GESCOM
MiniDisc
ONLY3CD
Or 1998/2006
45 Tracks. 66mins18secs

Audio visual history is full of obsolete formats, and recent years have been particular harsh, with audio cassettes, DAT, VHS, S-VHS, betamax, videodiscs or Philips’s ill-fated DCC, to name but a handful, all biting the dust in a matter of years, while the CD is getting under constant attack from MP3 players and computers, and even the DVD seems doomed as hard-drive recorders become more common and broadband is more widely available and faster. Only the vinyl record has regained some market shares.

One of these almost entirely extinct formats is Sony’s minidisc. Launched only fifteen years ago, it looked for a while as it was here to stay, but, with the arrival of the iPod and other MP3 players, the format rapidly became doomed. It was different when Gescom released Minidisc back in 1998. Continue Reading »