Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

Personally I'm more of a fan of minidisc. You can get minidisc players for $100 or so on Ebay and they occasionally show up at the local reuse center for less than that and my experience is that 100% of the minidisc players I've picked up worked (had one fail in six months though...), in contrast to about a 40% success rate with cassette decks. You can buy minidiscs in bulk from Japan for about $1.50 each, which is cheaper than Type 2 tapes. Portable minidisc players are available and can be plugged into your computer via USB to record music with names for the tracks.

My reuse center got two DAT decks, one of which looked terribly trashed, for $200 a piece. Nein Danke!

MD pricing can definitely be hit-or-miss, especially on those desirable USB NetMD units. But enough were sold that a little patience all but guarantees you'll find something satisfactory.

It comes across as weird to me that it's so hard to get an actual NetMD deck which isn't portable since my mental image is that I make cassette tapes with a deck plugged into my stereo/computer and play them back on a walkman or car deck. But yeah, at some point I just started recording MD's off my computer the same way I record cassettes.

I can only assume Sony thought that most people wouldn't keep a hifi deck near an early 00s desktop PC. And by the NetMD era, portable MP3 was the hot new thing so that got most of the attention. There were some cool Vaio PCs and laptops with NetMD drives built in that I would like to play with...

There's an active community around MiniDisc these days. r/minidisc and Discord are the places to check. People have been building replacement gumstick Li ion batteries with reasonable quality and there are replacement OLED displays for RH1 and RH10 Sony players. Mechanisms will eventually fail, I suppose, but for now you can still enjoy the format.

On the software end, web.minidisc.wiki has come a long way and there are even projects to expand the functionality of player firmware. Cool hobby, if you're into that.

Minidisc was where the fun was, it sounded good and the Walkmen were small. I loved that you could edit the md. Which meant if you recorded off the radio, you could instantly have your favorite song on repeat (with DJs talking over the song of course, but it beat waiting weeks before something would be available) - never got a DAT deck because MD was so much more convenient. And then MP3 players came - those with Rockbox were peak fun.

My son wanted to make a friend of his a mix tape, so I just recently went through the process of trying to get him a tape deck he could record to. Older decks on ebay are dicey, I got one labeled as "tested and working", but it arrived and was definitely not. "LOL, I just copied and pasted another listing, didn't read it". I got this weird deck that looks like the old portable decks from the '80s, but it can record to and from a USB, and once he figured out the right levels and compression settings (audio, not digital), he was able to make a reasonable sounding cassette. We had a lot of discussions about S/N ratios and bandwidth that I never expected to have with him.

My main 2-channel system is a Denon AV Receiver with a burned out video board, two Panasonic speakers I got for 1/10 the original cost and a stack of obsolete audio sources (two tape decks and a minidisc player) next to a M4 Mac Mini with a USB audio out that has coax, optical and analog outs so I have all the bases covered. By far the computer is the most common playback source.

The PC is for me as well - I run a Lenovo ThinkCentre tiny through a Yamaha MD8 MiniDisc multi-track recorder which then goes into my Yamaha 5.1 receiver. The MD8 is used for karaoke, and the receiver uses Dolby ProLogic to make it surround.

For recording MDs I use a Sony MZ-N920 with Web MiniDisc Pro.

I have five tape decks and two of them work. Most of them were fairly cheap (<$40) but I tried buying one really elite Sony deck with Dolby S that I got one good recording out before one of the heads wound up rotated 90 degrees away from where it should be.

I think the story is that the quality of a tape deck is inversely proportional to its need for maintenance. Any deck made in the last 20 years has the same mechanism

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-last-cassette-pl...

which is mediocre sounding but reliable. TEAC makes a dual deck model that costs about $600 (crazy!) but probably sounds about as good as $50 deck from back in the day, they say is the most dependable deck they ever made.

Between having two A/V systems and a tapehead in the family I am still looking for another one. I'd like an elite deck but probably won't get one. My son brought home a reel-to-reel that didn't work and he's still hoping he can get one that does.

I always wanted a Nakamichi Dragon when I was a kid. A year or so ago I thought "Ooh, maybe I can afford a used one on Ebay now." I cannot afford one on Ebay now. They're still like $3,500USD.

If Sony mastered interface, a GUI for music rearrangement, they could have stopped the iPod and iTunes in its tracks. Apple took away some of the freedom that managing discs and tapes gave, with the upshot of a proper visual interface.