Replies

The Mini-Disc was a great technology. Too bad it didn't catch on. Unlike CD's its' almost impossible to scratch a mini-disc. MD's were recordable, and re-recordable, from the get get go. MD's are the perfect size. Initially MD's had a proprietary compression scheme ATRAC that was much better than MP3, in terms of sound quality. With the advent of blue lasers MD's were able to use full uncompressed data and get more than a CD's worth of music on them.

Sadly, it's one of those really geat technologies that just died off. I don't know if you can even buy an MD player/recorder today, and certainly no pre-recorded media is available in that format.

RIP Ohga-san.

I wish had could have all the money back that I spent on CDs from the period 1985 to roughly about 2006.

Over that period of time, I collected some 1,250 CDs at a personal cost of approx. $15,000. Having ripped the bulk of those CDs to MP3s, they now sit uselessly in cardboard boxes up in my attic.

For a while, I thought I would be able to recover much of my investment by putting them for sale on eBay. However, the going rate on eBay for that Dire Straits "Brothers in Arms" CD that I purchased in 1985 for $17.98 (the first CD I ever purchased) is about $1.06. Then I have to package, label and ship the damn thing, keeping my fingers crossed that I don't get a poor seller rating on eBay because the liner note booklet has scuffs around the edges and the jewel case has a slight crack on the rear side.

And about those prices I used to pay for CDs...highway robbery. For at least the first 10 years of the compact disc, we had to listen to all that jive from the record companies telling us how we had to pay these premium prices because we were getting a product of "pristine" quality that would last several lifetimes. Evidently my great-grand children, in the year 2079, would be marveling over my pristine compact discs of Supertramp's "Breakfast In America" and "Reckless" by Bryan Adams.

So compacts discs for years remained at the $15.98 to $17.98 pricepoint because we consumers bought the lie that we were paying for state-of-the-art technology that would last for generations. So we started upgrading to compact disc all those perfectly fine recordings we spent the 1970s collecting in vinyl format. How many other people besides me remember selling all those Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin LPs at yard sales so we could go to the local Tower Records to get that $15.98 CD of "Sports" by Huey Lewis and the News?

Then, in the late-1990s, when consumers realized you could buy a spindle of a hundred blank compact discs for about ten bucks at the CompUsa, they started to realize just how badly they were ripped off all those years.

It's amazing how quickly the compact disc went the way of the videotape and the floppy disk.

I've pretty much given up on buying music anymore. Now I just fire up Pandora, type in the kind of music I'm in the mood for hearing, and I'm perfectly happy to hear the same music for free that I used to spend thousands of dollars on.