MiniDisc Madness

I used to do a lot of field recordings. It was great to go out and record sounds in the world and turn them into art. There were a couple of CDs worth of work that I did in the late 90s and early 00s. Some of those recordings in the 90s were done on cassette tapes with a portable recorder that had a built-in microphone. Lots of Lo-Fi goodness there. But there was always the desire for a cleaner sound. When the Sony MZ-R700 MiniDisc Walkman came out it was absolutely unrivaled in performance for its cost. Today? It looks like a piece of in-between tech that never quite hit its potential. Very Betamax.

So many source recordings with that thing, though. It has amazing DACs and really did a good job with a small mic. It’s small enough for a pocket and runs on a single AA battery. Glorious! And simple!

I made a ton of mix MDs back then too. Of course, it’s like making a tape of a record. You have to plug the source into the MD recorder and record it at real time. That’s fine. Making mix tapes and the like was always fun. It’s a far cry from any music ecosystem today. And that’s almost why I pulled it out of a drawer.

I took it out and looked at it. Really LOOKED at it. What a beautiful piece of hardware. So simple. Direct. Brutally so. And still absolutely functional.

A quick test showed that an old MD I had played perfectly. And what a find that was.

In 2003 I used the MD player to record members of my family sitting around the table talking and telling stories. The cast of characters included my mom, my granny, my great aunt, and my uncle/mom’s brother. I was there, of course, but I’m not the interesting part. My great aunt, granny, and uncle are all gone. It was the first time I’d heard those voices in a long, long time. My uncle and great aunt died within months of one another in 2004-2005. It was powerful to hear those voices. Moving in a way that pictures can’t be. I sat with headphones on and one turned outward so that my daughter could hear the voices. Two of them were voices she’d never heard before. And though granny lived for quite a while longer, my daughter was quite young when granny died. There is over 30 minutes of recording. I haven’t gone through it all yet. I will. And I will digitize it to the computer for archive.

Sitting and thinking about it more, it made sense to get a newer and better mic for this little unit and continue my crusade against connected and enabled devices. This little guy will fit in my bag nicely and can be used to capture source recordings to feed my sound art. And maybe grab some people talking.