Minidisc a go-go 2022

Today it must be said hasn't been a great one with much rain and wind and indeed yesterday It even hailed stinging my legs which meant a quick return from the paper shop and brewing a hot cup of tea.

I haven't written much in recent years around MiniDiscs for a number of reasons, one being the demise of my home recorder and issues trying to get a solid reliable working replacement given home decks have been out of production even in Japan since around 2006/7 and lasers don't last long.

Another is because of, the majority of use had been mainly for purely personal headphone based use such as lp records copied to disc which is a faff on computer based systems as the interfaces aren't easy or selections from cd because for whole albums it's easier and quicker to just "rip" to Mp3 or Flac and play from a personal audio player especially as mine have line outputs too.

My circa 2004 Sharp MT MD 270H developed issues with the catch holding the disc getting out of alignment so the slightest nudge caused errors so I was able to get a similar era Sharp MT MD 170 that had had next to no use in its original box just needing a new "Gumstick" battery which while not very easy to find can be still bought as new manufactured stock so still capable of holding a full charge.

This works very well with the controls operating the same way with both digital and analogue record levels being able to be set and a button to start charging when the power unit is inserted for mains operation.

Axia made a bunch of Hello Kitty and other Sanriotown banded blank uber kawaii MiniDiscs which are now highly collectable and those go for around £30 per disc unopened

They did so at the time Hello Kitty branded players including a MD Boombox!

Here's some discs together with a Sony portable recorder with inline remote that become common in the very late 90's that you'd clip on your attire for ease of operation.

I will have to say however in my experience Sony's personal recorders outside of the early MZ-R 30/35/50's from the mid 90's had by far the worst ergonomics for the controls of any, indeed those on my HiMD NH600 are an absolute beeping pain to use especially with sub menus that the rotary encoder is erratic at moving through. 

Their home decks were in the main, much much better.

Feminine schoolgurl technology

Every modern young person I ever met had some interest in music  whither or not it was just about the look and fashion of the artists, just singing the songs and usually some way of playing our favourite music.

Obviously with changing times, what it is we have changes as some products come to the end of their lives and others replace them and so while I was infatuated at one time with reels of tape, also I was an early adopter of the Japanese craze of the MiniDisc although that technology has come to something of a dead end with the discontinuing of recorders.

I have had personal digital audio players using either downloaded albums or home made copies, not least the Sandisk Clip Zip of which there is a feature on this blog but they didn't quite match the best of my portable MiniDisc machines as modern players are designed more about maximizing running time between charges rather than fitting the best possible  sounding electronics and that still left the question of playing music on them through a regular stereo a bit messy.

Like why would you want to fire up a computer to just play something?

I had considered a number of ways around this over the last year and very recently I obtained what is proving to be the answer.

Enter the Fiio X3

.
It's a digital audio player for sure but it is designed from the ground up to sound really good starting with using the same chip to convert the zeroes and ones of digital to analogue sound  as a £400 separate cd player and a very high quality headphone stage that cures at the outset the problem of not enough of and the failure to reproduce fully, the sound even from iTunes or better quality Mp3 albums.

Then there is the fact it also plays not only regular 16 bit lossless (Flac) downloads and home copied files equalling the full quality of a cd, it plays 24 bit better than cd ones too (192/24 being its limit) and it sounds on headphones better than many separates.

In the UK you can by cd and better than cd  quality downloads from Presto who do Classical music and 7Digital as well as the French Qobuz company for much else like Rock.

Compared with the ClipZip, the display has much better resolution, nearer a cellphones and isn't as restricted to the maximum number of pixels as that player is when it comes to artwork.

It has 8GB of internal memory but you can use upto 128GB micro sdhc cards too that might be pre-assembled by genre just like I did for the Clip Zip and its cards worked straight off the bat on it.

The kicker though is it for once has a proper line level output just like a cd player rather than relying on a crummy headphone stage with it's built in restrictions, so armed with lossless files it sounds equal to or actually better than a dedicated cd player.

Throw in the ability to play from a charger while charging and you too can be listening in really high quality to all those files while being portable enough to carry around with you.

Finally I have that not just can equal but now surpasses my MiniDiscs!