What are the worst tech purchases you or your family have ever made?
I watched a video recently and wanted to know what other have bought over the years.
What are the worst tech purchases you or your family have ever made?
I watched a video recently and wanted to know what other have bought over the years.
I am still very fond of MiniDisc and have all my old discs and equipment, which still works and plays just fine. But yeah, the 2000s were the decade of DRM and Sony’s tech side was constantly at odds with its media side. Limitations on optical recording & dubbing from MD to MD, using their horrible SonicStage software for NetMD, and horrible marketing overseas handicapped them constantly.
They finally got it right with their very last flagship NetMD portable (apart from its OLED screens dying after a few years) but by then Apple had made the iPod the default portable listening experience and Sony had very obviously lost.
They did make some excellent MP3 players, but once again: proprietary data connectors, restrictive media transfers, poor CODEC support, and freaking SonicStage made using those a nightmare as well. They never did learn.
MiniDisc as a format seemed to make huge sense at the time - mp3’s were a thing, but writable CDs were clunky and iPods hadn’t arrived yet. But yes - it was unusable - literally - I don’t remember actually being able to listen to anything I really wanted to listen to on it.
Your mention of NetMD awoke memories of absolute rage for me! Just trying to install it was flakey. Then trying to get MP3’s onto disc - it was never clear where the bugs stopped and where the DRM started. It simply didn’t work. I was left feeling Sony were actively hostile to their customers. Never again!
Ha ha then allow me to remind you of Sony’s pre-NetMD USB adapter that kinda turned a USB signal into either TOSLink optical or analogue stereo so you could play your files on a computer and record to MD in real time!
Yeah, their software was trash, probably written solely to support ad copy in an attempt to lure MP3 people to MD.
As someone who made mix tapes and wanted all of an album’s B-sides in one place, MD was amazing and I embraced it as a replacement for cassettes. No cassette wobble, hiss, or getting eaten, no LP warp, surface noise, or skipping. It was digital purity in the palm of my hand, and for a while it sounded far better than MP3s.
But LAME got better and better, we started getting more storage and FLAC files and hard drive MP3 jukeboxes like the Rio Karma and Creative Nomad…MDs could not compete no matter how desperate Sony got.
I still love my MD equipment and have hundreds of discs that all still play beautifully. But the format is a historic footnote that (sadly) really did lean into its own obsolescence.