Remembering the technical buzz around the system back in the day, either we audio enthusiasts glossed over this detail, or more likely, Sony’s PR did so to emphasize the all-new aspect of the system. The recordable discs were magneto-optical and wrote data by heating the disc with a laser under a magnetic field, while the pre-recorded discs used etched pits and lands in a similar way to the CD. The first surprise is that the MiniDisc was in fact a two-in-one system. Hackaday alum has disassembled a MiniDisc optical head to document how the physical part of the system worked. These floppy-disk-like cartridges held a magneto-optical medium, and were the last word in cool until being swept away around the end of the decade by MP3 players. A variety of digital formats came to market to address this, of which Sony’s MiniDisc was the only one to gain significant traction outside the studio. There was an odd era at the start of the 1990s when CDs had taken the lead from vinyl in pre-recorded music, but for consumer recordable formats the analogue cassette was still king.
0 kommentar(er)
