Continuing with CDs?

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

went to finland to be an exchange student in 89-90.
worked in the summers for ABB.
spent the money i earned on this when i got back.

https://i.etsystatic.com/6357513/r/il/a25662/1682839781/il_fullxfull.1682839781_e0c9.jpg

solid build, lasted years.
don't think i ever used it as a portable (batteries !),
used it to record cds onto cassettes as i had a boombox that had audio inputs, so used this as an external for a long time.
was genuinely gutted when it died.
in fact just seeing that picture is making me somewhat emotional.
changed everything for me.

xxxp Yeah pretty much. You have to turn off pretty much every special feature for the best quality, but to be fair, you could understand why they had them if they were made for portability. MP3's and iPods were already big though so I never used a Discman for portability, it was just something to have on my desk or the table with my headphones in lieu of a stereo system.

mark e, I actually found one of those in storage and coincidentally pulled it out over winter break and tried it. Sadly, it doesn't work.

hah I'd be pretty interested in seeing if I could bring it back from life! what was wrong with it? did it turn on?

(looking at that NAIM it's a) ridiculous, i'd only ever seen it half open, not fully out like that and b) it's not just a tray, it's obviously the entire drive and pickup that's swinging out, hence the thickness)

and as mike mentioned upthread, loads of slot loading players now, even the higher end stuff. asking for trouble imo.

yes, fuck a slot load

on features and quality... i looked up the new Yamaha pictured above and it has a "pure direct" button which disables its digital outputs and even the LED for the display in order to give you the cleanest possible analog output...... yeah

xxxp That was a problem. The power cord must've been worn on the inside because you had to bend the cable/wire in different positions until power actually got fed into the player. (I wouldn't leave it plugged in for long unsupervised- I'm guessing there may be a frayed wire inside, which could be a hazard.) After it came on, I tried playing a CD, and for some reason it wouldn't track it correctly. Like it would skip through the disc. You can hear very brief snippets intermittently, but then the player would start skipping ahead or stalling, etc. I didn't want to throw it away in the trash for environmental reasons - it would be great if it could be recycled for parts but it's always tricky with obsolete and non-functioning electronics.

A good portable is perfect for home listening. Mine is replaced for now with a Tivoli "Model CD" that came up cheap locally, just for the look.

Apparently no one is making decent new portables

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiMdpE1Nz5w

xp sounds like the lube on the worm gear is dry and needs replacing. re: power cord, could be a bad power adapter or the soldering of the jack inside is bad. both should be pretty easy fixes!

that's the sony d-2 innit? probably would cost more to repair from one of the discman repair services, although I'd be happy to take a look at it for free

if you're interested in picking up an old vintage discman for home use, i'd recommend the sony d-33 - still $15-20 on eBay and sounds pretty decent

yes, fuck a slot load

― call all destroyer,

100%

once my discman died i avoided anything that was slot loading.
my first proper cd player was a richer sounds purchase that's hidden up in the attic.
just remembered : the brand was 'eclipse'.
it was cheap but did the job as we were young and broke.
the drawer thing was flakey as f^ck though after a few years.
that said, it still works.

my car has a slot loader (yeah yeah it's old), and the f^cker is tempramental at the best of times.
hence i only i ever put in skinny promo cds that i aint fussed about.

https://whybuynew.2dimg.com/10/1451471630_3981.jpg

xxp I can't get it to you anytime soon, but honestly, if you'll cover the shipping (maybe just email me a shipping a label), you can keep it and hopefully fix it for yourself. It's basically in storage back home, where Covid has gotten really bad at the moment. Once it settles down, I can ask my parents to fish out the player and power adapter the next time they swing by the storage unit. I'll probably remember - there's a bunch of stuff I need to ship to my current place, but I won't be able to do it until things settle down and I have time to travel back.

(I already have enough players, so I don't mind giving it away if you can fix it. I just don't want to toss it into a landfill.)

I have no idea what happened to my Goodmans. I certainly didn't eBay it like the rest of my gear. It may be in a box somewhere. But for 2.5 years it was the heart of my hi-fi. It never went outdoors. "Outdoor hifi - is it a sin?"

lol. high frequencies mess with the birds.

cool man that sounds good! I'll ilxmail ya xxp

the old discmen were really nice SQ wise - i currently use a d-4 discman and it gets LOUD, even when using full sized headphones. of course the battery life is like 2-3 hours on AAs (for those that take em - a lot of the early ones used lead acid battery packs that are all dead by now) so I just use it on wall power.