6. Compact Discs To MiniDisc

The early 1980s also saw the arrival of the compact disc. The first mass-market optical disc technology, compact disc players quickly became portable, with the first mobile devices appearing in 1984. Sony initially called its systems Discman, but the name was changed to the more familiar Walkman brand. Portable players followed the same route as the compact cassette, offering portable personal stereo options - often with much-needed anti-skip buffers for mobile use - and larger, combined radio-cassette-CD units, which added CD functions to the familiar radio cassette format.

As an initial stop gap measure, cassette tape adapters could be used to connect CD players to existing car audio systems. The first dedicated in-car systems arrived in 1984, alongside the portable players. In-car CD players are generally either single slot devices or CD changers, the latter controlled by an in-dash head unit, with discs being loaded into a cartridge. Often requiring installation by specialists, changers became a feature of high-end car audio systems. General purpose slot loading systems were fitted by car manufacturers, and became a standard audio component by the end of the 1990s.

Digital tape systems arrived in 1987. Philips DCC had poor uptake, but Sony's DAT has become a key recording technology, and portable DAT recorders are used by radio broadcasters, as well as in audio mastering.

Sony's 10th anniversary portable Mini Disc player.

A comparatively unsuccessful follow-up to the CD was the MiniDisc, launched in 1992. The discs were smaller than CDs and used Sony's proprietary ATRAC compression to store up to 80 minutes of music; there was also a short-lived data version. Players could handle two types of disks: premastered read-only disks and read-write magneto-optical disks. Both disk types were mounted in a protective cartridge. In a short format war with the rival Digital Compact Cassette tape, MiniDisc's formidable Sony backing won the day, but despite MiniDisc's success, it never became a popular format. Even support for MP3 didn't help, as Sony only allowed you to record onto discs, not transfer MP3 data back to your PC from them. Recordable discs were popular with journalists, as they were more reliable than dictation tapes, and low quality recording options allowed many hours of voice recordings to be stored on a single disc. The new 1 GB Hi-MD format is suitable for data storage as well as audio, and players can be mounted on PCs using USB. Players are backwards compatible with standard MiniDiscs.

MiniDisc had one advantage over CD as a portable media device: the hardware specifications required at least 10 seconds of buffer time. This meant that skipping was rare, and MiniDiscs could be used during exercise. Players could also be very small, in some cases not much bigger than a disc cartridge. Sony also produced larger portable devices, using MiniDisc to replace the cassette tape.

The NetMD digital media variant could be used to store and playback your digital media, using Sony's proprietary software to load data onto discs. This was a one way process, though - media stored on a NetMD device could not be copied back to another PC - though newer software versions for use with Hi-MD players allow two-way music transfers. Native MP3 support was added in 2005, though this hasn't made much of an impact on the market, mainly due to the impact of high capacity hard disc and flash-based media players.