is done. Grow up - how old are you? We're looking for constructive and posts that are helpful in nature [and also in context], not fires.