mini disc

Hi,
I recently sold my Sony Minidisc deck, as with decent tapes, my Nakamichi cassette deck produced better recordings. Minidisc always had a 'processed' sound to it. I brought the minidisc deck thinking I would eventually use it instead of tape, and for convenience it is great, but for sound quality, I prefer a good tape deck with quality tapes.

Cheers
Ade

The latest versions of Minidisc actually sound pretty decent if used as designed(read, portable use only). To my ears, better than cassette tape. Not as good as CD though and not worthy for high end listening. There are too many drop offs and compressed sounds, especially in the higher frequencies. If you use them for what they are designed for, portable use, they work quite well. All those drop offs and compressed high ends are inaudible unless you're using a really decent set of headphones.

For portable use I find the results to be quite good in comparison to tape. They don't have the skipping problems with portable CD's either. No hiss, no wow or flutter or degeneration of sound after frequent use.

The standard headphone usually supplied are pretty dreadful as well.

For outdoor portable use they are the best thing going. The compromise between sound quality, convenince, affordability of media, and durability makes them stand out as the only rational choice.

For home use they don't stand up so well. Most any competent CD player will sound better than MD's. But it's not a huge gap unless you have a decent CD player.

Arthur Bye

For portables with standard 'phones, try upgrading to the Sennheiser MX500. Incredible difference.....for £20-25.

As a user of both cassette and MiniDisc IMHO MiniDisc wins. I use a Sony 930 to record from various sources inc digital radio.I use a Sony MD player in my car and a small Aiwa player for travel. I previously used to make tapes on my Nakamichi. The benifits of MD are, editablity, long battery life, sound quaility, size, and convenience. The only downside is that 80 minutes is the longest recording time, although a recorder from Sony will do upto five hours (with loss of quality). I have used tape for travel for twenty five years, last week I give a friend about five hundred tapes.

As someone else has said they are no contest to full sized CD players

rn

If you can make direct digital copies from a CD player then the quality isn't too bad, but recording from vinyl or a Naim CD player (no digital output) the signal has to be converted, which I found degraded the sound unacceptably. For portable use I would use MD as personal tape players sound poor.
To be fair, I don't listen to tape particularly at home, mainly using it to make good recordings for in-car use.

Cheers
Ade

I record from my CDS2 through 52 to a Sony minidisk desk and get *MUCH* better quality that any cassette deck I have used.

My Sony MD is clearly not as good as my Nakamichi CR7 but the convenience largely outweighs the difference.

If you are prepared to record in mono, you can get double the time from the MD.

Fraser

phew!! what a lot of useful replies. i have a nakamichi 580 (takes you back a while doesnt it??) but i find i am not using tape as much as i used to -- and using my sony mini disc recorder (mzr35) more and more, especially to record myself playing trumpet. very convenient. the question was prompted by the fact there are a number of md decks out there -- especially from sony, and i wondered whether any of you guys had used this and whether the results were comparable to nakamichi cassette quality.

many thanks folks...

enjoy...

ken

I might be utterly wrong, and I have never heard mini-disc, but I seem to remember reading in a PC mag that Sony are going to drop mini-disc in favour of their memory sticks (plug in RAM units). Might be worth checking before slapping the cash.