MINIDISC v CD

Is there that much quality difference between MINIDISC and CD? I mean the high street varieties. For instance, I have a Sony Minidisc recorder connected to my PC. My PC has a CD burner. Will Wave files be better quality if I burn to CD or record to Minidisc? Or is the difference negligable? Should I deliver voice work to radio production companies, advertising agencies and radio stations in CD or MD?

I'm not sure if this should be in this forum... although there is a particular 'radio' dimension to the MD thing.

In absolute quality terms, the CD technically wins, as indicated in your other thread, simply because it's not a compressed medium. But you'd be seriously hard put to reliably detect the difference, especially in material recorded on a decent desktop machine.

The radio dimension though, is that MDs support track and disc electronic labelling as standard, whilst CD players don't. When it comes to on-air use, I'd rather have sensibly labelled MDs any day - you know what you're getting, and the technical quality exceeds that of all of the current broadcast networks - including Radio 3.

Thanks Steve. I have added the radio dimension to my question.

I was a huge MD fan until I started getting frustrated by the slow transfer speeds.  Maybe the new generation (out soon?) will fix that.

Has anyone seen any reports of pro or rack-sized HiMD machines in the pipeline, ie anything other than little portables?

Has anyone seen any reports of pro or rack-sized HiMD machines in the pipeline, ie anything other than little portables?

Funny you should ask - I was in the local Sony shop on Saturday asking the very same question... and the staff said that they were due to go to a staff seminar next week where all would be revealed. They seemed pretty confident that there would be desktop models like the ones we've all come to know and love, like the JE series. But that could be pure sales bollocks for all I know - they'd tell me anything to get me to go back in, as far as I can tell. And no, it's not me - they'd do that to anybody and everybody...

If you hear of anything more of interest hopefully you'll share it here.  I have to say that this part of the world does not seem to boast too much in the way of non-portable MD devices of any kind...

http://www.minidisc.org/himd_mdcenter_news.html may be of interest.

[10 years]

Yes, I've scoured the minidisc site extensively - but they haven't got any references to desktop machines at all yet. Seems that everybody's still waiting.

Sony play a long game. I had a guided tour of Sony Broadcast a few years back, and they revealed that their general gameplan is to know exactly what they'll be selling 10 years ahead of time. Yes, 10 years. Somehow, I don't think that most people actually realise just how the strings are really pulled... The occasional whisper gets out, though. We've known about the extended storage possibilities of the MD format for years, and Sony do have a reputation for developing any technology almost to the limit, so we have no reason to suppose that they won't come up with the goods at some stage...

Well mine is a SONY MINIDISC DECK MDS-S40. It is not portable, has great editing facilities and is quite affordable, and I've had it about 3 years now. I'd point you to a SONY page on this machine but I'll be damned if I can find one (they've probably discontinued it already, who knows). Lovely machine though, and widely available.

Is there that much quality difference between MINIDISC and CD?

I'm not sure if I understand this correctly. I can record uncompressed wavs with my Sony minidisk recorder atleast through the line/mic in. And I can use USB to transfer wavs into it. The minidisk fills up pretty fast this way. Are these wavs compressed anyway?

Substantially, by a factor of about 5 to 1 I believe (or more depending on the settings chosen).  We're talking data compression here, not audio compression of course.

Substantially, by a factor of about 5 to 1 I believe

After some reading at http://www.avisoft-saslab.com/compression/compression.htm I stand corrected. I assumed SP (short play) would mean uncompressed since you can fit 80 minutes of audio on a 80 minute disk. I didn't realize it would (data) compressed anyway and the LP options would just compress it more.  

I have a Sony JE-520, a bit of a pro model as it does have some editing features on it. I've gotten some very good quality recordings using it for live recordings, where I didn't want to drag out the DA-88. One time I brought the MD and a Tascam CDRW5000 to record a gig, and didn't have the proper connections needed for the CD recorder, but did for the MD, so I used the MD, and it worked great as a back-up recorder.

I really like the MD format as the disk is always in a case and protected. This is a great feature if your music gets banged around a lot.

I've heard that MD's are real popular in Japan, but not so much in the U.S.

Some dj's transfer their music to MD's as it's easy recording the songs you want, take lot's of abuse, weigh less and take up less room than cd's, and you can leave your master cd's at home, to prevent theft while at a club.

They really don't sound bad at all.

If you want to compare the quality of ATRAC (the minidisc format) to others out there (mp3, wma & original cd) there is an up-coming public listening test being conducted by Roberto.  I'll announce it in General Audio, so keep your eyes open if you're interested

I have a Mini disc and I ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT!  As to the sound quality I cannot hear any difference between it and CD. Now if you use the long play modes then yes there is a degredation of quality, but what can you expect in putting 5 hours on a 2.5 inch disc somethings gotta go! I love the fact that there is no way to scratch the disc as you can with a CD. This makes for wonderful handling in a radio station. In fact I was able to talk the station that I worked for into buying a mini-disc recorder. My first unit was a Sony MDS-302 until it developed a poping noise in all of it's outputs and would have costed $250 to fix. My unit I have now is also a Sony an MDS-JB940. I have seen some pro recorders and if they weren't so expensive I'd have one of those instead of the regular consumer models. Mini disc is a great medium, but has been poorky marketed here in the US. Also it came out about the same time as DAT and DCC so everyone was overwhelmed by new formats. Recordable CDs are good but sometimes the disc quality and software are incompatible. I have wasted a many CD-R because of this, but I have never done that to a mini disc. I believe that it was supposed to be the replacement for the cassette tape/ No wif I could only find blank MD discs in bulk!