[HN Gopher] Sony DD-1EX Electronic Book Player
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Sony DD-1EX Electronic Book Player
Author : mattowen_uk
Score : 28 points
Date : 2021-02-22 14:11 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (collections.vam.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (collections.vam.ac.uk)
| PostOnce wrote:
| more pics and info https://retrostuff.org/2019/05/22/sony-dd-1ex-
| data-discman-r...
| HardwareLust wrote:
| Techmoan did a video on these, pretty interesting:
|
| https://youtu.be/MXXiRJAKC4w
|
| I wanted one of these so bad back in the day. Never had the cash
| though unfortunately.
| mechagodzilla wrote:
| It's an interesting observation that there wasn't really a
| viable market for an ebook device with large-capacity,
| expensive write-only media - it's not that publishers didn't
| want to sell e-books, or that readers didn't want a library-on-
| a-CD, but that there was no good way to sell individual books
| since customers couldn't burn their own CDs, and didn't want to
| carry 50 CDs with them.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It's an interesting observation that there wasn't really a
| viable market for an ebook device with large-capacity,
| expensive write-only media
|
| Or even, perhaps more relevantly, with _read-only_ media.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Encarta could have been the killer app.
| smcleod wrote:
| Ah, my favourite Youtube channel - highly recommend TechMoan!
| giantrobot wrote:
| I've got a couple of these bad boys in my retro tech collection.
| I've only got a couple "books" and fewer in English. The books
| are much harder to find than working players, at least in the US.
|
| If you're thinking of getting one I don't recommend it. Finding a
| properly working model is non-trivial and once you do finding
| content is harder. At the end of the day you've got a hard to use
| dictionary.
|
| I didn't find out these details until I owned them. However I
| have a soft spot for Sony's industrial design from the 90s. I've
| got a couple of these, Pyxis GPS receivers, and some
| Hi-8/Digital-8 pieces. I think they just look cool and some I
| lusted after when I was younger. It's way more techno looking
| than their 70s and 80s ID and way cooler than their post-2000
| retro-esque ID.
| awhitby wrote:
| This made me nostalgic for a 1990s Sony shortwave radio that I
| had as a kid. It replaced a much larger probably 1980s era
| radio that my grandfather passed on to me. By comparison this
| 1990s one was magically miniature - and very similar design to
| book reader:
|
| https://swling.com/blog/2016/09/the-sony-icf-sw100-a-minitur...
| giantrobot wrote:
| Oh man that's a looker.
|
| *Sony desire rising*
| reaperducer wrote:
| Thanks for the link to that site. I expect I'll waste most of
| this evening looking through it.
|
| It brought back memories of my SWL days. My favorites were
| Radio Sofia, Radio Habana (when playing music), and RNZI. I
| even sent away for an RNZI t-shirt, and was wearing it in
| Pennsylvania one day when a Maori recognized it and came
| running across the room to ask me about it.
|
| I still listen to RNZ Pacific online, but it's not the same.
| fumar wrote:
| Same, I love 90s peak Sony. It is amazing the amount of
| products they released. They had an offering for every niche.
| baybal2 wrote:
| And that was their downfall.
|
| Nobody cared for a gazillion cartridges, sticks, disks,
| drives etc if it all sounded exactly the same in the end.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Sony invented a gazillion of all kinds of disk, tape, and
| cartridge formats, all to make people buy new hardware by forcing
| obsolescence.
|
| And then... came the Internet.
|
| Parents once brought me an MD player from Japan back in nineties.
| We bought dozens of MD cartridges, but only 3 ever worked.
|
| Orienting in between at least 3 visually undistinguishable MD
| cartridge types was very frustrating, and near impossible for
| non-Japanese.
| soapdog wrote:
| I'm still using my MD player. It will work forever.
| agumonkey wrote:
| i'm still stumped that a rewritable 50MB+ thing was available
| before win95 .. if Sony pushed hard on the computer data it
| could have been something
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| I had an MD player, but I only used it to play blank MDs on
| which I had made mix tapes from my CDs. Many MD players had
| write ability, and (though it was a fairly little-known fact)
| many portable CD players had optical-out. You just needed to
| buy an optical cable and connect it between your CD player and
| the MD player.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Early minidisc players/recorders will forever be a unique and
| coveted item for some folks. Sony made a curious 'mistake' in
| those early units where they added recording functionality AND
| a fully digital S/PDIF input with zero copy protection or
| restrictions. You could plug an early portable minidisc
| recorder straight into a digital audio output from a high end
| (at the time) CD player to make digitally bit-perfect rips of
| CDs, or plug it into the digital output of a mixer board to
| make great live music recordings. You could even get a minidisc
| drive for computers and copy off your bit-perfect music rips to
| upload and share on the internet. Very, very quickly Sony
| realized their mistake and later minidisc players removed
| S/PDIF inputs (but left the outputs). Nowadays HDMI, etc. have
| all baked in copy protection to the wire protocols. So for a
| very short period of time minidisc was this odd little thing
| that was an enormous threat to the future of the music
| industry.
| blackrock wrote:
| I still have a Sony minidisc player. I haven't used it in
| years. Exquisite piece of mechanical engineering.
|
| Then came the iPods and the rest is history.
| Jermaine_Jabi wrote:
| Thats funny to hear, I had a minidisc player as a young tech
| neophyte in North America and never had compatibility issues,
| or even until now knew there were variants of md.
| throwanem wrote:
| The variants came along a good few years after MD hardware
| went on sale in the US - the first MiniDisc player went on
| sale in the US in September 1992, while NetMD wasn't
| introduced until 2001 and Hi-MD in 2004.
|
| With the original iPod also introduced in 2001, and MD's high
| media cost and lack of pre-recorded releases having kept it
| firmly in its original niche, I think probably most MD
| adopters in the US didn't have compatibility problems for the
| simple reason that, by the time those problems became
| possible, we weren't really bothering with MiniDisc any more
| anyway.
|
| That said, NetMD was just a different format on the same
| media, and a line of players capable of transferring audio
| from a computer digitally via USB. You can't use a NetMD-
| formatted disc in a non-NetMD player, but you can still
| reformat and use the disc in an older player, and a NetMD
| player will play back discs using the older format. The real
| compatibility barrier is Hi-MD, which uses a totally
| different media formulation in order to reach its ~1GB
| capacity; as far as I know, Hi-MD media, however formatted,
| can't be used in any non Hi-MD player.
|
| (Even for latter-day MiniDisc aficionados such as myself,
| that's still not a huge barrier, because not much Hi-MD media
| was ever made, and you can expect to pay $60 or more for a
| single disc today. Hi-MD players are likewise rare and
| pricey, so I suspect most folks who get into the medium for
| hobby reasons end up sticking with NetMD.)
| baybal2 wrote:
| You forgot MD Data, and MD Data2, and their assorted list
| of supported file formats.
|
| Some played MP3, some did different incompatible versions
| of ATRAC, some did raw PCM packed in two different
| containers.
|
| And there was even a digital videocamera using Data2.
|
| Panasonic MD was also barely compatible with Sony's one.
| Record in one, but not play in other.
| throwanem wrote:
| I don't think MD-Data ever made it to consumer
| availability in the US, but you're not entirely wrong
| with regard to fragmentation. That said, Sony seemed to
| do a pretty good job of keeping it under control in the
| US prior to the release of NetMD in 2001, but I suspect
| "seemed" is the operative word there, and that it had
| less to do with effective management of the medium on
| Sony's part and more with the whole thing being an
| incredibly tiny niche in the US for its entire lifespan.
|
| Sony certainly doesn't have a good enough record on
| avoiding media fragmentation generally, that any benefit
| of the doubt seems warranted here...
| kamarg wrote:
| I loved my mini-disc player. They somehow felt more futuristic
| than than the better alternatives. It's too bad there was
| virtually no support for them in the US.
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