Back in the 1990s, if you were using a MiniDisc portable, the chances were
that you were buying blank MiniDiscs and then recording CDs onto them.
Most of the portables had a mini toslink input, which would enable anyone
with a suitably equipped CD player to make a copy of a CD that stayed
entirely within the digital domain.
With optical you don't need to worry about setting the recording levels.
You just connect the CD player up to the mini disc recorder.
You press record on one and play on the other, find something to
do with yourself for a while while it copies across in real time.
But when it's finished, you've got a nice digital copy.
Albeit one with some compression.
Of course.
If you didn't have a CD player with an optical output, you could still copy
CDs, going from digital to analog, back to digital again, via the line outputs.
But regardless of which method you used at the end of it, you
effectively have a CD on an MD.
Now I'm talking here about the days before Net MD came along.
So it's your job to add the track titles onto the disc.
I mean, you don't have to, but they're nice to have.
If especially like this disc it's a compilation with 27 tracks
on it from various artists.
I mean, if you were to copy across this whole box set to MiniDisc you're going
to struggle to find the track you wanted without some kind of labeling system.
Now, in the days before smartphones gave us portable cat videos to watch
on the bus, adding track titles to a MiniDisc was one of the ways you
could pass time on public transport.
You could sit there with your CD case balanced on one knee while your
laboriously entered the track names one character at a time into the
recorder, hoping to get it all completed before your bus journey finished and
you have to return your CD back to your mate who you'd borrowed it from.
Now there were various systems devised to help speed up this manual titling process.
You may have seen a video I made last year about some keyboard
solutions for home MiniDisc recorders.
But back in the nineties, not many people how a home deck.
You were lucky if you could afford a portable.
THis one was 650 US dollars when it came out in 1995.
With inflation that's over $1,100 nowadays.
So yes, most people who had a MiniDisc recorder just had a portable.
And this is where the JVC or Victor XM-R2 fits in.
It was an attempt to sell a portable recorder that made track titling easier.
It not only had a bigger display than any other MiniDisc portable on the market at
the time, but that display was a touch screen, for which there was a stylus
tucked away inside the top of the device.
So I'm going to give this a go and I'm starting off entering
the details for track one, which is Shop Around by the Miracles.
The onscreen keyboard is laid out alphabetically, so it takes me a little
bit longer to type on than it would on a traditional QWERTY layout and the hit
points for each letter are quite small.
So you have to hunt and peck with stylus and your fingers get in the way a little
bit, so you can't quite see what you're tapping on, but the more I use it, I find
the quicker I get and still in these early stages, I can already see that I'm much
faster than I was on the other machine.
Although most of the text that would have been entered on one of these
devices would be using this keyboard.
As this particular machine was designed for the Japanese market.
It never made its way over to the West.
But even when entering English language track names, I can see that whilst it's
not perfect, it is a heck of a lot quicker than entering the same information on any
other personal stereo MiniDisc recorder.
Now, let me just give you a tour of a few of the other features of this
unique and really quite rare device.
If you put in a fully labeled up disc, you get to see the next four
track titles show up on the screen.
The current track is the one that's shown at the top and the title for
the top one also scrolls as well.
The tracks on the disc can be accessed with the usual
physical buttons at the bottom.
However, you can also select a track directly from the screen by touching it.
There are other physical controls along the bottom of the machine.
We've got a play and pause button, stop and record, but to change the
volume, now those are touch controls.
You can see the raised pimple just below them on the bottom left of
the screen and that's to aid with locating them with your finger.
There's also another touch control at the bottom right of the screen.
And that cycles between showing the current song details or that
screen with the four track titles.
And if playback is stopped, then that will also show the disc title.
So just looking around the rest of the screen to the other touch
controls, starting at the top left, that's like an enter or a confirm
or a write -to-disc button, and then we've got back and then edit,
text entry, delete, and settings.
And then along the bottom, well, we've seen the volume, then there's
the three types of keyboards and then the track titles toggle.
Now, if I go into the settings, this lets me adjust the LCD contrast to its maximum.
So we can then get a better look at that screen layout.
And as you can see, it's a character based setup with four lines of 12 characters.
The whole screen gets used for displaying track titles.
And that can produce some unusual results because there's no
attention being paid to word wrap.
Now, there are a few other parts of the screen that can be pressed.
There's three boxes along the bottom, right from the right to the left
those cycle through the megabass, the playback mode and the repeat functions.
And if the machine's in record mode, then the small box on the left can be pressed
to cycle between stereo or mono recording.
The edit menu gives you access to the usual MiniDisc functions of track
divide, join and move and you tap on the appropriate word to perform that action.
Moving on to the physical aspects along the top, next to the storage
for the plastic stylus there's a control for the analog input levels.
There's mic and line in/optical in, headphone output and around the side,
we've got a six volt DC power Jack.
In the top of the device is a nickel metal hydride battery, it's of a size
that unfortunately isn't made anymore.
However, it's just a tiny bit thicker than another common
battery that is still manufactured.
So I've modified my battery compartment a little bit and
fitted one of those instead.
The rechargeable battery will only power it though for four hours of playback.
However, there's a battery caddy that can be added, which then
takes four AA batteries, which adds another eight hours of playback time.
Once that's attached, though, it really does make the whole setup quite bulky.
And I'd imagine too big for many pockets.
As well as the Victor branded model JVC also made one for AKAI
to sell, using their own brand.
Now, the machine was launched in February, 1997 and it was
the first and last of its kind.
JVC, never returned to this idea of a touchscreen MiniDisc recorder
again, and their next model, which was released two years later, took
on a far more conventional design.
I don't think the XM-R2 was a success in the market.
There are very few of these to be found nowadays, it took me quite a
few years to get hold of this one.
Looking at it now I can see that the touch screen made the device quite a bit
bigger and more expensive than its peers.
It also resulted in a battery life of roughly half that of the other machines.
And on top of that, the Sony models in 1997, they were
only using two AA batteries.
Perhaps the desire to label tracks wasn't as strong as JVC imagined.
Most people seemingly happy to have unlabeled tracks until Net MD machines
came on the scene in December, 2001, which made the whole process a lot
easier by transferring any titles across over USB from a computer.
So that leaves the Victor XM-R2 and its AKAI branded sibling with a unique place
in history as both the first and the last touch screen portable MiniDisc recorders.
So I hope you've enjoyed having a look at this rather rare machine
today, but that's it for the moment.
As always, thanks for watching.