Rest in Peace: Sony MiniDisc – 1992 to September 2011 –

Sony have announced that it is to call time on it’s MiniDisc range this September, as the number of physical-media portable music players drops ever more steadily.

Continued poor sales of the hardware in all territories outside of Japan meant the MiniDisc’s demise was inevitable, which will join the cassette Walkman in Sony’s tech mausoleum.

With the digital music trend showing now signs of slowing, and with the rise of cloud-based music set to explode jsut over the horizon, the whirring discs of the MD were looking ever-more aged, with little of the retro, rose-tinted charm that even cassettes had. The last MiniDic player up on Sony’s website is the MZ-RH1, but even that is lacking a price tag and seems currently unavailable.

Sony has promised to continue to sell the actual MiniDiscs themselves still however, even if the players are headed the way of the dodo. They’re still used quite a bit in radio rooms thanks to their reliability.

Which leaves only the portable CD player as a physical-media player in Sony’s portable music arsenal.