Exactly 36 years ago, I was 7 years old and I remember going into an electronics shop that caught my eye.
I was literally always interested in electronics. I finally summoned up the courage and went in. The inside this shop that to me looked like a candy shop, was very friendly man. I ended up convincing my parents to buy me my first electronics kit from him, an audio amp.
I soldered the kit, placed it in a fancy metal box, together with heavy transformer, making the thing pretty beefy, all of which was purchased from him. I remember bringing it to the shop to show it off. He was very happy with my work.
My parents ended up buying more and more kits, and I remember very clearly just randomly coming into the shop when I would pass by for many years later. He was always himself, friendly, helpful, busy helping someone or repairing something, smoking, always smoking.
Not too long ago I passed there again and remember seeing the shop has closed. It was a sad moment.
David, believe it or not is literally the guy who is the repairman mentioned in the story must be at the very least 70 by now. I ended up spending half an hour reading some of the stuff he wrote in the guide, just for the sake of some glimpse of good old times.
I hope he still lives! I'm sure there are many other kids and teens he positively touched.
A high school friend bought a Minidisc recorder (pretty sure it was a Sharp) with his summer job earnings, and at the time (1997ish) it was an incredible object - battery technology more advanced than NiCad, LCD display of track titles, easily able to create mix MDs of anything, wouldn't skip even over rural Northern Irish roads (which are not good at the best of times, and are certainly not good when being driven in an aging Vauxhall Cavalier at significantly faster than the posted speed limits). But the counterpoint to the linked article is that he was about 30 metres from the epicentre of the Omagh bombing, and the minidisc recorder in his pocket did significant damage to his abdomen and still worked perfectly afterwards. Apparently not everyone built them fragile.
I had a couple of MD players/recorders (they could do both from memory) back in the day - I still view them with a fondness I have never been able to muster for any other class of device.
Something about the size, intricate control buttons and switches, the jewelled MD disc case just made the whole thing delightful to me as a 15 year old.
Perhaps it was also due to me developing my own taste in music at the time that I am linking the nostalgia of that to the players themselves.
I had a Minidisc player as well, and I know exactly what you mean. In my view, these devices were the pinnacle of Japanese industrial design broadly, and Sony Design Center specifically. The rituals around using them were the digital equivalent to playing a record.
Remember that scene in the Matrix when Neo sells an exploit(?) on a Minidisc? In 1999, they felt like the future. Plus the mobile players felt so mechanically satisfying to use.
What I really miss about them is they're theoretically great for long-term storage. The case was fairly robust, and data should be incredibly stable because the disc has to be heated past the Curie point during recording.
Totally get this. I recently revived my Aiwa MD player and now I listen to a disc or two when I'm cleaning the house - there really is something charming about the form factor that pushes my techie buttons. I just love handling the thing, it's a minor work of art.
I bought a (non-portable) minidisc player around the time 1995. I found it was the most advanced CE device for its time, certainly for its price, 300 euros or so.
It had a very user friendly and capable UI, for example, with a couple of rotations and clicks of the dial you could stitch together recorded songs. The matrix display was bright and well legible.
You could fit around 20 songs on a very small optical disc. It was quite advanced, it encoded and recorded audio in decent quality real time. It had an optical SP/DIF output.
After some years the recording feature did not work anymore, it now makes sense why, after reading the article.
It was a truely amazing and handy audio recorder/player. If it was still functional, I would still have used it for another 20 years or so.
Edit: found a 1998 review (1) about an MD very similar to mine.
I’ve used my Sony desktop md deck as a soundcard a bunch. Optical out of my Mac Pro (under the desk) into the MD unit, this use my headphones out of that (my headphones don’t reach the audio jack on my Mac Pro). Such a clear sound!
I have the same sense of nostalgic fondness for the hardware. The software, however, was terrible. If I had a nicer software solution for managing files on my MD, I might go dig it out of the closet.
In many cases I can easily see how they could've designed things such that far fewer sizes were necessary, but they don't. I do wonder if it's an early form of "anti-right-to-repair" obfuscation? For some reason, I've noticed this "design quirk" far more in various import products than domestic ones.
It's also interesting to read statements like this:
The DSP and control IC's in new Sony recorders e.g. MZ-R90/91 cannot be removed from the board due to a packaging design in which the pins are mounted under the chips and cannot be accessed for de-soldering. When these chips malfunction they are impossible to replace and the whole electronic board must be replaced at considerable expense.
...and then realise that, 23 years later, a sub-$50 hot air station can easily do that work (I'm assuming it's referring to BGA packages.)
I remember working on board repair in the early 90s, then surface mount stuff started to pop in. Equipment at the time was literally $10k in today's dollars, at least that was the figure everyone talked about ($5k-ish).
I remember attaching a thin copper wire to my soldering iron, wrapping it around the tip and then out the front, and using that to work on those tiny pads. Sort of worked. Didn't even have solder tape, just a sucker.
I didn't even understand how a hot air station worked, until youtube showed me years later (I moved onto the software side). The things people could never find out, never know, never even knew existed pre-Internet are staggering.
I don't think anyone under 30 can even begin to comprehend how limited knowledge was before. Quite often, if you wanted to know something, you literally could not find any info about it at all. You wouldn't even know what to ask, when you approached a librarian, even if they could find some book they could get from an inter-library transfer -- which where I lived, took weeks!
Such a culture shift.
But anyhow, I can imagine I'd have destroyed the board trying to get all that back together, via my soldering-iron with wire on end workaround.
people dont even understand. as a kid i would look at the content of .com files and .exe files in DOS and wonder why they didnt look like BASIC source code. wondering how the heck people made these wacky characters everywhere. had no idea what an assembler or a compiler was, and no way to find out.
as far as hardware.. .at least there was radio shack and those little books by Forrest Mims. Maybe a book at the book store. unlikely. the idea of board level repair to me would have been like aliens describing a spaceship without a translator.
I'm so glad someone else had the experience! Just being that combination of bored and curious that makes you open everything with notepad until you find something cool, clicking through windows registry entries and changing stuff to see if it does anything, then having your mind blown when you find a hex editor for the first time because you read some text file that shows you how to edit a specific value to cheat in a game .... then you kinda boggle at how they knew which value to edit. Then it takes you another 5-10 years to figure that one out. I do think I could have learned faster if I had a guide, but also not having one helped in its own weird way.
yeah i think... things are better now. people are still pushing those boundaries by poking at the unknown, and learning by exploring. like those people porting Linux to the Apple M chips. they have so many more resources so their exploration nowdays takes them so much farther than it did us back in the day trying to flip a bit in copy protection binary
This sentiment mirrors precisely how I think we might look back at a pre- augmented reality era if we can get an ‘AR web’ right. I write about it and advocate for it on my blog - this post in particular has some exposition on how I think AR could obviate keyword foraging, not knowing what questions to ask, and many other kinds of ignorance we take for granted today:
Screws usually end up different lengths and sizes for ordinary mechanical reasons (meaning, for example, if the screw was 0.5mm longer, it would interfere with something else).
The harder you are working to make the smallest thing possible, the more this happens.
Additionally, since no one has half a million 2.32mm long M1.2 screws just lying around, they're always a custom order. Might as well get the exact length you want.
In the iPhone, for example, each screw gets its own part number and each screw is custom.
Your assembly automation also affects screw choice. Some screw heads register better/faster than others depending on the size. This affects your line speed. A line might also be building sub-assemblies that are shipped to different lines with different equipment and this a whole different set of optimized part sizes.
The order you repair something isn't necessarily the order it was assembled in the factory(ies).
Yeah having worked for an electronics manufacturer they really really want to standardise this stuff where possible because every screw is a critical component and having many different types it means you can have many different chances to run out of stock and interrupt production. It also makes the manufacturing line more complex and training longer.
But in many cases there's just specific needs. Besides length, exterior screws are often countersunk, while internal ones would have flat heads to distribute the pressure over a PCB.
When it comes to stopping customers fiddling with the equipment look at Nintendo that use a different proprietary screw head for everything.
Who doesn't love how HDDs and optical drives use different screw sizes. Plus one is imperial and the other is metric. Maybe we should just feel lucky they standardized at all.
My MZ-1 died last year, after making it to almost 30 years of operation, and ate a rare MD that I hadn't archived. "No problem," I thought, "I'll just remove the disc manually."
I photographed and labelled everything in the order of disassembly, and I still can't get it back together. I'm not remotely embarrassed by it, either. After what I went through just to get it apart, I'm still astounded by the level of precision in manufacturing Japanese in the 90s were capable of.
I have two. As a consumer, travelling international longhaul for work they were amazingly good, and until mp3 players like the Archos came in, frankly indispensable.
The recording quality was phenomenal.
But the power supplies .. my God. The tiniest needle connectors I have ever seen. And super uncommon batteries.
Amen to that - I recently managed to find someone who 3D prints a shim for a standard cell and have been able to start using my otherwise perfectly functional Aiwa again. The original battery is bizarre!
I have a Sony player/recorder that served me well though grad school.
I tried it out a couple years ago. Still works. But the weird batteries no where to be found, but it had a screw on aa battery pack.
You should be able to find replacement gumstick batteries on ebay etc, but genuine sony or aiwa brand ones are a) hideously expensive and b) ludicrously underpowered - like 400mAh or less, which is worse than a single AAA
That might be an acceptable shelf-life if it's the original Aiwa Sealed Lead-Acid design, which should have a maximum shelf-life of 8 years. Would still be very iffy though.
The newer NiCd and NiMh designs would be useless of course, shelf lives of about 3 years for both.
AAs were more common on the recorders, probably because of the really terrible runtime gumsticks gave, but most of the later players (post 97? 98? whenever Sony bought Aiwa) used gumsticks, and even some of the recorders
Sony developed the gumstick format over the years, and the final ones were higher capacity - 1400mAh NiMH (so nominal 1.2v), but that's still really awful compared to a pair of AAs that would typically be 1400mAh each for cheap NiMH to 2500mAh each for higher end NiMH, or 2500mAh or so for alkalines.
The gumstick was a truely bizarre choice, the 14450/14550 and 18650 were already outperforming it massively for roughly the same size. And given sony wanted $100 for a replacement gumstick at one point, cost can't have been the reason.
I had one of the earlier Sony models, which was great - but if anything bad happened when "Writing TOC" (Table Of Contents) was happening, everything on the disc became unreadable. The filesystem was probably the worst thing about mini-disc aside from general availability.
The best thing about them was they were next gen mix-tapes, but random-access rather than sequential. It made editing a playlist way easier (sometimes maxing out available storage to the second) plus they were R/W which means they were also superior to burning CDs which were all still write-only in that era.
With the eject detection pin taped down on my player I'd read the TOC from a working disc, then swap in the broken disc and write the TOC onto it.
I had to do this often enough I made a blank disc with TOC covering its full capacity and a track mark every few minutes, to make it easier to skip through and set correct track marks on the recovered disc.
I've had a Sharp MD-MT-161E and a Sony MZ-N520. Both lasted for about 3-5 years of frequent but gentle use before they started having spin problems and giving frequent disk read errors. I'd love to get another one, but prices are high and reliability is poor. While they worked, they were really great for recording, and decent for listening to music, but today I'm using simple digital recorders that write MP3 and FLAC to SD cards and it's hard to beat them for reliability. I still hope to someday find a good deal on another minidisc player though. I'm sure I've got tracks I've recorded onto minidiscs, but never got around to copying to my PC.
I'm mostly recording music where I've got things set up in advance vs needing to quickly capture something on the fly but I've liked the Zoom H1n, Sony PCM-D100, and Sony PCM-A10
I can see that these are indeed targetting musicians and are way more sophisticated instruments than what I'm looking for. I'm still grateful for the info!
I picked that one up while traveling and I'm surprised at how good that little guy ended up being. It's lightweight and even without an external mic holds up pretty well. It's the one I tend to grab when I just want to record a melody or a few chords.
I think what's notable about this article that's not mentioned yet it's that it's written by a repairman. I do not think I would think to find an electronics repair man today except to replace the glass in my phone.
There was a time when it was clear to everyone that MiniDisc failed, but when alternative technology had not caught up for some of the applications. We hunted portable MiniDisc recorders on EBay for our student radio station, since some Sony models had perfect A/D for microphone INs. I would have payed 10x for the equipment, but most of the times we got them for 50 euros...
I repaired about two dozen units in the past three years and twenty years past their service life the most common failure mode seems to be a failing photodiode array which corrects for the tracking of the optical head. This is unfortunately beyond fixing by a hobbyist, so the minidisc format revival is effectively limited by the supply of working optical heads.
Btw my first thought (and the general consensus of the md community) was that the units fail due to dying laser diodes. I designed and built a md laser power meter (https://github.com/fijam/md-lpm) that runs off a coin cell and fits in a md disc case and every failed unit I tested had a working laser diode.
I sold a ReVox B77 analog tape recorder in mint condition for roughly the same amount as the price of a MiniDisc recorder, stereo microphone, and a bunch of discs. I was never happier. The B77 was the cadillac of ATR's at the time, but it was massive, the tapes cost an arm and a leg, and the recordings still had to be transferred to a digital format in order to do anything with them. As a result, I rarely used it.
The only annoyance was that I couldn't transfer recordings to my PC in a digital format -- thanks to copyright protection -- though I obviously owned the rights to my own recordings.
Later, the MD recorder gave way to a digital recorder with memory cards and a USB port.
But like everybody else, I loved the form factor and cleverness of the MD machine.
> The only annoyance was that I couldn't transfer recordings to my PC in a digital format -- thanks to copyright protection -- though I obviously owned the rights to my own recordings.
If it was recorded in analog, SCMS should not interfered with a digital copy, and on a PC it should been no issue at all. Slow, because real-time, but should have been near-perfect.
Of course, if you used a few hacks and two critical pieces of merchandise (MDS-W1, the only one I know of that does lossless ATRAC transfers, plus another with the TOC-cloning hack), you could make essentially infinite perfect copies.
I still have my Sony MZ-R30 and a case full of Minidiscs. In the 90s I used to DJ from minidiscs. I had two Sony MDS-DRE1 (DJ MD players [1]) and looking back I think it was really more than a gimmick since they were really impractical to carry around.
We used minidiscs at the local radio station where I volunteered. On the higher end decks you could do full interview editing just from the frontpanel. They were also great for jingles.
Before we had them interviews were literally cut on Revox big reel tape. They came with a cutter just for that purpose. The minidiscs were so amazing.
In the end it was all replaced by PCs of course but they had a good run of about 6-8 years when they were really key to our workflow.
Exactly 36 years ago, I was 7 years old and I remember going into an electronics shop that caught my eye.
I was literally always interested in electronics. I finally summoned up the courage and went in. The inside this shop that to me looked like a candy shop, was very friendly man. I ended up convincing my parents to buy me my first electronics kit from him, an audio amp.
I soldered the kit, placed it in a fancy metal box, together with heavy transformer, making the thing pretty beefy, all of which was purchased from him. I remember bringing it to the shop to show it off. He was very happy with my work.
My parents ended up buying more and more kits, and I remember very clearly just randomly coming into the shop when I would pass by for many years later. He was always himself, friendly, helpful, busy helping someone or repairing something, smoking, always smoking.
Not too long ago I passed there again and remember seeing the shop has closed. It was a sad moment.
David, believe it or not is literally the guy who is the repairman mentioned in the story must be at the very least 70 by now. I ended up spending half an hour reading some of the stuff he wrote in the guide, just for the sake of some glimpse of good old times.
I hope he still lives! I'm sure there are many other kids and teens he positively touched.
Great memories, never to be forgotten.