What Sounds Better? : Compact Disc or MiniDisc?

Рет қаралды 1,661

Tech Review Guy

Күн бұрын

Пікірлер: 55

@alexs-mind 2 ай бұрын

All I have on minidiscs are the clear recorded discs purely for decoration. They just look cool to me.

@QuoPaperPlane 2 ай бұрын

I've always enjoyed playing MD since I discovered the format back in the late nineties. I use mine purely as a recording medium simply because what was released on the format regards pre recorded wasn't my cup of tea. Tons of 'popular' music which I don't listen to hardly but It's great to record one's own material and the fact I can use it with the mic jack for dictation or whatever, the quality is right up there. I love the on-board editing facilities which are so intuitive. Who knows, there maybe a renaisance, a bit like audio cassettes and many will see just what they missed out on.

@jamesslick4790 2 ай бұрын

Of course I had a home MiniDisc recorder AND a portable "Walkman" MiniDisc player, BUT, I am one of the FEW people in the US who had a MiniDisc player in my car. (I couldn't find a CAR player locally, but a friend of mine in the Army brought me one home from Japan, A Sony- natch!) MiniDisc was (to me) the ULTIMATE replacement for Cassettes. CDs are compact for sure, but ONLY compared to LPs. They were NOT as convenient for portable (or frankly for mobile) use as Cassette, MiniDisc WAS. They were small enough to put a few in your pocket, The enclosure meant they could rattle around in the glove box with no worries. In the era before CD-R was a "thing" it was the BEST format for making DIGITAL "Mixtapes". I wish it was as "big" in the US as it was in Asia. LONG LIVE PHYSICAL MEDIA! Edit: I STILL have a home MiniDisc player/Recorder and a BUNCH of MiniDiscs. You COULD say that I am a fan of this format! LOL.

@robfriedrich2822 2 ай бұрын

I used Minidisc as "poor man's reel tape" especially the editing features and the stable sound quality as a new Type IV tape on a new unit.

@jamesslick4790 2 ай бұрын

@@robfriedrich2822 YES, I'm an (Decidedly amateur) musician (keys) and I HAD "open reel" machines, And I know how "old heads" dig analog, (I'm 62 years old..) But, THIS , THIS whole digital "thing" was a "game changer".

@ronny332 2 ай бұрын

The highest bit depth of 20-bit of the Minidisc doesn't matter in this case, at least it's marketing and not needed. You won't hear a difference in noise with normal dithering applied and regular music compared to 16-bit material. Everything else on Mindisc is a reduced data amount compared to the master material. The first generation of devices used a very rushed out first version of the Atrac codec. It was really harsh and had to be updated by a new version, about 2 years later. The later models, starting from 1997, were really good in recording, until 2000 is got even a bit better. BUT, it's still reduced material. If you can't hear the difference, good. But there has to be a difference technically. I'm a vintage collector and lover of devices from this ear. My Sony MDS-JA50ES sounds pretty good, I would say close to perfect. Compared to the also hooked up Sony CDP-XA50ES I can't spot a big difference, only the heights are a bit reduced. In the end much has to be searched at the D-A part of things. If your conversion from Digital to Analog is close to lossless (hard to do) you might hear a difference. But in the normal daily usage (like I did on the train back in the day for instance), Minidisc is/was close to perfect. Like a CD, but even more portable.

@nooneinpart 2 ай бұрын

Yeah, it definitely reminds me of the whole Mastered for iTunes thing Apple did where they touted how being supplied with high bit depth files allowed their AAC encoders to create a faithful output. In reality that 256k AAC file will only be accurate for the top few most significant bits and the rest of them will be completely different to the source, but maybe if you boost the volume in a super quiet segment (to the point of inaudibility under normal listening conditions) it might sound better compared to a truncated 16bit file? I should probably give that a try.

@ronny332 2 ай бұрын

@@nooneinpart 20-bit doesn't "sound" better. What 20-bit is better in is the noise floor. So from no amplitude to max amplitude of the signal. But as written, with dithering, what's almost always applied to 16-bit material after mastering, you have a noise floor we humans are not able to hear in normal circumstances. so don't worry about 20-bit and up 🙂might matter in movies with very low and loud Scenes. but even there DTS Masteraudio just has 16-bit and it sounds awesome.

@nooneinpart 2 ай бұрын

@ Yeah, that’s what I meant by boosting the volume to hear inaudibly quiet sounds, that’s how I checked to see if a dithering plugin I got for foobar2000 worked or not. Fade-outs will sound distorted going past the 16bit point without dithering, but they sound fine with dithering. But again, this is all past the point of normal audibility, in fact you would probably damage your hearing if normal volume content were to resume at this boosted level. It’s essentially placebo but it just feels right to get it right.

@ronny332 2 ай бұрын

@@nooneinpart exactly 🙂

@markmarkofkane8167 2 ай бұрын

Never had a minidisc player. I got a minidisc from 1992. It came with my Rolling Stone magazine. But I didn't want to buy another media player. I already had a CD player. But now, I'd like to have one. It's a shame it didn't catch on like CD's did.

@thatBrickishkid 2 ай бұрын

id love that mini disc player

@lutello3012 2 ай бұрын

Both are 16bit 44.1khz but CD is better by definition because it doesn't reduce the bitrate using lossy compression. Having said that, I personally can't hear the difference.

@jamesslick4790 2 ай бұрын

MOST people can't tell the difference. One would need PERFECT, "lab spec" optimal hearing, that FEW would have. Most people can't tell a GOOD *.Mp3 from a *.WAV file. Uncompressed AND "higher than CD" files ARE needed when doing editing and mixing (I'm a musician). but the FINAL "record" rendered "down" to an Mp3 or a MiniDisc is STILL going to be "above" the "resolution" that 99.9999% of what most humans can hear.

@nooneinpart 2 ай бұрын

@@jamesslick4790 This is true for the SP MiniDisc modes (so basically all commercially released discs), but once you start moving into the MDLP modes it starts to no longer be the case. A 2004 listening test by Roberto Amorim saw ATRAC3 at 132kbps (LP2) ranked at last place compared to MPC, Vorbis, MP3, AAC, and WMA at similar bitrates.

@CBitsTech Ай бұрын

@@jamesslick4790Well said!

@ralphreinhardt6020 2 ай бұрын

MDs are pretty cool , always wanted to get into them. Got ready in the mid 90's for the big MD wave they said was coming to the US. It never really did. Still they are nea ! 😎👍

@jamesslick4790 2 ай бұрын

I'm in the US and I went "All in" on MiniDisc in the 1990s (And regret NOTHING!) It replaced cassette for me as a recording medium (Amateur musician), The BEST part: I recorded by children in full, glorious DIGITAL perfection (They were born 1990, 1992) Their young voices were preserved (Now saved as *.WAV files) in a much more realistic quality than the rim driven 3" reel to reel tapes that MY earliest recordings render. This was an AWESOME format, Never "sold" as a medium for pre-recorded music format , but for those who wanted TO record. (Kind of what Betamax was, a RECORDING format.).

@jamesslick4790 2 ай бұрын

The 3.5" floppy disk that we all knew ALSO was developed by Sony. The resemblance is almost certainly no accident.

@cappaculla 2 ай бұрын

It wasn't a nostalgic choice

@jamesslick4790 Ай бұрын

@@cappaculla It would not have been "nostalgia" The 3.5" floppy is only a few years older than MiniDisc. It was just a Sony design continuum.

@homeopathical 2 ай бұрын

I found the sound quality from a Sony MDS-JE500 to be better compared to a Marantz CD player CD52 Mk2 SE, so much so, when I used the CD player as a transport and the MD player as a 'DAC' it was better than the CD unit. My feeling is that those Sony MD players had really good on-board DACs in them and the decoding for MiniDiscs was excellent. A forgotten format now, really but I've still got my portable Sony MD player for the very rare playback nostalgia trip. Thanks for your great video 🤩👍

@FranklyPeetoons 2 ай бұрын

I used to have a minidisc player/recorder. I used it on a set with wireless mics to record dialogue for video. Sound quality was great, but operation was cumbersome and the recorder interface was confusing. Compression is lossy on minidiscs, so technically its sound isn't as accurate as that of a CD - although I couldn't hear the difference initially. However, when manipulating the audio in a 2004-era DAW sometimes it "broke" a little bit. Later I put the MD unit on ebay and it actually sold for way more than I paid for it.

@platterjockey 2 ай бұрын

Back in the early 90s, I compared minidisc and CD on a home stereo system. The CD won. One of the titles I compared was Tina Turner's "Private Dancer" album. They were close, but no dice. CD won. The minidisc version was drier and had artifacts.

@Christian-fu8vx 2 ай бұрын

The Minidisc recorder Sony JA333Es or 555es is one of the best digital recorders. If you have one, you can be lucky. Only High End Cassette recorders or reel to reels are better.

@robfriedrich2822 2 ай бұрын

Pre recorded Minidiscs were produced the same way as CDs and it would used one side only.

@stpworld 2 ай бұрын

I have a mega rare pre recorded disney mini disc album it may even be the only one but imnnot sure

@Capturing-Memories 2 ай бұрын

CD obviously.

@robfriedrich2822 2 ай бұрын

4:58 I have lots of them. Should make them to money

@DanielGlover 2 ай бұрын

Had a Sony portable with what would now be a low capacity battery for the battery size. Things move on 1997. At Salisbury college doing Sound engineering. then got a HIFI separate then next year the slightly different (same thing at a glance) never model. 3 things, Portable long gone on Ebay. 1 mains powered separate, mechanism gone. Wont load, eject, I can't mend it. 1 still goes. Use to take music from TV programs. then plug into computer with the analog audio in. Make CD from the saved Wave files from audio program, recording software. I still use 1 last one remaining every now and then. CD mains powered separate thing was 1992. Late to the party on those. Minidisc compress with a Sony system. CD better on paper. Really to me those, all the same. Writing before I had video on!.

@jamesslick4790 2 ай бұрын

Luckily my existing MiniDisc gear is 100% working. I have been a fan of this format since it came out. Too bad it did not get as big in the US as it did in Japan.

@DanielGlover 2 ай бұрын

@@jamesslick4790 Never lasted in England as well. I liked. Used at church from the mixing desk output. Mix as a stereo mix by a bit of panning on drums. mics, backing lot. Straight to MD then back home, to computer as the digital output on a nice dear back then soundblaster card, digital in. Then tracks to CD. Now use for the TV audio, concerts or such like programs. I had a CD, MD separate once. Like your normal black 1999 CD player but a bit longer as MD one end. CD the other. display in the middle. Now just the 1 of 2 working Sony little neat pop under the mini system. As i did. some nice stacking Technics thing from 1998 onwards. That long gone. 1 MD thing working left. Used once a year if lucky. Still got lots of discs I made up. music from our UK top 40, chart show back in the day. top and tail the songs, good for youth club disco I did. club helper. Good old days. music groups and sound things, discos (I had the stuff). All gone now. getting old and boring.

@robfriedrich2822 2 ай бұрын

Funny thing is, in blind tests people prefered the Minidisc sound over CD. Prerecorded Minidiscs makes nearly no sense. It's different to MusiCassettes, where the portability was unique. With Discman & co, there was a digital medium, what is portable, Minidisc could interest as recording medium only.

@spellerlittlewing 2 ай бұрын

I wonder why these didn’t sell well I had a few of them the was good

@The-Scots-man 2 ай бұрын

I have various minidisc player/recorders. Fill size, midi and portable. Only recently I bought 2 Denon midi sized decks for £20 each. My favourite one is my Sony Hi-MD portable. Even with higher compression it still sounds great, although nowhere near CD quality which should be obvious to anyone that owns a Minidisc player.

@umbrellacorp. 2 ай бұрын

Okay. Now, what songs are better? Flac or Mp3. Because I can't tell the difference. If both are downloaded the same bit rate and in HiFi. Is there any difference?.

@rauland 2 ай бұрын

Short answer, no. As long as both formats are of the same bitrate and sampling, there is no difference.

@nooneinpart 2 ай бұрын

The FLAC can’t be the same bitrate as MP3 because the way it stores data is fundamentally different. MP3 throws away frequencies you can’t hear (well). FLAC cannot do that, what it does is replicate the exact sound wave with some tricks to reduce the amount of data needed for that (algorithms to predict what the sound wave will look like, plus correction data to fix the prediction errors). This requires a lot more data but it is exact representation of the source file. FLAC is technically higher quality than MP3, but restrictions apply. If your source is MP3, the FLAC will be the exact same quality, except wasting a lot more data trying to faithfully represent the decoded MP3 perfectly. MP3s at 256k bitrate or higher tend to be very hard to differentiate from the original source. This is 3-4x smaller than a CD quality flac.

@GladeSwope Ай бұрын

Looks a lot like the 100MB "Zip Disk" that I had in the early 2000s.

@maxchinn6150 2 ай бұрын

A brilliant recording format better than tape 😊

@QuoPaperPlane 2 ай бұрын

When it comes to the editing facilities, there's no contest but I do still enjoy listening to audio cassettes provided it's a good recording on a quality machine.

@EastAngliaUK 2 ай бұрын

no sound test oh well

@CBitsTech Ай бұрын

Hi fellow UKer. It would be great to have a sound test, I agree, but KZbin converts and compresses the video and sound on uploaded videos, so it wouldn't really give us a true comparison.

@MrSlipstreem 2 ай бұрын

As someone else has pointed out, not all MiniDisc recordings and decks were equal. The first iteration of ATRAC sounded absolutely awful. Distortion was clearly audible at all times giving everything a metallic sound. To my youngish ears at the time, it sounded like a band of tone deaf Daleks performing very bad cover versions. MiniDisc did improve significantly with later iterations of ATRAC, but it wasn't until around 1999 that it improved sufficiently to be taken seriously with the advent of ATRAC3. I had hi-fi cassette decks in 1992 that massively outperformed MiniDisc sonically, so I stuck to those until the LAME MP3 encoder had matured enough to make perceptually transparent encodings.

@jrockofages5413 28 күн бұрын

Does anyone repair these old minidisc player/recorders? I have a Sharp MD-R2 that I'm getting TOC errors on now.

@CBitsTech Ай бұрын

"They say" that minidiscs you record yourself on later models of recorders have better quality than factory-pressed minidiscs because the encoding got better over time. I don't have great ears so I cant tell, so I'm looking forward to any videos you make on the subject. There are a lot of comments here about minidisc being worse than CD because the compression is lossy. I wonder if they've even listened to a minidisc. In theory the compression discards frequencies that can't be heard. And surely a good DAC in a MD player would give a better sound than a poor DAC in a CD player. MD was never meant to be better, it was meant to be more portable. It's certainly a more interesting experience than CD. But what would I know, I like minidiscs and even cassettes. Oh, and I made quite a few videos on minidisc on my channel. Thanks for the video.

@MikinessAnalog 2 ай бұрын

Canadian "aboot"

@vsammy_poet 6 күн бұрын

MiniDisc is great. I used it back in days a lot for Recording from PC audio sources. 🤔.. Its a bummer that my JVC CD/MD deck that i bought new back in beginning of 2000, got failure. And the MD side wont work anymore there ok.. Should buy some other secondhand Deck as i have lot of MD discs in my collections.. 🤔

@tiomkinnyborg2289 2 ай бұрын

Mini disc could have taken over and been the dominant digital format but they made recording difficult. They introduces 'generational degradation' to spoil recordings. Kind of like how a cassette gets worse the more it is copied. Music studios would have lapped this format up but Sony greed killed it.. They did the same crap with their MP3 players. Everyone else allowed 'drag and drop' but for Sony, you had to check in your music through a slow and painful program. Sony is their own worst enemy. I stopped buying Sony after MD came out.

@That70sKid 2 ай бұрын

When Minidisc debuted in November of 1992, the lossy codec it used (ATRAC) was equal to 128kb MP3. It sounded bad, with lots of compression artifacts, which is why the format tanked here in North America. The music industry refused to support it because it was so inferior to CD, and very few albums were released on Minidisc. Also, the first blank Minidiscs couldn't be erased like cassettes. Sony would vastly improve the Minidisc, upping ATRAC to near lossless quality and introducing rewriteable blank Minidiscs, but by then, it was too late - everyone had a rewriteable CD burner in their computer, MP3 was the lossy digital format of choice, and nobody cared about Minidisc. The format was doomed here from the beginning, as Sony rushed it to market before it was perfected, fearing it would lose the portable recordable disc format war to come, as its Betamax lost the video format war to VHS. There was no portable recordable CD format war - its main competitor, Philips, inventor of VHS, gave up on its own format when the Minidisc bombed in the North American market.