It remains to choose the preferred era, but there were no particular problems: I wanted the most functional, maximum features and capabilities. Today's post is about the functional mini-disc deck Sony MDS-JB980. This is the only device in my rack with high-fi that connects to a computer via USB. And at the same time it became interesting to me: when the component audio started, why (for most people) ended, and why did the fashion for building pyramids from devices, necessarily with large speakers, arise?
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Minidisk is a magneto-optical digital sound carrier (and later data) on a 64 mm diameter disk. To record sound, a proprietary lossy compression standard is used. Before talking about the deck, I want to explain why I chose it. And for this you need to recall what kind of minidisk had options. Roughly enough, three generations of a minidisk can be defined:
- First. The original ATRAC codec with a bitrate of 292 kilobits per second is used, up to 80 minutes of stereo sound can be placed on one disc. Portable, stationary, professional and automotive devices of this generation were produced from 1992 to 2001. Many justifiably consider the “golden era” of the minidisc to be the end of the nineties, it was a time when this format was really relevant, but was beyond the financial capabilities of most people.
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- . Hi-MD. , — 1 , 230 . ATRAC3Plus 48 352 , CD- , MP3. , Hi-MD 2004 , . 2014 . , , , , , . .
A stationary mini-disc deck is a very strange device these days. Imagine a large chest with a bunch of buttons that can only play MP3s. And here it’s about the same. The minidisc was born as a portable, youthful device, but it was not quite possible to get into this audience due to the high price of both players and media. In 1994, the positioning of the format had to be changed, releasing devices for a more solvent audience. The first stationary deck was released - Sony MDS-101and car radio. Due to errors in the implementation of lossy compression in the first devices, the reputation of the minidisc among music lovers and audiophiles (that is, people with money) was tarnished. In 1996, a Japanese manufacturer tries to convince them that the format is good and the bugs are fixed. The MDS-JA3ES stationary deck is available, a hefty coffin with the highest performance, cooler than CD players.
One of the ES series mini-disk recorders could very well become my “retrotopik”, but there is one problem: they all belong to the first generation, do not support PC communication and, with the exception of the last two models (hard to get), new compression formats with ATRAC3 loss ... Why did you buy such expensive devices at all? In 1996, the main argument was recording. A high-quality mini-disc deck could be used to digitize vinyl and magnetic tapes, divided into tracks and tagged. Followed by digital listening at home, or on the go. At the beginning of the new century, this advantage came to naught: it was more logical to use a computer for digitizing old media, for which quite high-quality audio interfaces were already produced. A separate device, minidisk or CD recorder, only made sense ifif you did not want to deal with new computer technologies at that time.
So my new-old Sony MDS-JB980 deck was released in August 2002. It belongs to the QS series, which in Sony terms is a level lower than ES, but still not bad. This is a very interesting exhibit of the sunset era of physical media, one of the best. We can say that these are two devices in one: an autonomous system for digital sound recording and an external audio data carrier for a computer. The first, however, succeeded Sony much better than the second.
MDS-JB980 can record analog and digital audio signals onto a mini-disc. It supports three bitrates: the original 292 kb / s, and the more modern 132 and 64 kilobits (the latter, however, is only suitable for speech and if you really want to fit five or more hours of music on one disc). It offers good possibilities for editing audio after recording: splitting into fragments, deleting and moving tracks, gradually increasing or decreasing the volume at the beginning and end of a track. You can even change the level of the recorded signal, for example, make the song “too loud” too quietly recorded.
There are three options for entering track titles: from the front panel buttons, from the remote control, or using the PS / 2 keyboard. Only Latin is supported. I have tried several recording scenarios using late nineties technology. For example, vinyl digitization: we write, in the process we divide it into tracks, after recording we delete unnecessary pauses at the beginning and end of the record. For records with an “endless loop” (such as the Beatles' Sgt Pepper edition) can be applied at the end of Fade Out. Since in LP2 mode (132 kilobits) quite a lot of music is placed on the disk, it is possible to divide it into groups, similar to folders on a USB flash drive.
The easiest way is to rip music from a CD, especially if the CD player is from the same manufacturer. One button on the remote starts the disc playback and recording on the MD deck. When connected using an optical cable, the tracks are arranged automatically, after which it is enough to connect the keyboard and register the names of the songs, if you really want to. At the end of any recording session, it is advisable to eject the disc from the device - this is how the table of contents is finalized. Almost no suffering, unlike my experience with the rival Digital Compact Cassette format. Although it’s still strange: digitizing and editing sound without a computer, old-school, using buttons and rotary knobs.
Minidisk and Windows 10
As a device of its era, this mini-disc deck is good, but I want to take advantage of a unique feature, namely the built-in USB port. And here oddities begin, their own unique approach. In previous research, I used an old Windows XP laptop to communicate with minidisk devices. This time I wanted to fasten the retrodevice to a modern computer. This is where the familiar complications of other retro devices begin. The proprietary program SonicStage runs in Windows 10 without problems (you only need to set the compatibility mode with Windows XP). The device is not visible - drivers for minidisks with NetMD features and the ability to work with a PC were released only for 32-bit OS. There is an instruction on the SonyInsider forumto which the driver for 64-bit Windows is attached. To install, you will need to temporarily disable the mandatory driver signature, but in general everything works.
It works rather strange. All fans of the minidisk are forced to operate with the 2007 release software. It is not very convenient in itself, so age also affects it. Every time it starts up, SonicStage tries to go to Sony's servers and update some information there: most likely this is a rudiment of a now defunct music store. When recording a minidisk, question marks are temporarily displayed instead of track names. SonicStage leaves a bunch of converted files in a temporary folder and never deletes them. And of course, nothing is supported except for 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and numbers - you cannot import tracks with tags or file names in Russian. In a very crooked way, you can burn a disc with Japanese characters in tags.
Working with minidisk on a computer in 2020 looks like this. In Foobar I convert music from FLAC to WAV format. This is the only way to load uncompressed music into SonicStage, apart from the WMA Lossless codec, which is no longer supported by Windows standard tools. I import WAV into SonicStage, prescribe tags. I record the downloaded album or collection on a minidisc. The MDS-JB980 has a dedicated button for communication with a computer. In NetMD mode, all control is transferred to the computer, the buttons on the front panel and on the remote control do not work. From SonicStage, you can start playback, delete individual tracks, rename tracks, divide tracks into groups. 80 minutes of music are recorded on a minidisc for about 20 minutes, which is by the way slower than on a portable of the same release year.
Everything works, but there is a feature about which I already wrote in previous articles. SonicStage normally works only with the LP2 format and a bitrate of 132 kilobits per second. There is a compatibility mode - you can record a disc in the original ATRAC format with a bitrate of 292 kilobits. But in this mode, forced recoding to LP2 occurs, that is, double lossy compression, and an 80-minute album is written for about an hour. In general, not the best option: for recording in the original ATRAC from a computer, you can use only software developed by enthusiasts, the fruit of reverse engineering of a closed communication protocol. I will write about him in the next article.
Burning mini-discs from a computer is a fairly convenient process when compared to audio cassettes or DCC. And not the most convenient in comparison with the Apple iPod, and even more so with any player on flash memory. A mini-disc deck in NetMD mode turns, in fact, into a CD-RW recorder. Works well, writes fast, SonicStage lets you organize your library almost as easily as in iTunes or Foobar (but doesn't support many modern formats like FLAC or AAC). But the record is only one way. There is no way to record data (it will appear only in 2004, when no one was already making stationary devices). There are meaningless bitrate restrictions. In the early versions of the software from 2001-2002, there were also severe limits on copying music to disk, one track no more than three times. In 2002, the minidisc played an iPod in convenience,functionality and partly price. But if you had a lot of money (about $ 400), you could have a portable device and a real home high-quality with excellent sound quality and digital output!
Ballad of coffins
This mini-disc deck is one of the last representatives of component Hi-Fi. More precisely, not so, you can buy similar music boxes new today: CD-player, amplifier or even digital media player. But the time of racks with technology is gone. And how long did this era last? It is possible to count from the first radio receivers of the beginning of the last century: large apparatus, solid apparatus. Turntables were quickly added to these. The first device of this type in my family is the 1949 Ural radio :
As you can see, this is an integrated device: everything is included, and the receiver, and the player, and the amplifier, and the speaker. The Hi-Fi industry has been actively developing in the West since the late forties, when in fact sources of high-quality sound begin to appear: FM broadcasting, long-playing vinyl. To them are gradually added reel-to-reel tape recorders (50s) and compact cassettes (60s). How these devices were packaged is not a question of technology, but of design, consumer expectations from an expensive purchase. You can look, for example, in historycompany Pioneer, and watch how since the late sixties, single devices, packed in expensive varieties of wood, become more compact, divided into components. If in the sixties even individual speakers were a rarity, then in the eighties a high-fi lover could assemble his own system from a huge number of available tape recorders, tuners, amplifiers, and so on.
In fact, combined devices and component Hi-Fi existed in their parallel universes. Most of us dreamed of at least a music center, so that “all in one”, in the eighties, mini-systems that can accommodate even in a small room became popular. Assembling an audio system at will, from separate devices is the destiny of non-poor people and / or wanting to get the maximum functionality, quality, convenience. In the late seventies, video was added to the sound - VHS, Betacam and laser discs. The first "coffin" my parents buy is not a minidisc, or a cassette deck, but a VCR. In any case, such devices occupy a central place in the room. They are proud of them, they should look richsurprise guests. A variety of formats play a role: every self-respecting music lover should have a vinyl player, and a cassette player, later a CD, a good radio receiver. All this must somehow be connected with each other. In the nineties, attempts began to adapt a computer to the same concept: in a case with a display and a remote control, connected to an ordinary TV.
By 2020, all this has almost completely disappeared. The set of various equipment is reduced to one speaker, under the TV or separately. You can control it from TV, or from a smartphone. Everything that previously required a set of five devices or a separate music center is available from the phone. A thing of the past, along with other physical media, is not only a mini-disk, but in general the idea of a large-block Hi-Fi. If you really want to, you can organize it. But not necessarily.
First of all, it's pretty pointless. Even high-quality, sophisticated components now fit in a box the size of a video cassette. This was already noticeable in 2002: the mini-disc recorder is empty inside, there is a lot of free space. Modern Hi-Fi does not require large boxes, and manufacturers either follow the lead of conservative users, or significantly, often beyond reason, complicate the scheme to feel the power... Home audio technology has evolved from devices the size of a washing machine to handheld devices that are no worse than dinosaurs in the past in terms of characteristics. Speakers aside, of course: size matters here, but most even demanding listeners do not need to buy two-meter boxes. I'm not a big fan of portable bluetooth speakers, but I use compact monitors with a subwoofer in my audio system. It’s more convenient than looking for a place for a full-sized system.
It turns out that I'm not only building a system for outdated media. I capture ideas that are forming in the past, which shaped the look of our home, which were widely discussed in specialized media and in narrow circles of connoisseurs. I am building my pyramid of outdated devices that have been swept away by rampant computerization. As a man of the old school, I find a certain charm in these devices, I enjoy the control with the help of these buttons, and not just from the touch screen. I am going against the progress. Taking advantage of the relatively cheapness of retro devices, I bring them to mind, and now I can operate with five different old media: CD, audio cassette, vinyl, digital cassette and minidisc. I plan to build the mini-disk infrastructure further, the next step is the automotive part.