Reasons to have a Laserdisc Player in 2011?

Mini Discs never really caught on int he states I knew about them but I never so much as saw a player until I went on a trip to London in 1997

 

I had a Minidisc recorder/player back in the day. My parents got it for me for my birthday. I hadn't asked for it, and I don't think I'd ever even heard of them - but I loved it. It was a Sharp model. There was nothing else like it on the market at the time; it was very compact, and could both record and play high quality digital audio.

Mine had a connected remote control that allowed you to change tracks and see song information on the little backlit LCD display. Minidisc was ahead of its time in a lot of ways. For example, it basically had a form of metadata. You could give the album a title as well as titles for each individual track. It was also a really attractive device, and was really well-built.

I was already pretty well versed in electronics by the time I got it - I must've been 11 or 12. I recorded CDs on it so I could listen to them on the go, and sometimes I would plug in a microphone so I could do interviews with my friends. I eventually figured out that I could get higher quality sound by using an optical (toslink) cable. I still have lots of discs, but I don't know where the player is. My mom probably threw it out, just like she threw away my DAT recorder.

An interesting fact about MD: Sony actually made a Minidisc camcorder. It was $2,300, and it only recorded 10 minutes of video. I got to play around with one at the Sony Store in Chicago many eons ago. Even though my iPhone's camera feature surpasses it in virtually every way, I'd still love to have one.

 

I still use my MiniDisc player occasionally. Definitely nostalgic.

There's a release by Gescom (basically Autechre, if you've heard of them) that I really want to get:

"The first ever minidisc-only release; you reorder the 87 short tracks to construct variants of a single full-disk song. "
Basically, you put your player on random and theoretically get a new album every single time you listen to it. Works great since the seek time on MD is super tiny.

 

I had a Sony mini disc recorder/player that cost me around £249.

Then my GF of the time sat on my lap and cracked the screen while it was in my pocket. Sony wanted something ridiculous for a replacement screen

 

i still have my Sony deck hooked up to mi hifi, ocasionally listen to some MD, i would love to still use them since the sound quilty of the Sharp portable (got some) is simply outstanding, it's not the problem of getting a recorder but the disks are, as here in argentina small bands use them to record their demos, the only player that could play music with the quality of my Sharp ST66 was a Toshiba Gigabeat F20 with rockbox (custom firmware), still the Sharp beats em

 

btw, i forgot, if you wanna see some pictures of players, disc , etc, in my blog there's a post about them, spanish, but you still can watch the pictures http://www.frikidemierda.com.ar/2011/05/mini-are-disc-big-is-post.html

 

up to today there's not many better ways to get a high quality field recording beside MD...

never had one but wish i had one when i went to nobuo uematsu concert :/

 

So we've covered MD and LD

How about Vinyl I've been looking for good all in 1 record players (ie Turntable with built in speakers that don't suck)

 

Why would you want that? And why would anyone make a decent turntable that is designed for the budget market?

 

I don't have a huge room for ginormous speakers

 

There's no need to, buy some monitor speaker, I sugest JBL, and pass it thru a small amp, old audio can even be free, i recommend Technics amps, got 2 of them, there are even a lot of small sized but really powerful amps technics SA-C and SA-CH series a few Pioneer too, and in turntables, try to get a Technics SL-1200 or similar, those are the best

 

Everyone I knew back in High School/Middle School (circa 1999-2005) that had mini-disc players were Asian. Huge Filipino population about half an hour from here and many of them travel back and forth to the Philippines to see family. Never owned one myself.

 

I knew only one guy with an MD player when I was at middle school and even back then (2000ish) it was more of an obscurity. Everybody had Discmans back then.

 

I don't want to derail this topic too much, but I was in an antique mall the other day and found a copy of 'Star Wars' on Super 8 film. It's got me kinda interested in that film medium now. I was looking at some projectors on ebay and found some for about $20. However, shipping is just as much.

 

It's a great medium if you wanna start collecting vintage porn movies :lol:

 

Vintage porn when girls didn't shave and all the men looked like Mario

Seriously Mario has that mad 70s porn stashe going

 

lol! could you imagine someone walking in on you and you've just got this little square of flicker film on the wall.

 

That's how it was back in the day