today i saw come MD’s for sale: specifically 2 kinds of Sony Brands. the “Illumina” (i think) and the regular kind. the Illumna’s were 20% cheaper. Is it because of lesser sound quality or are they just not as durable? for that matter, how are other brand MDs (TDK, etc)?
today i saw come MD’s for sale: specifically 2 kinds of Sony Brands. the “Illumina” (i think) and the regular kind. the Illumna’s were 20% cheaper. Is it because of lesser sound quality or are they just not as durable? for that matter, how are other brand MDs (TDK, etc)?
Hmm, never heard of ‘illumina’, but it could be one of those regional marketing things.
That aside, there are many brands of -mini discs-, and any of the media produced by a major manufacturer, should be ok.
The majors are of course sony, tdk, maxell, memorex.
From experience, maxell and tdk, are the best producers of mass market media. They’ve both specialized in it for years.
They win hands down for highest quality, and you can never go wrong by purchasing either brand.
Then, mini discs, are rather immune to media vagaries.
As far as recording the information, they’ll all perform equally well.
You won’t be able to hear any difference between the cheap, and the expensive.
I generally buy, whats on sale, at about $2 per.
Ten for twenty is a good price, no matter what brand,
and then sometimes they come in colors, or have a free storage case.
As for durability, do you just load them into the player, or do you stomp on them first?
Its a lot harder to kill than a floppy disk, or a cassette.
Your call of brand, even the cheap ones are virtually indestructable, and will reproduce the sound correctly.
The only difference I’ve heard of between the different types of Minidisc media is that some had formatting issues- the recorder and the media did not work properly together and there were TOC editing error messages reported. Whether this is a case of poor media or a badly designed recorder, I dunno. There should be no differences in the audio quality of the media itself.
I read it either on http://www.minidisc.org/ or http://www.t-station.net/ (both great resources) but was not able to find the original story. I do not know of the specific differences in the media you mentioned but I’m sure someone on either of those sites has done a comparison. I’ve got a Sharp 722C and lots of Maxell colored MDs and haven’t had a problem yet (knock on wood).