h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

minidisc is great,i too was sceptical about the compression etc,but
the recordings ive made outside with a microphone are unbelievably good-i think mp3 is crap,alright for convenience but crap quality,next is cassette-ive never been able to get a satisfying recording and i spent £300 on my tapedeck-now its stopped recording on one channel and as itll cost me £50+ to repair it im well down on this dinosaur medium.also, having spent an obscene amount on a top cd player-and having dj decks for my vinyl,i do think that there is
a lovely warmth from vinyl-and this is not with the upper end of hifi (ie £1300) for your stylus or whatever).in retrospect i wish id got a valve amplifier instead of my pre +power amp,but this does all boil down to small,increments of sonic pleasure-after all were all into this cos we love music ,right?i love music....finally the only downside to minidisc is that all your mates havent got one yet!

I wouldn't say that MP3 is crap.

A bad MP3 is crap, in the same way that a badly recorded minidisc will be crap, but some 192K MP3s that I've heard have been excellent quality.

I'd even argue that 128k MP3s can be decent quality. Any lower and I can tell the difference (96k MP3s really do suck) but i've used my large collection of MP3s for various partys with many many loud speakers without any problems or distortion.

And I'd even go as far as to say that MP3 compliments MD quite nicely, as a friend of mine (who's encouraging me to buy a minidisc) downloads MP3s off the net before recording them over to a minidisc. Quite handy, really!