To anyone who remembers Y2K, Sony’s MiniDisc format will probably always feel futuristic. That goes double for Sony’s MZ-RH1, the last MiniDisk recorder ever released, back in 2006. It’s barely larger than the diminutive disks, and its styling is impeccable. There’s a reason they’ve become highly collectible and sell for insane sums on e-Bay.
Unfortunately, they come with a ticking time-bomb of an Achilles heel: the first-generation OLED screens. Failure is not a question of if, but when, and many units have already succumbed. Fortunately enterprising hacker [Sir68k] has come up with replacement screen to keep these two-decade old bits of the future alive.
Previous revisions required some light surgery to get the twin OLED replacement screens to fit, but as of the latest incarnation (revision F+), it’s now a 100% drop-in replacement for the original Sony part. While it is a drop-in, don’t expect it to be easy. The internals are very densely packed, and fairly delicate — both in the name of miniaturization. You’ll need to break out the micro-screwdrivers for this one, and maybe some magnifiers if your eyes are as old as ours. At least Sony wasn’t gluing cases together back in 2006, and [Sir68k] does provide a very comprehensive repair guide.
He’s even working on new firmware, to make what many considered best MD recorder better than ever. It’s not ready yet, but when it is [Sir68k] promises to open-source the upgrade. The replacement screens are sadly not open source hardware, but they’re a fine hack nonetheless.
We may see more MiniDisc hacks as the format’s apparent revival continues. Things like adding Bluetooth to the famously-cramped internals, or allowing full data transfer — something Sony was unwilling to allow until the RH1, which is one of the reasons these units are so desirable.
Minidisc were okay., but at 64mm diameter with a 340gb capacity (later HI-MD hit 1gb). I was always more impressed by Dataplay’s 32mm diameter 500 gb capacity. It was unfortunate that the company made two bad choices, they chose not to license their tech trying to keep control of the format, and they chose to only offer write once discs despite being able to produce rewritables. Discs lost to chips, so daraplay wouldnt have lasted anyway, but its a shame that management decisions got in the way of it gaining traction while the window was still cracked open.
340gb, do you mean gigabit (Gb) or perhaps gigabyte (GB)? I think you mean Mega?
Where did you even find those numbers?
Yeah total typo was meant to be MB not GB oops.
What is daraplay ?
Dataplay was a tiny coin sized write once optical disc in caddy format from imation sometime ~2003 iirc but it was dead on arrival since imation wanted complete control over the format and seemingly no one else could/wanted to make any supported discs/devices. I remember seeing an advert for it included inside an imation cd-rw I bought but that’s basically it. If you are interested Techmoan did a video on it and even managed to get a disc to show off.
Aside from the type of gb, should have been mb, Minidisc are rewritable 1000x’s over! That’s why I still enjoy my MD’s. I am able to purchase used MD’s wipe the recording(s) that I don’t like and start over.
Also, the many features of to edit the music are unlike anything that we have today in a disc format.
Regardless, it is a shame that it didn’t catch on due to Sony’s decisions.
I still use minidisc to this day and don’t see a day when I will stop using them, barring the inability to repair my devices.
Every time I see the MiniDisc come up in discussion I think back to the first Men in Black movie where Sony inserted some non-subtle marketing about this alien technology that was going to revolutionize/be ubiquitous in a few years. (And I think Agent K’s lament that he was going to have to re-purchase the Beatles’ albums again, so at least they were trying to get consumers prepared for the idea of not actually owning anything in the future.)
Except agent K could just copy all of his existing albums to a SSD based personal cloud server, save the vinyl some wear, gain anywhere access, and still own everything forever.
“the first-generation OLED screens. Failure is not a question of if, but when, and many units have already succumbed.”
This reminds me of something. I worked at a large electronics retailer in the early 2000’s (I think 2001 or 2002). We just got the first LCD TV’s which were very expensive and tiny. The people that wanted a bigger screen opted for plasma TV’s. The problem was, we have rows of TV’s that were on all day during opening hours and plasma TV’s could not handle that. So what we did was unbox a plasma TV, put it on the stand, let it play for a week of 3 or 4. Then it would be resold to another company that bought the used TV’s at a discount and we would get a new one from the warehouse and put that in the store. The cycle repeated itself. After only a few weeks, the plasma screens would visibly deteriorate. The screen would get darker and darker and if it was on the same channel every day, the logo would burn in. The store was open 12 hours a day and the TV’s were on for a bit longer than that, every day and plasma just couldn’t deal with it.
We also sold MiniDisc players. I really really miss mine. I didn’t have a proper recorder so I would manually record songs to a MiniDisc and stop recording after every song of the album, then start a new recorder, similar to how you would copy to a cassette. But I was a skater and MiniDisc was the best thing ever. Players were compact and although my jnco’s had big pockets, a CD player was still a problem. And MiniDisc was a lot better with shocks and vibrations compared to CD. I think my Sharp had something like 30 seconds memory.
I switched over to a 64MB MP3 player in the size of a USB stick, which was easier to use.
I miss the old days
I was lucky enough to get a Diamond Rio PMP300 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300) through my work, shortly after they came out. I remember thinking I was the bee’s knees as I walked around listening to my newfangled mp3s, rather than the walkman or discman that other, less technologically-blessed people had to use!
…for all of about 30 minutes each time, which was the elapsed time before either a) the 32MB-worth of tracks crammed onto the player began to repeat annoyingly, or b) the single AA-cell battery died. The above wikipedia article says “8-12 hours” of battery life – that’s an exaggeration, to put it charitably :)
I recently swapped the screen in my Sony MZ-RH10 (which has the exact same problem with it’s oled screen, being a slightly older high end Hi-MD model than the RH1). I kick myself for passing up a chance to score a RH1 years ago for only $50 with dead screens. Even broken they now go for hundreds of dollars and especially now that there are replacement screens available I expect that price to even further increase.
So you got the idea for this article from the recently uploaded video by Janus Cycle on YouTube or was it just co-incidence? Absolutely no comment about that video anywhere to be seen. https://youtu.be/Et756ELKK3M