With the Diamond Rio player in 1998 and the Apple iPod in 2001, the mass market began to eschew physical media in favor of more convenient file-based systems. The biggest competition for MiniDisc came from the emergence of MP3 players. Initially, Sony believed that it would take around a decade for CD-R prices to become affordable – the cost of a typical blank CD-R disc was around $12 in 1994 – but CD-R prices fell much more rapidly than envisioned, to the point where CD-R blanks sank below $1 per disc by the late 1990s, compared to at least $2 for the cheapest 80-minute MiniDisc blanks. MiniDisc technology was faced with new competition from the recordable compact disc ( CD-R) when it became more affordable to consumers beginning around 1996. Additionally, home MiniDisc decks were less widely available, with most consumers instead connecting a portable MD device to the hi-fi system in order to record. The initial high cost of equipment and blank media was also a factor. The initial low uptake of MiniDisc was attributed to the small number of pre-recorded albums available on MD as relatively few record labels embraced the format. Since then, recordable CDs, flash memory and HDD and solid-state-based digital audio players such as iPods have become increasingly popular as playback devices. It was very popular in Japan and parts of Asia, and relatively so in Europe during the 1990s and into the 00's, but did not enjoy comparable sales success in other markets. However, non-Sony machines were not widely available in North America, and companies such as Technics and Radio Shack tended to promote DCC instead.ĭespite having a loyal customer base largely of musicians and audio enthusiasts, the MiniDisc met with only limited success in the United States. Sony licensed MD technology to other manufacturers, with JVC, Sharp, Pioneer, Panasonic and others producing their own MD products. This created marketing confusion very similar to the videocassette format war of the late 1970s and early 1980s. By the time Sony came up with the MiniDisc in late 1992, Philips had introduced a competing system, DCC, on a magnetic tape cassette. Relegating DAT to professional use, Sony set to work to come up with a simpler, more economical digital home format. dollar had fallen so far against the yen that the introductory DAT machine Sony had intended to market for about $400 in the late 1980s now had to retail for $800 or even $1,000 to break even, putting it out of reach of most users. Because of technical delays, the DAT was not launched until 1989, and by then the U.S. Sony had originally intended the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) to be the dominant home digital audio recording format, replacing the analog cassette. Sony's MiniDisc was one of two rival digital systems, both introduced in 1992, that were targeted as replacements for the Philips Compact Cassette analog audio tape system: the other was the Digital Compact Cassette (DCC), created by Philips and Matsushita (now Panasonic). It took almost 10 years, however, before their idea was commercialized. In 1983, just a year after the introduction of the Compact Disc, Kees Schouhamer Immink and Joseph Braat presented the first experiments with erasable magneto-optical Compact Discs during the 73rd AES Convention in Eindhoven. Sony has ceased development of MD devices, with the last of the players sold by March 2013. īy March 2011 Sony had sold 22 million MD players. MiniDiscs were very popular in Japan and found moderate success in Europe although it was designed to be the successor of the cassette tape, it did not manage to mass replace it globally. Its successor, Hi-MD, would later introduce the option of linear PCM digital recording to meet audio quality comparable to that of a compact disc. The music format was based on ATRAC audio data compression, Sony's own proprietary compression code. Sony announced the MiniDisc in September 1992 and released it in November of that year for sale in Japan and in December in Europe, North America, and other countries. MiniDisc ( MD) is an erasable magneto-optical disc-based data storage format offering a capacity of 60, 74, and later, 80 minutes of digitized audio. The Sony MZ1, the first MiniDisc player, released in 1992.
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