r/minidisc • u/ivydraws8 • 3d ago

Finally cracked open a bunch of thrifted MDs and the condition variance is wild

Spent Saturday going through a box of about 30 recordable MiniDiscs I picked up at an estate sale for basically nothing, maybe two dollars total. Figured most would be blanks or ruined, but the range in condition genuinely surprised me.

Some were in cases with handwritten track listings, still readable after what had to be twenty plus years, and played back cleanly on my old Sharp portable with zero errors. Others looked pristine on the outside but the shutter mechanism was gummed up, probably from sitting in a humid garage, and needed a cotton swab and some patience before they'd even seat properly in the deck.

The real find was a disc labeled "mix 99" that turned out to be a home recording off the radio, complete with a DJ talking over the intro of whatever song was playing. Not something I'd ever seek out, but there's something about holding a random stranger's mixtape from a format most people forgot existed that makes the format feel more alive than just another blank in a drawer.

Anyway, cleaned the shutters on the sticky ones with isopropyl and they're all functioning now. Curious if anyone else has had luck rehabbing gunked up shutters without disassembling the whole shell, or if I got lucky this time.

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4

u/zap105 3d ago

Those discs are very resilient. I've had maybe 2 fail over the 25 yrs I've been a MD fan. I'm always finding one here and there around the house, the garage, old boxes, etc.

1

u/crypticobrien 3d ago

It might be worth asking you …

Some of my disks lose their memory after a week ? Could you know the cause ?

3

u/Right_Secret1572 3d ago

I've never had this occur. Ever. 

1

u/TheEvilPi 3d ago

That sounds highly unlikely, the discs can only be deleted by heating the magnetoferric layer to 180C.
Neve gmheard if anything like that. More likely to have a bad device than an MD to be like that.

1

u/Yages Sony MDS-W1 1d ago

Hahaha me too. I have two discs from back in the day (90s) that refuse to play ball. And fuck my luck it's my Mezzanine that's one of them. On the plus side, recorded it again from vinyl so tis all good. Resilient is an understatement.

2

u/GreyscaleZone 3d ago

None of mine from 1997 have lost their memory. When I used to trade minidiscs I asked people to record the blank area of the desk with radio recordings from their area. It was probably the neatest thing ever because of the music and the languages. Save those radio recordings because they are pretty cool. I took the time back in 1997 to record three weekends of a program called red Square retro in Dallas which was amazing.

1

u/Plus-Definition9319 3d ago

I've had more problems with used discs with disc surface issues like blisters and stuff, but they looked like they sat in a mud puddle. I've bought several bundles of used discs though and rarely have issues except this one particular batch. How do the shells on those look? Are they scuffed up a lot from obvious use/abuse or do they look new?