OFFICIAL: Minidisc Dead In Australia

[plr]

It was only last year that analogue studio recording tape died (Quantagy, I believe it was, was the final manufacturer of tape. Many people still mourn. I grew up with digital but I understand thier grief. The bassy warmth of analogue shall be forever missed).

They are up and running again ...

-mike

[CrackBone]

hmm, i think the death of technology is also because of not enough of promoting of the units.

a bit offtop:

the same i can say about NW-HD series...i would buy one for myself - BUT WHERE DA HELL CAN I BUY IT IN CANADA?

gosh, why does sony loose a big chunk of north america to ipod? i donno..

can anybody ask sony rep`s for info on NW-HD series in canada? and why they are not selling those up in here?

[Yizgarnnoff]

OMG, I just took a look at TeamDigital's website ( my favourite dealer, I have to admit ), I don't find any reference to MD anymore.....

No more MD unit, no more media ( MD or Hi-MD ).

Only MP3 players...

It's a f****** nightmare !!!!!!

[chuckempire]

I'm glad I have my NH700 and glad I have 10 Hi-MD disc from when they were cheap at JB Hifi.

Well, as soon as I have the means I think I'll be picking up an NWHD5, I'm sick of losing music across too many discs and sick of converting mp3 to oma. That way I can save my NH700 for making recordings too!

I wonder if Sony will ever have a recording function on an HD player? Doesn't seem that far fetched to me...

[dispher]

i just don't get it.....why is sony doing this to us?

first, they create MINDBLOWING technology that only can be appreciated by true technology / audio video enthusiasts

second, they just kill it because they don't get enough money from it.....it's really sad cuz when you buy these kind of electronics you feel "special" in a way.... that make you a fan of the technology / company who is behind it....then they betray you in cold blood ....... it's like saying: sorry, but we REALLY don't care if you "LOVE" this technology...we REALLY don't care if you will be a loyal customer & finaly, we REALLY don't care if this thing has affected your life / work style in anyway!

DAMN IT! everyone i know....everyone who asks me "what i should buy if i want a hi-quality audio recording / playing device, i quickly reply: go for sony MDs...there are THE BEST & just show them what can i do with my MZ-NH1 & they are 100% floored.....period!

i really hope they find a way to get a grip of this before i (as a customer) start having second thoughts about moving to another A/V electronics company...& i can swear that i won't be the only one that dose that cuz of this...

peace

[anont]

Too bad to hear about this, if completely expected. I think the MDs problem is that while it's a very good solution for making easy high-quality field/concert recordings, that's too much a niche market.

On the other hand, it's not like we have to throw away our MDs if the product gets cancelled. If the product does get cancelled worldwide, it might even be worth getting a backup unit. Some of the solid-state recorders seem really cool (and probably have better audio quality than MD) but are more expensive and won't fit in your pocket. If anybody knows of a solid-state recorder alternative, perhap it's worth bringing up

[hobgoblin]

thing is that they could easy licence the tech away and let someone else keep the tech rolling.

like say that other company that was making md players.

thing is that the hi-md system is one of the most fexible systems out there with its cheap media with relative high storage (i still think of 1GB storage as high, atleast when its one a media of that size and at that cost).

they should have pushed it harder as a computer product rather then a audiophile product.

personaly im not into doing field recordings but the idea of having a unit that i can play music on at one moment and then plug it into a computer and use it as a storage unit the next, and with virtualy unlimited storage (just bring more discs) at that, and i would say its a killer.

problem is that they killed it with allmost no commersials, late mp3 support and draconian drm to say the least.

hmm, anyone know what happend to that buffalo player?

[garcou]

Now, it's no time for crying but to go ahead.

hi-md with SS 3.2 uploading features is good enough for me. (if Connect could add wma (lossless especilly) support it will be perfect)

I 've decided today to buy an onkyo MD-105 hi-md deck from Audiocube for 337€.

I can live with myMZ RH1O and my girlfriend MZ dh10P. But I need a hi-md car unit: please kenwood, jvc,... SONY???!!!

We have to continue promote HiMD qualities in direction of our friends, family, etc.. If they don't find MD in stores, we can import it for them from japan. Of course, this way we pay shippin cost instead of Sony..damned!

[Deanage]

I received some GOOD news.

I visited Sony Central in Adelaide and I asked them about the current MD situation. They said, and I quote, "Sony is scaling back MD operations; however, walkmans will still be available and blank media will definitely be available."

So there won't be as many walkmans (meh), and you will still be able to buy Hi-MD's. Yay!

If anybody knows of a solid-state recorder alternative, perhap it's worth bringing up

Last time I looked at "portable" SSR's I found one called a NAGRA V. You use standard PC hard drives (it's portable in that it comes with a bag portable), has a ton of inputs & meters and id meant to be really, really good. Last time I checked it cost $10,000...

[tekdroid]

First I'm surprised they'd kill it completely like this in Australia. I always thought bringing in only 1 or 2 portables would be Sony's move. Probably not impossible for them to reverse their decision next year, too - as new hardware comes out and they have finished getting rid of the current crop at rock-bottom prices

problem is that they killed it with allmost no commersials, late mp3 support and draconian drm to say the least.

You said it. Tho they had commercials in the past that I remember (I rarely watch tv now), but I think the very late native mp3 support (like it or not the masses demanded it (and got it) for years in other products, even within the same company) and ultra-restrictive DRM - even on your OWN recordings until recently (imagine those that lost all confidence in the product when losing their OWN stuff due to Sony's stupidity + bugs), coupled with buggy and unfriendly software killed all chance completely.

This is the masses telling Sony it's not on and we shouldn't be lamenting their decision; Sony deserve what they got. Sony was trying to tell the market what they needed instead of the other way around. Ease-of-use suffered bigtime and was replaced with user frustration.

I think it could all have been prevented, though. Technically, if done right, there's no reason why MiniDisc couldn't be so much more popular than it is, advertising or not. To the average Joe, tho, these days - as far as playback is concerned - it's hard for him not to be swayed by the (really) tiny flash portables on display everywhere and the small HD portables holding lots of storage. Without getting into technical differences and the finer points of pros and cons, Joe is hooked.

Many things didn't inspire confidence or word-of-mouth recommendations with MiniDisc leading to this, so should we be that surprised? Probably not.

Recent talk of trashed discs and Hi-MD (un)reliability, coupled with possibly declining build quality don't exactly inspire confidence, either (ignoring several other issues that have cropped up, like mp3 frequency response differences versus ATRAC, feature omissions on models, etc).

It's a good time for Sony to get things right with Generation 3, I think - and just erase all previous bad vibes. But given these times of restructuring, who knows what other markets will get the (temporary?) axe?

[Deanage]

coupled with buggy and unfriendly software killed all chance completely.

My friend just bought a Creative Zen Touch. Using the software (Creative Mediasource) was an absolute pleasure. 3 step copying and it NEVER crashes. Sony could learn a lot from the king of sound cards.

Recent talk of trashed discs and Hi-MD (un)reliability

I'd have to disagree with "MD's are unreliable". One of my discs is so screwed you can pull back the protective "door" and touch the disc. Now the disc has all sorts of gunk on it but it still works. If you want unreliability, buy an iPod. I can't tell you how many stories (many verified) there are of dodgy Pods. Dead On Arrival shouldn't really inspre consumer confidence but many of these "victims" went through the 'return, wait, get screwed around, wait some more' procedure just to get a working iPod. Duh!

[Dinko]

Sony was trying to tell the market what they needed instead of the other way around.

Well...

I've never subscribed to the "market should lead development" doctrine. For one thing, the market is driven by the masses, and the masses tend to be stupid (due to ignorance, itself a result of not caring about what they're buying and the effect of some advertisements).

The masses resulted in us using VHS over Betamax for many years. What do you prefer? Better picture, better sound and smaller size, or less good picture, less good sound and a huge cartridge you need both hands to handle. The masses eat junk food, then we complain about heart disease to our doctors.

Put differently, did the masses ask for an iPod? Everyone was happy with CDRs. What was Apple thinking about? What were Sony and Philips thinking when they developed the CD? Everyone was happy with 8-tracks and LPs. Who needed shiny frisbees, right?

If you let the masses dictate the market, we'll never get any new R&D.

Now I'm not saying that you should do what Sony does: completely ignore its customers. But at some point, I'm pretty sure that people and companies who devote part of their lives to developing new gizmos know better than the masses. My position is that once you develop a good product, you should educate the masses about its advantages and then let the masses use their voting might. Something Sony is completely incompetent at. They develop fantastic gadgets and then hope that somehow, with no advertising, no marketing campaign at all, the products will magically catch on with the masses who have no idea that the product exists, and if they do, they're more intimidated than interested.

A week after the Nano hit stores, TV commercials began appearing on Canadian channels. It's featured in newspaper ads, and Apple dealers are running iPod ads in the public transit system in Montreal. I have never seen a print, TV or public transit advertisement for the Network Walkman products. Never. The average person does not check SonyStyle website once a week to see what else is new. But Sony doesn't seem to know that.

Educate the market before letting the market decide, but certainly don't let the market dictate your whole strategy otherwise we'll be stuck with no progress forever.

[tekdroid]

Well...

I've never subscribed to the "market should lead development" doctrine. For one thing, the market is driven by the masses, and the masses tend to be stupid (due to ignorance, itself a result of not caring about what they're buying and the effect of some advertisements).

Completely agree with you. With food as well The masses don't KNOW what they want, overall. (a lot of [bad] habits start as children, too - just see the commercials during kids tv).

But I stated that Sony was trying to tell us what we need in the context of ease-of-use. Sorry if I didn't make that clear. The masses ALWAYS want ease-of-use and basic flexibility, but Sony was telling them "no, we think DRM is for you". No, we think re-converting MP3s is for you. And now, "we think making mp3s sound different is for you". Hah. Making things a pain when they don't need to be. I know the frequency response thing is subject to argument, but I for one am very cynical of their intentions on that one.

The thing is, even with an effective advertising campaign for MiniDisc, the product as it was (highly restrictive and not-as-friendly-as-it-could-be to the recordist (or the casual listener), would have been pretty ineffectual, so I don't blame them for not pushing it. Of course now the market has transformed completely, with or without Sony's involvement - and this news pretty much speaks for itself. If the portable market wasn't changing like it was, chances are they could have gotten away with all their grand plans, too - and we'd have no real choice in the matter.

So I'm just glad it took outsiders to make them wake up. It's very easy to talk about this after the fact, but Sony had a LOT of time to get it right, but only gave the market crumbs. Steadily improving, but crumbs. They had feedback and they had heaps of it. They didn't take action fast enough to shake off perceptions, or create new (positive) ones.

I'd have to disagree with "MD's are unreliable". One of my discs is so screwed you can pull back the protective "door" and touch the disc. Now the disc has all sorts of gunk on it but it still works.

Is that Hi-MD or regular MD? Recently enough talk on this forum of recent models going south to be a concern (seems to be hardware-related making discs seem faulty). Gappy playback, inability to pull stuff off discs (both data & audio), etc. Seems to be a growing concern. Could be just a very minor percentage tho, but I suspect it's a large enough problem to need 'fixing' in the next generation, along with the firmware bugs (some of which could have been prevented with the most basic quality control measures in place).

[Sparky191]

.... Recently enough talk on this forum of recent models going south to be a concern (seems to be hardware-related making discs seem faulty). Gappy playback, inability to pull stuff off discs (both data & audio), etc. Seems to be a growing concern. Could be just a very minor percentage tho, but I suspect it's a large enough problem to need 'fixing' in the next generation, along with the firmware bugs (some of which could have been prevented with the most basic quality control measures in place).

I dunno I think the HIMD were the best (least troublesome) of all the MD produced.

[hobgoblin]

yes ease-of-use and flexibility is king.

for the (often) ignorant user the ease-of-use is vital. even a one sheet foldout is often to much for them when it comes to manuals.

for the power user flexibility is king. you want the ability to use and abuse the equipment you have bought as you feel like. these are the kind of people that fix stuff themselfs when its broken and allmost never return something unless its DOA.

question is, can you combine both in the same package?

right now im not sure.

thing is that often the stuff that attract power users may well make it "blow up" in the hands of joe.

allso, joe often have a bad habbit of trying to pretend to be smarter then he is by using the power user features without knowing (or wanting to know) how said feature works. these are the kind of people that give mediaphiles and similar a often bad name.

the have this bad habbit of sounding like some used car salesperson that dont know squat about what they are talking about

most likely the best way of merging these two user personalitys are to lock down the power features under a menu option that you will only find by either playing around deep in the menus or looking in some deep section of the manual

[hobgoblin]

wanted to add some stuff about ease-of-use issues killing ideas that was good on paper.

betamax:

from my understanding you had to flip the tape over in mid viewing.

laserdisc:

rember those big LP sized cds that contained movies? not only where they big and bulky, but you had to physicaly turn them over to watch the other half of the movie.

see? ease-of-use can be vital.

so lets look at current tech:

cd:

it killed the cassete tape on two vital areas. 1, you dont have to rewind. 2, you can jump to any song you want instantly. this makes collection cds much more usable then collection tapes.

dvd:

same as above. you dont have to rewind, you can jump to any scene that you want to see, and its about the size of a cd you can fit 3-4 dvds in full covers on the same space as one vhs! still tho, they should not have given the dvd makers the ability to put in non-skipable commersials (but thats kinda besides the point)

so lets look at the hi-md...

thing is realy that the only killer negative thing against that i can find on the ease of use (outside of the drm stuff, but thats a implementation, not a weakness of the base tech) is that you have to swap discs ever so often. thing is tho that some may see this as a blessing rather then a curse, but for people that have gotten used to having their entire music collection sorted, with allmost analretentive (sp?) id tags and sorted into all kinds of automatic play lists, the hi-md is archaic.

still, i cant stop wonder what could happen if sony started to play on the hi-mds ability to be a storage unit as well as a music player. yes you can do this with a hdd baed or flash based player, but let me finish

first of all, the ability to fill a whole disc with songs and another with data, or for that matter mix it up is very flexible. a hdd unit, while having larger storage in a single unit, have a upper limit. you have to allways juggle between how much music and how much data you want on it. a flash unit can have the same fexiblity as a hi-md player by using removable flash cards. but there is one small "problem" there, for the price of one 1GB card you can grab atleast 1 box of 10 1GB hi-md disc

problem is tho that all this plays to the power users and their want of flexiblity. so the hi-md is basicly a power users tool. and sadly the number of power users are often 1/10 if not 1/100 of the total market. and often a non-drmd hdd player (like say a iriver or iaudio) can be flexible enough for the power user most of the time.

so it makes sense that sony is dropping it. its basicly to low volume for a company their size.

i just hope that say buffalo or other companys are still able to licence the tech and produce new units.hopefully dropping the DRM in the prosess.

[Dinko]

tekdroid, I see what you mean now.

[anont]

A quick look around at solid-state recorders yields the Edirol R-1, which seems like it would be excellent for recording quality (better than an MD), but I wish was just a little smaller and cheaper - it's about 60% bigger and twice as expensive as a Hi-MD, before getting the CF card. Maybe I'll wait for the Edirol R-2. Portable multi-track machines are getting better and better, check out the Mini Pandora Recorder. But in the end I prefer my Hi-MD 2nd generation to either.

As for playing music - MD disks are very big (bigger than a iPod Nano) and only hold a gig and transfer with computers at a speed much, much slower than solid state or HD. It seems very off to say consumers are stupid for preferring other music solutions. There really is no reason to prefer MD aside from technology fetishim (yes I realize this is a board for technology fetishism). As far as storage goes - MDs are TERRIBLE at it. It's a nifty little extra to the MD, but you wouldn't want to use it more than occasionally. I don't see any reason to prefer the MD for these purposes.

[jadeclaw]

betamax:

from my understanding you had to flip the tape over in mid viewing.

Actually, no. That was Video2000. Betamax is used like VHS - Record, Rewind, Playback.

Video2000 was the Flip-It. But it was 4 hours per side, giving you 8 hours per cassette on a quality well above VHS.

But the real reason, why VHS finally won, was the movie rental market.

[mangizmo]

wanted to add some stuff about ease-of-use issues killing ideas that was good on paper.

thing is realy that the only killer negative thing against that i can find on the ease of use (outside of the drm stuff, but thats a implementation, not a weakness of the base tech) is that you have to swap discs ever so often. thing is tho that some may see this as a blessing rather then a curse, but for people that have gotten used to having their entire music collection sorted, with allmost analretentive (sp?) id tags and sorted into all kinds of automatic play lists, the hi-md is archaic.

Good point...I have never seen that swapping a disc was a negative...I actually really like to be able to keep the discs seperate...and 1GB seemed a great size to me....we use Hi MD for speech...lectures, and audiobooks.....people have no trouble with having a hard copy of something which can be filed away or posted in the mail.....this may only have been a problem pre Hi-MD when minidisc capacity was much smaller...but it wasnt a major weakness....I blame poor marketing and DRM...the minidisc was surely a product which really deserved and should have taken the world by storm.....SONY YOU BLEW IT !!!!

[mmilovan]

If anyone from SONY ever spent his time reading to our disscussions, I believe, MD and HiMD format will last much longer...

Edited September 26, 2005 by mmilovan

[garcou]

totally agree with you manqismo

[tommypeters]

Actually, no. That was Video2000. Betamax is used like VHS - Record, Rewind, Playback.

Video2000 was the Flip-It. But it was 4 hours per side, giving you 8 hours per cassette on a quality well above VHS.

But the real reason, why VHS finally won, was the movie rental market.

Yes, the Video2000 cassettes were really "long" (while VHS were mostly 120min) but they made them unnecessary expensive so there was no real advantage to 8h cassettes (just more wind/rewind)

Video2000 had the best picture,

Betamax had the best sound,

VHS had the prerecorded XXX movies.

VHS won.

[betamaxDATminidisc]

Yes, the Video2000 cassettes were really "long" (while VHS were mostly 120min) but they made them unnecessary expensive so there was no real advantage to 8h cassettes (just more wind/rewind)

Video2000 had the best picture,

Betamax had the best sound,

VHS had the prerecorded XXX movies.

VHS won.

Yes, but one videocassette Video2000 was "plus long" with XL of Philips or LP of Grundig mode, total 16h 8hx2 for side of VCC480, also it existed very extremely rare videocassette Video 2000 brand PDM VCC540 18h!

Video 2000 and Betamax had best picture and sound.

Best picture search and fast/slow motion (always picture colour and without noise) are Video 2000.

Also VHS had software XXX movie and many piracy.

For Hobglobin: CD? Remembed mysterious DDCD-R and DDCD-RW (CD dual-layer for data only 1.3GB)?

To after....

[Christopher]

This topic is becoming redundant, let's continue here:

http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=12318