A litany of electronic shitery.
Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) - when Richer Sounds had them down from £499 to £150, I should have realised...but no, I bought the fucking thing - ostensibly for home studio (4 track) music mastering, because it's digital = no tape noise, right? Shame it was a lossy format, which meant if you dubbed a DCC sourced tape onto it you were sampling a lossy sample, and it sounded like it was gargling water. And it kept chewing tapes.

In-Car DVD player - from China. £200, and I watched maybe 20 minutes of DVD on it, ever, waiting for a mate to show up. The screen needed to be pulled out of the slot because the motor was bollocks, it wasn't bright enough, and it didn't have EQ for audio - no bass or treble controls even. And it lost all the settings every 10 minutes. Overwhelmingly inadequate.

Minidisc - it's the future of in car entertainment! No it isn't - next.

DAB car stereo - brilliant when it works...which is everywhere except within a three mile radius of home, and especially big dead zones on the M3. Arse.

and way back in time...the VHS dubbing kit. Which turned out to be a set of cables - "first, borrow your neighbours' VHS machine." Bastards.
( Fathter Puddytat Kill Kill dat widdle boid is mine on, Thu 29 Sep 2011, 14:35, 8 replies)

Minidisc should have taken off
it was better than CD or tape when CDs and tapes ruled the market.

I like the idea of a VHS dubbing kit - I imagine it was just a male/female rf cable, maybe a scart cable, and a bit of paper. What an awesome scam.
(leviticus no longer likes the cut of your gib on, Thu 29 Sep 2011, 15:07, closed)

minidisc did kinda take off
Just not in the domestic market. when Sony failed there they marketed it as a professional system.... and it ended up getting used in radio stations up and down the country. it meant you could have broadcast quality location audio without having to take out a massive reel to reel recorder, and you could edit it on the machine itself quite easily - handy if you cant get to a studio. Pretty much the same thing happend with Betamax.... youd think Sony would have learned.
(Sexual Chocolate!, Fri 30 Sep 2011, 5:09, closed)

Minidisc was a a stopgap before MP3 etc.
It was not a suitable replacement for CD, since it employed a lossy compression format which altered the sound of the music (though I did prefer ATRAC to MP3). I'll agree it was much better than tapes though, and the only choice for anything like CD quality sound in a portable player.
(Me, I'm not... in any way intoxicated, Fri 30 Sep 2011, 12:12, closed)

They missed a trick in not calling it the Compact Digital Cassette.

( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Thu 29 Sep 2011, 15:24, closed)

The Philips Family
"Cassette" is properly called "ACC" - Audio Compact Cassette.
"Video 2000" - the third 'also-ran' video format from the early 1980s, was actually called "VCC" - Video Compact Cassette.
So it's hardly surprising that they went for DCC.
(moon monkey is busy making memories worth repressing, Thu 29 Sep 2011, 16:03, closed)

Yeah, thanks for ruining an already not very good joke there, Captain Autism.

( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Thu 29 Sep 2011, 20:15, closed)

Haha, DCC *and* minidisc?

( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Thu 29 Sep 2011, 15:27, closed)

agree wholeheartedly
with the dab pointlessness - Somerset is also not good, and the wanky popping noise drives you mad.

give me analogue noise any day
(anonymouse sitting in front of a screen since 1989, Sun 2 Oct 2011, 21:14, closed)