Is MiniDisc lossy?
Yes, MiniDisc uses a lossy compression system called Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding (ATRAC) to achieve a compression ratio of roughly 1:5. If no compression was used, a MiniDisc could hold only 15 minutes of audio. There have been a number of different versions of ATRAC used in MiniDiscs over the years — several by Sony and several by Sharp — and the audio loss with recent versions can only be noticed by die-hard audiophiles, although of course, loss increases with generations.
