Minidisc battery life
I knew minidisc players got great battery life but it is good enough that I could never really keep track of just HOW good it is. Lasting for so many listening sessions that I don't even recall when I last charged/changed the battery.
This is still not scientific but I have a better idea how ridiculously good it is. I listened to music on my Sony MZ-NE410 a few times throughout the week. I'll say maybe 4 hrs-ish total. Then I hooked it up to the speaker on the front porch at 7pm one night and forgot to turn it off before bed. Wake up the next morning and around 9am I realize it's still playing. So like 14 more hours there. Then I listened to music in the car while driving back and forth between our new and old place the next week, 1-1.5hrs one way. I think it was the last return trip that it finally died. This much play time from a single AA rechargeable battery!
@Sandra Minidisc players have screens that provide the necessary info but no backlight. The rest of those things are unnecessary for a music player. I'm just lamenting what we *could* have if priorities were in the right place. 20 years ago we had this much efficiency and the improvements in the meantime have been squandered.
Mmmm. My mini disc player broke pretty quickly 💔.
I loved it when I had it. (90s.)
I have a memory with it when I lived in Manizales, my friends there leaving through my discs. Marilyn Manson, they're like "cool, The Matrix was a great movie". Penny Lane off the Beatles' blue collection, on the other hand… "The Beatles! *¡Satanico!*" with a whispered, getting-away-with-something grin.
Minidisc battery life
@kelbot I wonder how much of a cache the device has. It could, for instance, read an entire track into memory and play it without actively accessing the disc much. Thus for an hour of playback the laser and motor could be active for only a few minutes.
Minidisc battery life
@kelbot on top of that, it could take advantage of rotational momentum. Maybe the motor only takes power for a fraction of a second to get the disc spinning enough to read a few seconds of song. Purely speculating here I don't have enough physics or engineering knowledge to know if these are viable optimizations
Minidisc battery life
@Natris1979 Yeah, they have a cache that does this and also has the benefit (and was marketed as this) of being "anti-skip". So you don't have to worry about jostling the device and skipping while moving it around. I'm sure the other rotational momentum stuff was accounted for to get the great battery life as well.
Minidisc battery life
@Natris1979 My point is if that was possible even with lasers and motors then why with flash storage and no moving parts don't we have music players that can last for like a whole month now?
Minidisc battery life
@kelbot Damn, that's impressive.
re: Minidisc battery life
Screens eat battery and so does highpower networking like wifi and 3, 4, 5g.
But the engine in Minidisc does eat more than a solid state player does.