Continuing with CDs?

I like the jewel cases when they were made of better plastic - if they were recyclable everywhere, it would be nice though.

The plastic wrap could be annoying - remember how they used to sell little blade thingies designed to open CD's? - and the sticker on top that had the album and artist name along with a thin bar code could be a pain to get off. I learned to unhinge one side of the case as an easy way to peel it, but 1 of every 3 or 4 would always leave some residue that I'd have to get off by sticking and unsticking the same sticker.

I had that blade thingy! and yeah I know exactly the trick you're talking about in unhinging the front cover and sticking/unsticking the stickers. started not bothering with getting the stickers off towards the end

I'm glad that was all we had to deal with when it came to CD's, and not off-center holes, warping, "non-fill" and all the other complaints I keep hearing from vinyl enthusiasts.

Well the stuttering of some new CDs has been really fucking with me and I'm very grudging about having to buy a better player if this isn't to be an issue anymore. I just hate it so much.

Those stickers on italian CDs are evil

Some paper/cardboard sleeved CDs could warped if they were shrink-wrapped too tight. My first copy of Brian Wilson's That Lucky Old Sun was fucked up like that.

jewel boxes are the work of the devil. used to think of creating a site to shame the inventor (Peter Doodson). knock over a stack and you'll have discs under furniture at the far end of the room, like they're designed as ejector seats, and 70% of the jewel boxes will have broken in one way or another. and they're heavy and take up too much shelf space. fie!

CAD - how is that Yamaha? Really been curious, I ended up buying used Rotel but the disc tray is flimsy

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, January 12, 2022 6:01 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i just set it up today but seems great, single-digit number of buttons on the front panel, as it should be. it's solidly built--i can't remember if it was you or someone else saying it but yamaha products usually feel pretty good. i got it from crutchfield, which i've never used but they seem to have really great service and shipping. it was shocking how few single-disc players for people who like decent stereo gear were out there. i've gotten into playing cds for my baby when she comes home for the day so it was a good time to do this.

that said i feel like every cd player in the world has some quirk with the tray--in this case, it doesn't *quite* extend out far enough to lay a disc on it completely flat. you have to angle it ever so slightly to get it in there. not a big deal but odd for sure.

was inspired by this thread to have a quick flick through the CD shelf at the charity shop today - found this which i bought for a speculative $2 - will be selling to fund an extravagant vinyl purchase, and so the dance of life continues

Nice score!

I found a pawnshop in a neighbouring town that has a good selection of CDs, including indie stuff that I’ve sold for 3 digits on Discogs.

For personal use, jewel cases are just the devil for so many reasons, so I end up not collecting very much for myself outside of friends’ bands. But I do have a bunch of 90s stuff that the vinyl is prohibitively expensive for. And like, how could the vinyl of For the Beauty of Wynona possibly sound better than that CD? No way it does.

For all the problems with CDs and vinyl, I’ve probably had more trouble with streaming:
—why isn’t this connecting?
—do I need to wait until I get more bars?
—why are there gaps in this audio?
—why is this coffee shop playing this thing that’s clearly struggling to connect and sounds like Morse code?
—why did this stop all of a sudden?
—wait let me try restarting the stereo
—Ok let me restart my phone
—Why does this internet suck

It’s insane to me how everyone LOVES streaming because like 10% of the time it’s like a Mr Bean sketch trying to get it work

What I hate most about streaming is that 99% of the time when I'm with someone who's streaming music, they're doing it through their shitty laptop speakers or phone.

I can’t stop buying vinyl even in this insane day and age and I don’t know why. I’ve been collecting for 20 years at this point so it’s not like it’s a new hobby and I’ve gotta catch up on everything.

I will say that even I have mostly stopped buying new vinyl after getting burned about a hundred too many times on warping, bad pressings, mp3 sourcings, etc…this doesn’t really help though because older pressings usually go for even more.

If I had to take a gander I think it has something to do with the art of the album (not artwork, but just art form) having been so important to me since I was like 8 years old and getting blown away by Nevermind and Vitalogy and with streaming the album as an art form carries way less weight…it’s way too easy to put it on shuffle, play through a playlist, or get antsy and start another album after two tracks of the one that’s currently playing. Even if you do sit down and stream an album all the way through there’s nothing to look at or touch (even though you could find whatever information might be contained in the liner notes online now).

As stated upthread, I built a massive CD collection in my early teen years but CDs just don’t do it for me anymore…feels like those AOL discs that they used to give out or something.

In short: help.

the solution to any physical media collecting impulse is to move, preferably several times in a short span

In this economy?

Forgot, one reason why I never got into vinyl was how junky they seemed. First time I went record shopping, it was because a relative took me to a huge record store specifically to buy vinyl - he collected 12" club singles, but vinyl in general was NOT fashionable, it had very much cratered. Aisles of vinyl, and it was 99% old stuff, and after five minutes of flipping through some particularly grimy ones in the movie soundtrack section, I had hands like coal miner. On top of that, a day later he developed pink eye, which he blamed on rubbing his eyes while going through the record bins! It was just the one time, but it left a pretty bad impression, that's for sure.

Sometimes after a day of flipping through (used) record bins my hands would swell up and get insanely itchy... assume it was mold or like rat shit, used record bins used to pretty fucking grotty.

Go to the “Packaging” section for the greatest cd longbox story:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Time_(album)

Did not expect DOOM to show up in that story

https://www.discogs.com/release/8838193-Spinal-Tap-Break-Like-The-Wind

that said i feel like every cd player in the world has some quirk with the tray

I note there are even some audiophile "transports" with slot loading. I've wasted too much time trying to feed discs into a failing Nintendo Wii to be completely comfortable with that.

why isn’t this connecting?

Yep. Drop-outs are far less common now I have decent broadband, but still - every few days - my streamer will just decide it's forgotten there was ever a wifi network.

This calls for an Alexis Petridis GQ article exploring what kind of quirky, socially outcast people write such things.

At the risk of further agitating the nerd police, I even tried a third-party player to see if I could stream hi-res from Qobuz to the Marantz (bypassing AirPlay). mConnectLite (a free app). It didn't completely work: anything up to 24/48k was fine, but beyond that, it just buffered unacceptably every 30sec. (The Marantz is single-band 802.11b/g so probably can't really hack that kind of throughput, even if my wifi / broadband is up to it). Still nice to know the unit can play back 24/192k FLAC, off USB or whatever. I will likely never try again ;)

Thick booklets for the extensive notes of a reissue compilation, crammed under the tabs of a jewel box cover. Also those double-wide jewel boxes for two-disc collections.

xpost - Turn of the century AOL CD-ROMs certainly contributed to CDs suddenly feeling less valuable. I also recall walking down the dairy aisle and eying a block of American cheese with a CD-ROM of the World Book Encyclopedia attached to it, and shedding a silent tear for how the mighty have fallen...

It’s insane to me how everyone LOVES streaming because like 10% of the time it’s like a Mr Bean sketch trying to get it work

the main thing that got me back into listening to CDs regularly was realizing how fast the timespan was between wanting to hear an album and then hearing it with CDs (think of album, slap disc in player, hit play, enjoy) vs streaming (am i paired to the right device? wait this is the wrong song, is it tagged right? etc etc). I still go mainly for vinyl bc thats what i grew up with and its inextricably linked to how i think about music, but whiney otm that there can be room in our life for all of god's great formats

my dad has a huge CD collection and used to listen to music all the time, but got rid of his CD player years ago and I've literally never heard him listening to music at home since. anytime i point out his shelves of CDs collecting dust and say it might be fun to get a CD player again, he insists that its easier to listen to music than ever, and gets up, gets a CD, tries to put it into his Wii, tries to find the Wii controller, tries to turn the TV on, cant find the remote for the soundbar, gives up on the Wii and tries to find those high-numbered cable channels that are music stations, and 10 minutes later we are listening to some kind of top-40 station that he obviously hates but is too stubborn to admit.

^lol for real

I used to carefully open longboxes and then pin them in a row along the ceiling of my bedroom.

Once in high school, I was with a girl in her bedroom; she wanted to open her new copy of Bryan Adams’ Waking Up the Neighbors. I tore the longbox open straight across the middle… she looked at me horrified, turned out she had planned to preserve the artwork

that's actually the proper way to treat anything by bryan adams: total trash, rip and smash.

Lately I like to buy cassettes and digitize them with audacity and then manipulate them however I like as well

Have a handful of old college radio shows I've been meaning to do this to, also. Maybe a few songs that I haven't found since, but mainly for hearing college friends' voices during the PSAs.

that said i feel like every cd player in the world has some quirk with the tray

My first CD player died because of the tray mechanism, so when I bought my next one I went with a top-loading Rega player to eliminate that whole motor assembly. 20+ years later still going strong (just checked, and Rega is still making that style). Also popular among for their warm, "analog-like" sound (hey, they're a turntable company). Don't know about that, but sounds good to me.

*among audiophiles

i have a couple of cds that got scratched by the door randomly closing on them whilst i was in the middle of putting them onto / taking them off the extended tray thing.

I inherited an old 6-CD player once, and it had something I've never seen before or since - a magazine cartridge about the size of jewel case but about as thick as a 200-page paperback book. These thin plastic plates would flip out like a square-shaped switchblade, and you'd but your discs in the circular impressions of each plate. From what I can tell, the only thing that kept your CD's from scratching when using these were small pads of felt, and amazing they usually did the trick. (There may be a few instances where I scratched a disc by closing the magazine wrong, but that's out of countless uses.) I was told the player wouldn't last long because the person had a second unit that recently and permanently jammed up mechanically speaking, and yet I played the shit out of that thing for several years before I passed it down to someone else. It wasn't the best sounding CD player, but it held up remarkably well.

I did a quick search - this isn't it, but the CD magazine looks about right. I'm guessing they designed their units so that those magazines can be used in all of them, a logical and economical decision for a number of reasons:

https://0303dba.netsolhost.com/pioneer_pdm403_cd_player2.jpg

i remember those. my parents also had one with the giant rotating carousel.

giant rotating carousel.

an old friend had one of these in his shop. 200 disc capacity. in the pre-streaming days, it was super fun to load it up and hit shuffle, though the wait times between songs was a little lengthy.

i have one of those 6cd changers on the other half of the sofa i'm currently sat on. came with the midi-hifi i bought with my first pay packet.

and i have another of those cassettes that's specifically designed for 3" cds.

makes a hell of a noise when it changes discs.

i've been getting into vintage discmen from the late 80s / early 90s... one of the grails for collectors is the sony d-88 which was designed for those 3" CDs but can also play full sized CDs

https://i.imgur.com/ZDe9q94.jpg

discmans were so cool and desirable. buying aa batteries all the time was a major pain though.

xxp lol that pioneer 6-disc changer with the magazine you found the picture of is what i just replaced! it still worked fine but just an awful and stupid design, the nadir of which was that you had to load discs upside down.

i had one of these for years, great battery life and the first truly skip-free one i owned

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/812lGEFE0WL._AC_SL1500_.jpg

*walks around park listening to ben folds five*

yeah I had one of those in blue and have much lingering fondness for that era. I even got pretty good at switching out CDs with one hand while commuting on the train. you're right about batteries though

currently using this as my main CD player. Cant believe I used to walk around with these things in my pockets.

http://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71CTnTgdCOL._AC_SS450_.jpg

I seem to recall similar magazine cartridges for car audio; you'd install the cart *in the boot* and the console on the dash was just a remote control for that player. I remember getting a lift down the M6 from a work colleague in his brand new 1994 (M reg!) Vauxhall Whatever - he let me supply the music. I did wonder if I'd ever see those CDs again.

I went through a year or two where the discman was going to be my primary CD player, so I decided to invest in the best one. Surprisingly the bells and whistles were a waste if you were focused completely on audio quality - the EQ settings in particular degraded the shit out of the sound. I found the best sounding Discmans in Panasonic's line of players. Switch it to the most neutral settings and it was perfect. Problem is they're all old now, so they may not play so well. I had one that I finally chucked because some of the rubber parts they came in contact with the CD finally broke down into a sticky, crumbly mess. You can clean them with rubbing alcohol when they get too sticky, but it only works for so long and eventually old rubber is likely to break down like that - sucks when there are no replacement parts.

pulls over onto hard shoulder 5 miles down the road, frisbees the Merzbow into nearby field...

what was the make of cd player that had a door that swung out rather than slid?

I seem to recall similar magazine cartridges for car audio; you'd install the cart *in the boot* and the console on the dash was just a remote control for that player. I remember getting a lift down the M6 from a work colleague in his brand new 1994 (M reg!) Vauxhall Whatever - he let me supply the music. I did wonder if I'd ever see those CDs again.

― Michael Jones, Thursday, January 13, 2022 12:57 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

my friend in high school got one of these....it was a really steep downgrade in convenience for the privilege of being able to shuffle 6 cds

I have that same Insignia model above at the moment. I don't use it often but it's fine.

Pretty tight tolerances on those portable players too; I had a Goodmans in '93, and had a few discs that were slightly warped. They'd play ok, but you could hear the disc catching the inside of the unit at a few hundred RPM :/

xp: Naim possibly still have such a player - entire mech swings out. Meridian ejected the whole mech too.

(Laika sounded great over Corney Fell ;)).

I think the later discmen might have sacrificed sound quality for battery life and/or antiskip. antiskip in particular was bad because iirc the player would read ahead in the CD and then store the music as compressed audio to avoid skipping, degrading the audio quality

one of the grails for discman collectors is the d-555, which just looks really cool:

https://i.imgur.com/eOaxAlW.jpg

> what was the make of cd player that had a door that swung out rather than slid?

NAIM, yes

https://img.canuckaudiomart.com/uploads/large/906812-0a3b602d-naim-cd5x-cd-amp-hdcd-player.jpg