MiniDisc & DAT
1987 onwardsThe CD could be played but not recorded, so for about a decade the cassette kept a job the CD could not take. Three formats arrived to fill that gap, and the fight between them is one of the better examples of a format losing for reasons that had almost nothing to do with how it sounded.
Origin
Digital Audio Tape came first. Sony intended DAT to be the home digital recorder, but technical delays pushed the launch to the late 1980s, and by then currency movements had pushed the price of a machine far above what a home buyer would pay. It never reached ordinary living rooms.
Two rival formats then arrived together in 1992, both aimed squarely at replacing the analogue cassette: Sony announced MiniDisc in September 1992 and shipped it that winter, while Philips and Matsushita launched the Digital Compact Cassette.
Sony launched the first MiniDisc players and recorders in 1992 — small square cartridges a little under three inches across, holding around 74 to 80 minutes.
How it worked
A MiniDisc is magneto-optical. A laser heats a tiny spot on the disc to the point where a magnetic field can flip it, and the spot holds that state once it cools — which is what makes the disc both recordable and re-recordable, unlike a pressed CD.
Full CD data would not fit on something that small, so MiniDisc used ATRAC, a perceptual coding scheme: a transform breaks the signal into frequency bands and discards what a listener is unlikely to hear, reducing the CD's 1.4 Mbit/s to roughly 292 kbit/s — about a five-to-one reduction.
That is the same underlying idea as MP3, arriving in the same years, and it is why both formats were argued about in identical terms.
DAT took the opposite approach. It recorded uncompressed digital audio to tape using a rotating head, borrowed from video recorders, which is why a DAT machine cost what it cost and why studios liked it.
Where they actually lived
DAT became a professional tool. Studios used it as a mastering and delivery format through the 1990s, and a great deal of music from that decade passed through a DAT machine on its way to a CD plant.
MiniDisc found its most committed users in broadcasting and field recording. It was small, it survived being carried, it could be edited on the machine itself, and it did not skip — which is why radio journalists and oral historians kept using it long after the high street had moved on.
Neither replaced the cassette at home. The cassette was already everywhere and already cheap, and by the time a MiniDisc recorder was affordable, the CD burner and then the MP3 player had taken the same job.
Then and now
Sony ceased production of MiniDisc machines in 2013, which is the point at which the format is usually called obsolete.
It has a small, genuine following now, for the same reason the cassette does: it is an object, the machines are beautifully made, and a format that failed commercially tends to have been over-engineered rather than under-engineered.
Names that mattered
Listed because of what they did, not as recommendations. Velorex Music did not make any of these.
Did you know?
- MiniDisc and Digital Compact Cassette both launched in 1992, aimed at the same customer, and neither one won.
- ATRAC compressed CD audio roughly five to one, using the same perceptual principle as MP3.
- DAT recorded uncompressed audio using a rotating head borrowed from video recorder design.
- Broadcasters and oral historians kept MiniDisc in service long after consumers abandoned it.
Remember this?
Naming tracks on a MiniDisc with a jog dial, one character at a time, and doing it anyway because the display showing the title while it played felt like the future.
Sources & further reading
- British Library — Sound and Vision blog on MiniDisc
- Library of Congress — New Sound Recording Formats (cataloguing practice)
- Library of Congress — Guide to Digital Audio Formats
Written from these sources, not copied from them. External links open in a new tab.