Accept No Substitute (FORUM: MiniDisc VS MP3)

Member Name: kfingleton

Product:	FORUM: MiniDisc VS MP3
Date:	09/01/03 (1570 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: MP3 durability

Disadvantages: Minidisk fad

I don?t own a Minidisk player, I never have and I never will. When the format was released, it was hailed as the digital substitute for the cassette tape, but I didn?t buy that argument one bit. There?s little more satisfying to the egotist than being proven right, but now that sales in Minidisk players are falling I am being proven correct. The Minidisk is not a viable alternative to any music format. MP3s are equally feared and loathed by the music fan and record company executive respectively and rightly so. In my opinion, the MP3 format will continue to increase in strength for some time and become even more of a staple for the music fan. Here?s why?

MINIDISK
What benefits do Minidisks offer over any other format? They are smaller than CDs, size was surely a big factor in the consignment of the superior format, vinyl to the edges of sales statistics, but size wasn?t enough of an advantage for the Minidisk. CDs offered the carrot of having the word ?digital? in its name, but the Minidisk offered little in the way of new technology. The fact that the Minidisk was recordable (and rewritable) offered a fair advantage over the CD for a while (and consigned the cassette to the abyss), but not for long. Anyone with affluent enough to own a Minidisk player (which still aren?t too cheap), is most likely to own a PC or Mac with a relatively fast CD rewriter. With CD-R?s being so cheap few people even care about the ability to rewrite Minidisks, they?d rather have a permanent copy of the album or compilation that they?ve burned. Minidisk players are smaller than portable CD players and offer instant record ability, but these two advantages seem to be the only palpable advantages to owning a Minidisk recorder.

MP3
MP3?s encoded at 128kbs, or even at 190kbs are not of the same quality as CD audio or Minidisk audio and this is an argument often used to discredit the format. But for me, this argument is superfluous. The average record bu
yer (i.e. the people who collectively decide which format wins out in the end) would not be able to tell the difference between the quality of a good quality MP3 and CD audio. It is only anally retentive audiophiles such as me who can tell the difference and less again care that the quality is diminished in MP3s. The great advantage of MP3s is that they are so small in size, that even on a 56k modem; you can download them for free off the internet. This inevitably leads to accusations of freeloading and the argument that MP3s are killing the record industry. Bullshit. If anything, MP3 downloading encourages people to sample albums and if they like what they hear they?ll pay for the album, though broadband may threaten the status quo. What record company executives are really afraid of (or should be) is that the music buyer can bypass promotional pushes, sample album filler material and decide what music they WANT to listen to, rather than be fooled into buying something they won?t like for £15. There?s nothing the capitalist fears more than a sophisticated demographic of music buyers.

MP3 players have big advantages over CD players. The very small players have tremendous advantages in that they are literally tiny and are very cool. They are, however limited to one or two albums on their minimal memory and offer no record function. The real threat to the CD is the bigger players such as the Archos Jukebox or Creative Jukebox. These players aren?t any bigger than your average portable CD players, but allow you to hold hundreds of albums on their hard drives. The Mp3 player is a versatile solution to playing not only your downloaded music, but also most of your CD collection too!

MINIDISK VERSUS MP3
There simply is no contest here because only price (something that is continually dropping for MP3 players) offers an advantage to the Minidisk player. For example, my Archos Jukebox Recorder 6gb cost ?400 14 months ago. Now, the Archos J
ukebox 10gb retails at ?300! MP3 players are not much bigger than Minidisk players (and the 64mb players are far smaller). The Archos Jukebox and Creative Jukebox both offer record facilities. Every track on an MP3 player can be easily labelled via the internet, something that proves incredibly useful. You also do not need to buy any accessories such as disks after your initial purchase of an MP3 player and therefore don?t have more disks to clutter your desktop. If Minidisk was truly the successor to the cassette, it would surely have a large in-car presence by now, but it is the CD player and now even the MP3 player that is most likely to be installed in more expensive models and eventually will filter to all models. Like I say, no contest.

In my opinion, when Sony created the Minidisk as a successor, they missed the point and they missed an opportunity. The Minidisk and Philips DCC were marketed as successors to the cassette, but what was really needed for music was something that has never existed, a durable solution to all your musical needs, home stereo, car stereo, personal stereo, even for DJs. The MP3 is a solution that works and works well for all of these needs. There are some who believe that even the MP3 will be superseded by another computer format, but I really don?t buy this. The MP3 is so widespread and recognisable as a format, that any improvement technology will surely have to be backwards compatible with MP3. Just look at the MIDI format, it?s been around for 22 years and still no alternative can shake off its dominance in its niche. The MP3 is less of a threat to the CD as record company execs would like to make out, because people will always want a hard copy of their music, just in case things go wrong. But while the MP3 is here to stay, Minidisks never really lived.

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