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The iPod thread made me think of failed audio formats. I myself has owned a DCC deck and then a MiniDisc. DCC died almost immediately, MiniDisc made it, but never really took off as Sony would´ve wanted. While surfing the net I also discovered the Elcaset. A format by Sony that were meant to compete with the Compact Cassette, but despite it´s technical superiority it failed miserably due to non-existant marketing.
The DCC was a nice thought by Philips and Matsu****a. They intended this to be the successor to the Compact Cassette and competitor to the DAT and MiniDisc. It was backwards compatible with analog Compact Cassettes, but alas it also meant that you had to wind and rewind the cassettes to get to a particular song. So...MiniDisc really won this hands down you ask? Well, yes, and no. While MiniDisc was a terrific format (a small cd-like disc encased in plastic 68 x 72 mm with 80 min capacity) it depended on a software called SonicStage to transfer files to and from the player. It also had a proprietary format called ATRAC that all files were encoded in. Thus putting your mp3s on your MiniDisc were a real hassle. In 2005 Sony finally incorporated mp3 as a native format, meaning that it didn´t convert the mp3s to ATRAC. But it was to little too late, and you still had to use SonicStage to transfer files to and from the player! Not to mention that Sony implemented a lowpass filter that made mp3s sound like crap compared to ATRAC...
The DCC was a nice thought by Philips and Matsu****a. They intended this to be the successor to the Compact Cassette and competitor to the DAT and MiniDisc. It was backwards compatible with analog Compact Cassettes, but alas it also meant that you had to wind and rewind the cassettes to get to a particular song. So...MiniDisc really won this hands down you ask? Well, yes, and no. While MiniDisc was a terrific format (a small cd-like disc encased in plastic 68 x 72 mm with 80 min capacity) it depended on a software called SonicStage to transfer files to and from the player. It also had a proprietary format called ATRAC that all files were encoded in. Thus putting your mp3s on your MiniDisc were a real hassle. In 2005 Sony finally incorporated mp3 as a native format, meaning that it didn´t convert the mp3s to ATRAC. But it was to little too late, and you still had to use SonicStage to transfer files to and from the player! Not to mention that Sony implemented a lowpass filter that made mp3s sound like crap compared to ATRAC...
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