Sony made some really sexy devices, but the format itself just came out too late for it to have widespread consumer appeal. MP3 was just way more convenient, and a lot of folks still rocked discmans like myself.
That said: it was actually a very popular format for the media. I was a journalism student 2001-2005 and it was the format we recorded all interviews on. The radio station where I worked at had MD gear, but also used Marantz compactflash recorders, which I personally preferred.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!
where it positioned itself as a promising alternative to CDs.
Well, to cassettes actually… or both.
The format never made it big in Canada so I was oblivious.
But I still have many Walkman models, and I love them.
It probably would have dominated the market for a good while if Sony hadnt taken so long to ship mini disk storage drives for computers.
I remember having that “net” version of a MiniDisc player, and I would have kept it but it was SO slow to copy music from your computer onto the device.
Plus eBay had those stick shaped MP3 players for about £25 which could hold around an album’s worth of music, and transfer times were much faster; although slow by today’s standard
Great writeup.
