[HN Gopher] A Repairman's View of Portable Minidisc Recorders (2...
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A Repairman's View of Portable Minidisc Recorders (2000)
Author : ecliptik
Score : 79 points
Date : 2023-10-08 04:03 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.minidisc.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.minidisc.org)
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I think what's notable about this article that's not mentioned
| yet it's that it's written by a repairman. I do not think I would
| think to find an electronics repair man today except to replace
| the glass in my phone.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| I had a couple of MD players/recorders (they could do both from
| memory) back in the day - I still view them with a fondness I
| have never been able to muster for any other class of device.
|
| Something about the size, intricate control buttons and switches,
| the jewelled MD disc case just made the whole thing delightful to
| me as a 15 year old.
|
| Perhaps it was also due to me developing my own taste in music at
| the time that I am linking the nostalgia of that to the players
| themselves.
| nrp wrote:
| I had a Minidisc player as well, and I know exactly what you
| mean. In my view, these devices were the pinnacle of Japanese
| industrial design broadly, and Sony Design Center specifically.
| The rituals around using them were the digital equivalent to
| playing a record.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Remember that scene in the Matrix when Neo sells an exploit(?)
| on a Minidisc? In 1999, they felt like the future. Plus the
| mobile players felt so mechanically satisfying to use.
|
| What I really miss about them is they're theoretically great
| for long-term storage. The case was fairly robust, and data
| should be incredibly stable because the disc has to be heated
| past the Curie point during recording.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| I bought a (non-portable) minidisc player around the time 1995.
| I found it was the most advanced CE device for its time,
| certainly for its price, 300 euros or so.
|
| It had a very user friendly and capable UI, for example, with a
| couple of rotations and clicks of the dial you could stitch
| together recorded songs. The matrix display was bright and well
| legible.
|
| You could fit around 20 songs on a very small optical disc. It
| was quite advanced, it encoded and recorded audio in decent
| quality real time. It had an optical SP/DIF output.
|
| After some years the recording feature did not work anymore, it
| now makes sense why, after reading the article.
|
| It was a truely amazing and handy audio recorder/player. If it
| was still functional, I would still have used it for another 20
| years or so.
|
| Edit: found a 1998 review (1) about an MD very similar to mine.
|
| (1)https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/sony-mds-je520?amp
| RedShift1 wrote:
| I have that model and it still works. Very good A/D and D/A
| converters in this model, I used it a lot for that.
| glial wrote:
| I have the same sense of nostalgic fondness for the hardware.
| The software, however, was terrible. If I had a nicer software
| solution for managing files on my MD, I might go dig it out of
| the closet.
| danparsonson wrote:
| Totally get this. I recently revived my Aiwa MD player and now
| I listen to a disc or two when I'm cleaning the house - there
| really is something charming about the form factor that pushes
| my techie buttons. I just love handling the thing, it's a minor
| work of art.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| In my opinion it also has something to do with actually
| having a haptic feeling when dealing with music. Put
| something in, select, press play.
|
| This is especially true for MD as they were a rad less flimsy
| than CDs. I had a Sanyo portable MD and it was a rock-solid
| device.
| autoexec wrote:
| I've had a Sharp MD-MT-161E and a Sony MZ-N520. Both lasted for
| about 3-5 years of frequent but gentle use before they started
| having spin problems and giving frequent disk read errors. I'd
| love to get another one, but prices are high and reliability is
| poor. While they worked, they were really great for recording,
| and decent for listening to music, but today I'm using simple
| digital recorders that write MP3 and FLAC to SD cards and it's
| hard to beat them for reliability. I still hope to someday find a
| good deal on another minidisc player though. I'm sure I've got
| tracks I've recorded onto minidiscs, but never got around to
| copying to my PC.
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| Could you please give an example of one (or more) such
| recorder(s)?
|
| I'm thinking about getting a cheap tiny dictaphone for logging
| ideas daytime for distilling them to my notebook/journal when
| at my desk.
|
| ps: I find phone apps too cumbersome to get to the point where
| the record is running, by that time the idea might slip.
| specialist wrote:
| > _phone apps too cumbersome_
|
| To your point, I tried to make voice activated journaling
| thingie using Shortcuts. Turrible UX.
|
| I really just need a physical "record" button. Maybe the
| Watch's new customizable action button would work.
| mikeruiz wrote:
| Don't know about the watch, but the new iPhone supports
| this feature as a built-in action.
| autoexec wrote:
| I'm mostly recording music where I've got things set up in
| advance vs needing to quickly capture something on the fly
| but I've liked the Zoom H1n, Sony PCM-D100, and Sony PCM-A10
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| I can see that these are indeed targetting musicians and
| are way more sophisticated instruments than what I'm
| looking for. I'm still grateful for the info!
|
| Thanks for sharing!
| Nition wrote:
| There are smaller and simpler ones if you don't need
| super high recording quality. The Sony PX470 for example.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There are some ridiculously cheap voice recorders on
| Amazon.
|
| The H1N is a good compromise between size and simplicity
| and audio quality - not super cheap, but not professional
| prices, and a good step up.
| autoexec wrote:
| I picked that one up while traveling and I'm surprised at
| how good that little guy ended up being. It's lightweight
| and even without an external mic holds up pretty well.
| It's the one I tend to grab when I just want to record a
| melody or a few chords.
| mjg59 wrote:
| A high school friend bought a Minidisc recorder (pretty sure it
| was a Sharp) with his summer job earnings, and at the time
| (1997ish) it was an incredible object - battery technology more
| advanced than NiCad, LCD display of track titles, easily able to
| create mix MDs of anything, wouldn't skip even over rural
| Northern Irish roads (which are not good at the best of times,
| and are certainly not good when being driven in an aging Vauxhall
| Cavalier at significantly faster than the posted speed limits).
| But the counterpoint to the linked article is that he was about
| 30 metres from the epicentre of the Omagh bombing, and the
| minidisc recorder in his pocket did significant damage to his
| abdomen and still worked perfectly afterwards. Apparently not
| everyone built them fragile.
| illwrks wrote:
| Wow
| hnwizard wrote:
| This is so amazing!
|
| Exactly 36 years ago, I was 7 years old and I remember going into
| an electronics shop that caught my eye.
|
| I was literally always interested in electronics. I finally
| summoned up the courage and went in. The inside this shop that to
| me looked like a candy shop, was very friendly man. I ended up
| convincing my parents to buy me my first electronics kit from
| him, an audio amp.
|
| I soldered the kit, placed it in a fancy metal box, together with
| heavy transformer, making the thing pretty beefy, all of which
| was purchased from him. I remember bringing it to the shop to
| show it off. He was very happy with my work.
|
| My parents ended up buying more and more kits, and I remember
| very clearly just randomly coming into the shop when I would pass
| by for many years later. He was always himself, friendly,
| helpful, busy helping someone or repairing something, smoking,
| always smoking.
|
| Not too long ago I passed there again and remember seeing the
| shop has closed. It was a sad moment.
|
| David, believe it or not is literally the guy who is the
| repairman mentioned in the story must be at the very least 70 by
| now. I ended up spending half an hour reading some of the stuff
| he wrote in the guide, just for the sake of some glimpse of good
| old times.
|
| I hope he still lives! I'm sure there are many other kids and
| teens he positively touched.
|
| Great memories, never to be forgotten.
| partomniscient wrote:
| I think a lot of the west first saw them in an early Ralph
| Fiennes film - Strange Days.
|
| The disc is shown in the first 20 seconds of the trailer:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yaXPx6xWEQ
|
| I had one of the earlier Sony models, which was great - but if
| anything bad happened when "Writing TOC" (Table Of Contents) was
| happening, everything on the disc became unreadable. The
| filesystem was probably the worst thing about mini-disc aside
| from general availability.
|
| The best thing about them was they were next gen mix-tapes, but
| random-access rather than sequential. It made editing a playlist
| way easier (sometimes maxing out available storage to the second)
| plus they were R/W which means they were also superior to burning
| CDs which were all still write-only in that era.
| crtasm wrote:
| With the eject detection pin taped down on my player I'd read
| the TOC from a working disc, then swap in the broken disc and
| write the TOC onto it.
|
| I had to do this often enough I made a blank disc with TOC
| covering its full capacity and a track mark every few minutes,
| to make it easier to skip through and set correct track marks
| on the recovered disc.
| kefyras wrote:
| MZ-1 was also featured in Last Action Hero (1993).
| wkat4242 wrote:
| We used minidiscs at the local radio station where I volunteered.
| On the higher end decks you could do full interview editing just
| from the frontpanel. They were also great for jingles.
|
| Before we had them interviews were literally cut on Revox big
| reel tape. They came with a cutter just for that purpose. The
| minidiscs were so amazing.
|
| In the end it was all replaced by PCs of course but they had a
| good run of about 6-8 years when they were really key to our
| workflow.
| [deleted]
| userbinator wrote:
| _The size of the screws are not the same._
|
| In many cases I can easily see how they could've designed things
| such that far fewer sizes were necessary, but they don't. I do
| wonder if it's an early form of "anti-right-to-repair"
| obfuscation? For some reason, I've noticed this "design quirk"
| far more in various import products than domestic ones.
|
| It's also interesting to read statements like this:
|
| _The DSP and control IC 's in new Sony recorders e.g. MZ-R90/91
| cannot be removed from the board due to a packaging design in
| which the pins are mounted under the chips and cannot be accessed
| for de-soldering. When these chips malfunction they are
| impossible to replace and the whole electronic board must be
| replaced at considerable expense._
|
| ...and then realise that, 23 years later, a sub-$50 hot air
| station can easily do that work (I'm assuming it's referring to
| BGA packages.)
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| Screws usually end up different lengths and sizes for ordinary
| mechanical reasons (meaning, for example, if the screw was
| 0.5mm longer, it would interfere with something else).
|
| The harder you are working to make the smallest thing possible,
| the more this happens.
|
| Additionally, since no one has half a million 2.32mm long M1.2
| screws just lying around, they're always a custom order. Might
| as well get the exact length you want.
|
| In the iPhone, for example, each screw gets its own part number
| and each screw is custom.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah having worked for an electronics manufacturer they
| really really want to standardise this stuff where possible
| because every screw is a critical component and having many
| different types it means you can have many different chances
| to run out of stock and interrupt production. It also makes
| the manufacturing line more complex and training longer.
|
| But in many cases there's just specific needs. Besides
| length, exterior screws are often countersunk, while internal
| ones would have flat heads to distribute the pressure over a
| PCB.
|
| When it comes to stopping customers fiddling with the
| equipment look at Nintendo that use a different proprietary
| screw head for everything.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Who doesn't love how HDDs and optical drives use different
| screw sizes. Plus one is imperial and the other is metric.
| Maybe we should just feel lucky they standardized at all.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Your assembly automation also affects screw choice. Some
| screw heads register better/faster than others depending on
| the size. This affects your line speed. A line might also be
| building sub-assemblies that are shipped to different lines
| with different equipment and this a whole different set of
| optimized part sizes.
|
| The order you repair something isn't necessarily the order it
| was assembled in the factory(ies).
| bbarnett wrote:
| I remember working on board repair in the early 90s, then
| surface mount stuff started to pop in. Equipment at the time
| was literally $10k in today's dollars, at least that was the
| figure everyone talked about ($5k-ish).
|
| I remember attaching a thin copper wire to my soldering iron,
| wrapping it around the tip and then out the front, and using
| that to work on those tiny pads. Sort of worked. Didn't even
| have solder tape, just a sucker.
|
| I didn't even understand how a hot air station worked, until
| youtube showed me years later (I moved onto the software side).
| The things people could never find out, never know, never even
| knew existed pre-Internet are staggering.
|
| I don't think anyone under 30 can even begin to comprehend how
| limited knowledge was before. Quite often, if you wanted to
| know something, you _literally_ could not find any info about
| it at all. You wouldn 't even know what to ask, when you
| approached a librarian, even if they could find some book they
| could get from an inter-library transfer -- which where I
| lived, took weeks!
|
| Such a culture shift.
|
| But anyhow, I can imagine I'd have destroyed the board trying
| to get all that back together, via my soldering-iron with wire
| on end workaround.
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| This sentiment mirrors precisely how I think we might look
| back at a pre- augmented reality era if we can get an 'AR
| web' right. I write about it and advocate for it on my blog -
| this post in particular has some exposition on how I think AR
| could obviate keyword foraging, not knowing what questions to
| ask, and many other kinds of ignorance we take for granted
| today:
|
| https://noahnorman.substack.com/p/what-is-augmented-
| reality-...
| doubloon wrote:
| yeah like.
|
| people dont even understand. as a kid i would look at the
| content of .com files and .exe files in DOS and wonder why
| they didnt look like BASIC source code. wondering how the
| heck people made these wacky characters everywhere. had no
| idea what an assembler or a compiler was, and no way to find
| out.
|
| as far as hardware.. .at least there was radio shack and
| those little books by Forrest Mims. Maybe a book at the book
| store. unlikely. the idea of board level repair to me would
| have been like aliens describing a spaceship without a
| translator.
| tomduncalf wrote:
| Hahaha same here with the .com and .exe files. I had
| forgotten about that lol.
| yterdy wrote:
| We're almost back. Search quality degradation has made
| finding even things you know exist significantly more
| difficult and time-consuming.
| ggm wrote:
| I have two. As a consumer, travelling international longhaul for
| work they were amazingly good, and until mp3 players like the
| Archos came in, frankly indispensable.
|
| The recording quality was phenomenal.
|
| But the power supplies .. my God. The tiniest needle connectors I
| have ever seen. And super uncommon batteries.
| acomjean wrote:
| I have a Sony player/recorder that served me well though grad
| school. I tried it out a couple years ago. Still works. But the
| weird batteries no where to be found, but it had a screw on aa
| battery pack.
| NikkiA wrote:
| You should be able to find replacement gumstick batteries on
| ebay etc, but genuine sony or aiwa brand ones are a)
| hideously expensive and b) ludicrously underpowered - like
| 400mAh or less, which is worse than a single AAA
| danparsonson wrote:
| > And super uncommon batteries.
|
| Amen to that - I recently managed to find someone who 3D prints
| a shim for a standard cell and have been able to start using my
| otherwise perfectly functional Aiwa again. The original battery
| is bizarre!
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| My MZ-1 died last year, after making it to almost 30 years of
| operation, and ate a rare MD that I hadn't archived. "No
| problem," I thought, "I'll just remove the disc manually."
|
| I photographed and labelled everything in the order of
| disassembly, and I still can't get it back together. I'm not
| remotely embarrassed by it, either. After what I went through
| just to get it apart, I'm still astounded by the level of
| precision in manufacturing Japanese in the 90s were capable of.
| analog31 wrote:
| I sold a ReVox B77 analog tape recorder in mint condition for
| roughly the same amount as the price of a MiniDisc recorder,
| stereo microphone, and a bunch of discs. I was never happier. The
| B77 was the cadillac of ATR's at the time, but it was massive,
| the tapes cost an arm and a leg, and the recordings still had to
| be transferred to a digital format in order to do anything with
| them. As a result, I rarely used it.
|
| The only annoyance was that I couldn't transfer recordings to my
| PC in a digital format -- thanks to copyright protection --
| though I obviously owned the rights to my own recordings.
|
| Later, the MD recorder gave way to a digital recorder with memory
| cards and a USB port.
|
| But like everybody else, I loved the form factor and cleverness
| of the MD machine.
| ianbooker wrote:
| There was a time when it was clear to everyone that MiniDisc
| failed, but when alternative technology had not caught up for
| some of the applications. We hunted portable MiniDisc recorders
| on EBay for our student radio station, since some Sony models had
| perfect A/D for microphone INs. I would have payed 10x for the
| equipment, but most of the times we got them for 50 euros...
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(page generated 2023-10-08 23:00 UTC)