By the end of the 1980s, powerful lobbies within the U.S. music industry had all but killed off Digital Audiotape (DAT) as a popular recording medium and replacement for the aged and low-fidelity Philips Compact Cassette. This led the way for the Sony Corporation of Japan to develop its own proprietary digital recording format.
Introduced in 1992, the MiniDisc resembles a small computer floppy disk. It is a magneto-optical, disk based data storage medium able to contain up to eighty minutes of digitized audio. The disk is placed in a suitable recorder and a laser heats one side, which makes the material susceptible to a magnetic field; a magnetic head on the other side of the disk alters the polarity of the heated area, recording the digital data—a series of ones and zeros—onto the disk. To play back the audio, the laser senses the polarization of the reflected light and interprets the digital data.
After a short-lived format war with the Philips/Matsushita Digital Compact Cassette (DCC), the MiniDisc format prevailed. A factor in its success was that Sony avoided the mistakes made in the 1970s with its own Betamax video system, which failed largely because the corporation refused to allow competitors to license the technology and produce their own recorders. Although the MiniDisc became a major format in Japan, its popularity elsewhere was limited to niche markets, such as audio enthusiasts. In these territories, the Compact Cassette only died out when reasonably priced recordable CDs and MP3 players appeared on the market.
MiniDisc has maintained its place as a well- established format, and, following the development in 2004 of the Hi-MD format, is also widely used as a general-purpose data storage medium.
