Well, it's been a good fifteen years.Sony has officially cut off support for SonicStage. It's been over a year since the introduction of their flagship (and evidently, last) unit, the MZ-RH1. They've also abandoned the ATRAC format in their newer flash units.

Over the last year, most brick-and-mortar retailers have stopped carrying blank media for the format, and companies like TDK and Maxell have stopped making them altogether.

Lower the flags to half-mast, gang: this really is it.

Here's the obscure but lovely Sony MZ-E630. This is an older MDLP (ie. legacy) MiniDisc player. For some reason, it's not listed in the MDCF equipment browser, but it does in fact exist. Just like Bigfoot.

These are 2005 Special Edition MiniDiscs from TDK:

Here they are with my trusty DR7:

They're a slight variation on the HO series. The bottom two discs are the …

The わ series are TDK's flagship minidisc blanks for 2006. The word "sublime" comes to mind…

(Bottom two rows. From top left, L-R: 2003 HO series yellow, 2004 …

On to the torture test: the local shooting range. I've found that this is the absolute worst acoustic environment I've ever run across. The average gunshot is ~155db at ten feet. You've got a situation where the ambient sound level …

I've been a fan of MiniDisc for awhile. My primary recording unit is my DR7, bought back in 2003, and as is typical, it still serves me fine to this day.

I had a Nomad Jukebox 3 that worked well as …

Not many folks noticed Sony's announcement earlier this year that they'd be phasing out the Minidisc format. In fact, most people were unaware that it was even still alive in the 21st century.

As it turns out, Sony …

Sound waves are delicate and fragile things. They need a medium simply to exist at all, and any variations or interference in the ether can change their whole character.

Ever since 33.3 LPs started coming out in stereo, we've had …

This is the second-generation Hi-MD playback unit. Notice the similarities to last year's MZ-E630 MDLP player. This unit has the HD amp as well as a connexion for an external battery pack. …

A bit back I posted that Rio had gone belly-up. All assets had been sold to Sigmatel, and hope for anything developed by their team looked lost.

Looks like I jumped the gun.

Turns out, Sigmatel has kept Rio's development …

Sony is finally phasing out the DAT medium (Babelfish translation and community reaction). To be honest, I thought this happened years ago. There are no plans to cease production on the blank tapes themselves, but recording/playback …

I've talked about my experiences with the ihp-120 previously. It's a great piece of hardware, but iRiver really fumbled the software, and though they promised updates to rectify some of the more glaring omissions, nothing was ever released, …