Whatever happened to... Minidiscs?

QI noticed that your 500th issue is on the way — congratulations! It prompted me to flick through your first issue, which I’ve kept all these years. In it, you raved about Minidiscs. Whatever happened to that format? Alexander Craig

AThe 500th issue is here, and you’re in it. So congratulations to you too! We did cover Minidiscs in our first issue but our advice was measured, pointing out that the technology was already six years old and that not everyone would prefer the sound quality over CD. But it wasn’t the slightly poorer audio that did for the Minidisc format so much as the rapid evolution and adoption of recordable CDS (CD-R) and MP3 players.

Price drops at the tail end of the 1990s had made the Minidisc format an interesting option for consumers wanting portable audio with a recording capability. However, at around the same time the manufacturing cost of CD-R media was in freefall, with a single CD-R disc costing roughly half that of a Minidisc.

The first consumer MP3 players went on sale in 1998. Unlike Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding (ATRAC) – the audio-compression system owned, implemented and tightly controlled by Minidisc inventor Sony – MP3 was something of a licensing free-for-all, so it was more popular with consumers and device manufacturers alike.

Sony attempted to keep the Minidisc format alive and relevant with several initiatives including the 2004 introduction of the HI-MD, a refresh of the original standard that enabled use of higher-capacity discs for higher-quality recordings and longer playback – plus support for the MP3 format. However, it was too little too late, because by then dedicated MP3 players were rampant and CD-RS cost mere pennies each.

Minidisc limped on for a few years, but mainly as a legacy format supported only by Sony. In 2013, the company announced that it would no longer manufacture or sell Minidisc players, though for the time being it continues to make and sell blank discs.