I had a fever dream some years ago. In this dream I fed a MiniDisc into the dash of my E36 and smiled as it clunked into place. Once awake, I decided I would install a head-unit in my car. I wanted to be as cool as in my . And I wanted period-correct electronics.

It would have to be a Sony head-unit, given the MiniDisc’s and my love for . But BMW did technically approve; it produced at least two MiniDisc head-units, though only for the and the , so my E36 was out of luck. I could’ve tracked down a Becker Mexico Pro MD, a good fit for my dash, but it would also cost much more.

Yes, I could have just replaced my factory head-unit with something modern and convenient, but I felt nostalgic. It was Sony MD or bust. I wanted to fuss with the durable MiniDisc casings and rediscover all of my old mixes. I must have wasted entire days in the late ’90s creating playlists and adding metadata,in spite of Sony’s middling software.

MiniDiscs were like the cassettes of the aughts. And there were a of MiniDisc head-units out there. Alpine, Pioneer, Nakamichi, Blaupunkt and JVC are just a few of the companies that made them. They existed in single- and double-DIN configurations, too.

Sony made a few that really captured the zeitgeist of the MiniDisc era:

You can’t convince me this wasn’t a Winamp skin:

I confess I only made it to the “Oh, God, what have I done” phase of my plan. I bought a Sony and a Sony but did not install them. I sobered up and realized that keeping the factory radio and adding an was more sensible. But I wish I had seen it through, especially now that MiniDisc is enjoying a very .

Now, in 2020, I’m convinced the apotheosis of head-units — at least in older cars like mine — is a blank dash plate that will interface with the iPhone’s MagSafe feature and can provide both power and data pass-through. It wouldn’t need a screen, either. The iPhone’s will do.

But there’s less fun in using an iPhone, a fully-functioning pocket computer that can access thousands of songs on demand while providing a reliable telecomfeature-set. What I really wanted was an MD unit, for more or less the same reason we love an air-cooled flat-six or a manual transmission. What I really wanted was a bygone object with its inherent technological limitations and enduring charm.