Lost in the Supermarket - Hardware Review - Evaluation

Emedia Professional, March, 2000 by Joshua McDaniel

Sony's MiniDisc and the new Digital Music Mainstream

My next-door neighbors are band people, and consequently throw a spectacular and most-orotund shindig. Every single possible mode of existence is represented at these things: punks and hippies swap tales of intrigue and terror, transvestites instruct prom queens in the proper application of mascara, bikers show pictures of their children to MCSEs, the Sharks and the Jets adjust themselves on a couch such that all have a clear view of The Graduate. The cops never come, or rather, if cops do show up, it's because they're thirsty; nobody is at home to complain about the noise, they're all at the party.

Naturally, you tend to fall into conversations here. A young man twitched over in the kitchen; one of his ears contained an earbud, the other was devoted to something else, I'm not real sure what. Visually tracing the cord to its origin, I anticipated arriving finally at a DiscMan, maybe even a Rio; to my surprise, the cord ran to a portable MiniDisc player. Hmm, I thought, I'd forgotten those even existed. I remember seeing a few MiniDisc units here and there almost a decade ago, among the privileged, but they never piqued my curiosity at all. I had the format pegged as something akin to the pot-bellied pigs people were keeping as pets for a time: here today, dying neglected in a cold, suburban garage tomorrow. Now here's this young man, t-shirt and jeans, no pretense at all about him, carrying a MiniDisc unit around, at a very public party. Okay, I thought, I'll bite.

He handed it over pretty happily when I asked to see it. Now, God bless it and all, and keep in mind that we're still pretty much in a prototype phase, but Diamond's Rio [See review, June 1999, pp. 80-82--Ed.] seems a little frail when you're holding a portable MiniDisc player. You can tell, just by its sturdiness, and that pleasant bit of weight, that it means business. That's where my fascination with MiniDisc started, a fascination honed yet sharper by this statement, unequivocally rendered by said young man: "Soon, MiniDisc will supplant CD-R as the storage format of choice for personal music compilations."

So what have you been smoking? I felt compelled to ask.

Just what I thought. Nonetheless, we cannot reject this young man's statement out of hand, if for no other reason than the passion and fortitude behind it. Something, after all, made him say it, and I think I know what it is: MiniDisc is cool. And not only is MiniDisc cool, but it also perfectly complements this new digital consciousness we've got in the wake of MP3. Judging from the popularity and sales of digital jukebox and DJ software, "favorite" buttons on late- model CD changers, and try-before-you-download tracks, it seems we're all starting to like a lot of flexibility in and control over our digital music collections.

These are the primary (even legendary, as it turns out) strengths of MiniDisc: flexibility and able subservience to the user. It's uncanny how accurately MiniDisc technology at its release in 1992 foreshadowed contemporary events--a cagey Cassandra wrapped in chrome (or yellow, or blue, depending on your preference), too far ahead of its time, but not without some hope, especially now.

Career Opportunities

Sony has evidently noticed its renewed opportunity: as of December 1999, Sony had plans to release a cable-and-software bundle built for PC-to-MiniDisc digital recording. The release was scheduled for Q1 2000, which means it should have happened by the time you read this, or at least be imminent. We have to wonder, though, will we ever hear it has arrived, when it does arrive? Sony, in the past, has been pretty quiet about its product; where it could be--and perhaps will be, and in any case should be, by all rights--eminent in our minds, for Sony, it's just not. I sought comment from Diamond Multimedia (creators of the Rio) on the issue of whether or not MiniDisc was perceived as competition in light of the company's intended entry into the downloading fray, or as apples and oranges. I never heard back, which I think at least substantiates my claim that nobody thinks about MiniDisc.

Sony gets yelled at often on the marketing score: for example, a November 1997 issue of Rolling Stone, in the necessarily coarse language of honesty, accused the company of both bad timing and bad marketing, saying, "The technology rocks, but the roll-out sucked." The king is decidedly absent from the portable prom, which invariably leads to wild, even mean-spirited speculation about and beratement of MiniDisc's marketing, or lack thereof. One piece in Gadget--though stopping short of outright accusation--hints at a "concept of planned obsolescence," a thing wrought of both greed and a need for something for plant workers to do while new technologies develop. On the subject of MiniDisc, you'll find a lot of talk (sometimes wacko) about a taciturn Sony, images of non-images. But let's face it, even after all these years, MiniDisc is still brand-new in some sense, and perhaps the language in which to describe it, position it, and market it is only just emerging, which would explain a lot. And something is happening here, for what it's worth: "The U.S. market penetration of MiniDisc is on target to double this year, just like last year ..." says Tracy Farrington, marketing manager for Sony Electronics.