Continuing with CDs?

(i saw those when they were talking on the other thread about adding a cd player to a raspberry pi and wondered if you could fit one in the plastic casing)

the built in speakers (in the muji versions which are the only ones i've seen irl) strike me as a bit inadequate.

https://www.instructables.com/Adding-an-audio-jack-to-a-MUJI-wall-CD-player/?&cf=1

or search eBay for wall mounted cd player and you'll see some clones that have line out.

if there's ever one with digital out I'd be on it

ebay same as Amazon for this i guess..nvm

Thanks, didn't know Muji sold them. Yeah, not interested in the built in speakers as I would plug it into an amp. The main reservations people have in reviews seem to be that there's often no cover and they can be a bit noisy.

i wonder about voltages and stuff with that mod. would that be line-level out, headphone-level out, something else? also, you now have two cables hanging down.

true. maybe I'd lay it down next to my turntable so it's like a mini-me situation

Anyone have experience of those £50 wall mounted vertical cd players that they have on Amazon? I have a 'proper' CD player in the room with the hifi but it would be nice to be able to play a cd in the room we do most of our living in.

https://www.wired.com/story/you-should-listen-to-cds/

Latest (last?) update, mostly CDs among the remaining stock
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I like that they're using more cardboard for albums but they're getting ridiculously tight, I accidentally ripped the card of a recent Van Der Graaf Generator sleeve and a Throbbing Gristle release was so determined to keep the CD inside that I said fuck it and cut it with scissors

That's kind of annoying how most new CD's just have cheap cardboard sleeves. Jewel cases may be better, but that creates even more plastic waste since almost no one recycles them. Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab's design for the gatefold sleeves used on their SACD's is kind of a great environmentally-friendly solution. The discs never get scratched either since they have their own soft, fabric-like sleeve.

a well manufactured matt or gloss digipak is ideal, but those little card eco-slipcases are a bit wimpy and sad. jewel cases are really cool, aesthetically, it's just a shame the plastic is so weak!

Finally getting some CDs delivered that I ordered in spring 2021. They're in heavy cardboard mini-LP sleeves, with textured matte paper on the outside (assuming they actually did what I asked) and an inner sleeve.

I like jewel cases. They look good imo, and they are so practical. But point taken about plastic waste.

xp that inner sleeve is key. I think having them is common in Japan but most U.S. releases just throw the disc in the sleeve with no protection. It's pretty sloppy, the discs get really scratched up quickly.

xxp the plastic on jewel cases used to be better, even though CD's have supposedly gotten better, per this guy at another forum:

As someone who supplied raw materials to the major CD production factories (as well as working for Philips Electronics) back in the day and up to the new millennium - I can attest to the fact that the pinnacle of CD manufacturing has only recently been achieved - the base materials used for the CD itself are now a much higher medical optical (lens grades) of poly-carbonate (with the Japanese SHM-CD materials going a grade higher still) and the aluminium substrate is now sourced from aircraft grade alloys that provide superior pit depth and form almost rivaling the gold coating of the DCC and Audio Fidelity eras.

The mastering process still uses digital glass master discs but the transfer of that data is made by FAR superior AD/DA converters and mastering suites....

However, I will concede that the jewel case has gone the other way and although it hasn't changed in thickness or dimension the material has moved from HIPS (High Impact Polystyrene) for the outer case and Acrylic for the dark grey/black disc tray/insert - giving impressive impact and thermal sabilty....to low grade styrene for both, that threaten to crack if they're looked at for too long.....

*throw the disc in the cardboard album sleeve with no inner sleeve

I ended up recycling all my old jewel cases. Couldn't find any takers anywhere and my local recycling center specifically told me they take them.

I will miss the nice art collage that jewel cases provide but when you've maxed out your storage, something's got to give.

xxp that's super interesting, thank you

I thought one of the arguments for the superiority of earlier CD manufacturing was that the discs were thicker. Does that not necessarily mean sturdier?

Or is the idea that the material is better in terms of the legibility of the data rather than the endurance of the disk?

endurance durability

straighter 1s and rounder 0s

(a bit of both was my reading of that, just higher quality all round)

It's a combination of things. The discs are basically a polycarbonate layer with the data molded into it in a loooong spiraling row of pits, and the key is covering it with a reflective layer that preserves the shape of those pits as accurately as possible while reflecting as much of the laser's light as accurately as possible. So you need material that spreads evenly enough to do it but also consistently so as not to open up into gaps/pinholes (likely to happen anyway if any impurities like dust is found on the polycarbonate), and then just be good material with high reflectivity. Gold was exceptional for that because it spread so much more evenly - like I've never seen a gold CD with a single pinhole like an aluminum CD (and older aluminum CD's tend to have much more - most of the time those holes are introduced in the manufacturing, not from age.)

But doesn't the computron thingy interpret everything as 1 and 0's? I don't get how the material matters as long as the machine can read it.

It can also not interpret things and read it as an error. Things have gotten better, but in the earlier days, you could count on errors getting read. That's especially true when you see how people typically treat optical discs like they were indestructible or fool-proof, but even without a single scratch, fingerprint or speck of dust getting in the way, the laser could still pick up errors for many other reasons. You just rarely notice because of the massive amount of error correction built into the data encoded into the disc, and that's before you need to resort to error correction where the player tries to extrapolate the missing data, which can be hit-or-miss depending on the severity. From an audiophile perspective, or really an engineering perspective, you want as much or the actual real data read as possible - it translates into the best sound possible in terms of the info being fed into your system. Nowadays with SACD's and especially UHD's on the video side of things, errors are becoming a bigger issue because you're packing in a lot more data in the same amount of real estate, so anything like a scratch is likely to be far more harmful to how a disc is read.

and the key is covering it with a reflective layer that preserves the shape of those pits as accurately as possible while reflecting as much of the laser's light as accurately as possible.

re reflective layer : how does this all work with the all black cds (plastic) that i have a few of.
and are the black cds better/worse re scratches etc
in my simple head once i saw a black cd i thought that they would become the standard as they seem to be more robost re scratches, but out of 1000s of cd i've got, i have only ever come across a handful of them.

No idea. I thought the black CD was a cosmetic choice, not something that would actually improve anything though I'm sure there are arguments somewhere for that. Intuitively I can't see how it would really help with the laser. The black additive might make the plastic more durable, I could see that.

I got another new CD that stutters towards the end (Blind Guardian reissue of Nightfall) and I'm starting to wonder if maybe rather than being badly made, the occasionally stuttering CDs are actually a new type that my Sony player can't always cope with? I need to try more of them on my bluray player but they've mostly played fine on it but it's not ideal.

Very reluctant to look for more fancy CD players, I'm not tech-brained and my brother just bought a supposedly high end bluray player and had to get 3 replacements because they kept fucking up (different models). Seems like a small ask to have a CD player that can play any CD that isn't abused beyond repair.

@birdistheword - very interesting, are there any consumer CD players that have kept up? can't imagine sony or phillips putting out new CD players anymore tbqh

Coincidentally, I was chatting with another ILXor about CD standards yesterday; they'd recently had a conversation with a hi-fi shop employee who was bemoaning the "abandoning of the Red Book standard". I'm not too sure about that, or quite what they meant; I know that Philips were always sniffy about "Compact Disc" appearing on any products that deviated from the Red Book (dual-layer, copy-protected, etc), and there are plenty of discs that pushed tolerances to the limit to squeeze in 80-85min of content. The only playback issues I've ever had were visibly "bronzed" items, otherwise scuffed-up discs, and the occasional struggle with a very long CD. Oh, and I used to have a CD-RW burner in a desktop PC 12-15 years ago that was hit & miss - all those discs are borderline.

I only discovered this week that Linn stopped making CD players in 2010! Threw their lot in with streaming (before there was even any lossless streaming?), outrageously expensive upgrades to yr Sondek and room-modelling. (I know Linn are a very divisive name in audiophile circles anyway, and hardly a bellwether of what anyone else is doing).

I'm very used to long CDs faltering on the last track or two - poor though that is. The more strange problem I've had recently is brand new CDs, fresh out of the wrapping, not playing the *first* track or first few tracks, but then being fine from track 2, or track 6, or whatever, up to track 13, 22, or whatever.

Is that familiar? The relevant CD player still plays my old CDs fine. For that matter, one of the CDs played fine on a much cheaper and smaller device.

Can't help thinking it's something about the encounter of CD player + CD (of a certain generation?) -- both of them adequate elsewhere, just not compatible together.

> faltering on the last track or two

a lot of the time i find this is because you've fingerprints on them at the edges, not matter how careful you are.

but, yeah, not always. my copy of SAWII is particularly bad. visible scratches just through handling.

haven't really noticed issues with newer cds, mainly because i haven't bought many. i think last year's cd were mostly WIRE cover cds, the seefeel box, the Deutsche electronik musique vol 4 double and the new low CD.

SAWII -- is that a Stock Aitken & Waterman collection? You weren't content with just one??

when i rip my cds on my laptop i use an external LG optical drive, and for cds that are over 70 mins it will often spin out of control trying to rip the last track(s).
thankfully my very old Dell XP laptop is a lot less fussy and rips whatever i put in it (but due to XP - no windows media lookup functionality).
so, perhaps these cd players that don't like excessively long cds are more stringent re red book rules ?

@birdistheword - very interesting, are there any consumer CD players that have kept up? can't imagine sony or phillips putting out new CD players anymore tbqh

Sony and Phillips still do, but they're not great - I think they're mostly boombox type players. By the time they started pouring money into PlayStation and Blu-ray ten years ago, dedicated CD players made a lot less sense, especially when they wanted to push people into buying those consoles. I think that was part of the selling point, especially for PlayStation - you don't need any other console for home entertainment, just the one.

hm so are the best CD players actually blu ray players now? or are we stuck with ludicrously expensive audiophile offerings? or perhaps the mythical playstation one cd player revered by audiophiles?

Playing CDs through my Blu-Ray player and my TV's sound bar is amazing. Sunn O))) albums literally shake the floor.

i found my new BR player (2020, £70) had no audio out except via hdmi (and it had only one of those)

Sounds like you need an AV Receiver (with a bunch of channels you'll never use) for that HDMI feed, koogs. Or a soundbar (sound bar, sound bar).

There are still, surprisingly enough, CD players in a lot of micro hi-fi or all in one systems (glorified boomboxes, as birdistheword says). We got one for the 15yo for her bedroom. Everything on it worked (Bluetooth, DAB, FM, wireless charging, the USB port) - except the CD player. It's going back.

Marantz make, I think, precisely one vanilla CD player now. Everything either side of that that plays discs is streaming/radio/amp all-in-one (like my MCR610), or SACD high-end.

Marantz make, I think, precisely one vanilla CD player now.

Will it play CDs by ... Strawberry Switchblade?

Who is making reliable CD players now? I really hate that they can't even get this one thing right.

these get great reviews and i generally like yamaha a lot as a company

https://www.crutchfield.com/p_022CDS303/Yamaha-CD-S303.html

I don't think that has a headphone slot. Does freedom from stuttering new CDs have to be up in that price range?

there is digital optical out, i think, Mike, but neither my Kenwood receiver (Pro-logic!) nor my nad 350 does digital. can probably do the old minidisc-as-a-dac trick but life's too short.

i checked. hdmi and a LAN socket, nothing else. usb on the front.

you can get an external DAC for the optical out for pretty cheap these days

I don't think that has a headphone slot. Does freedom from stuttering new CDs have to be up in that price range?

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Thursday, January 6, 2022 1:38 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

as far as actual CD player CD players I don't think anyone makes much for low end stuff, obviously you can buy really cheap blu-ray or DVD players than can work - but are you trying to just use it w/headphones and not run it into an amp or receiver?

another place is ebay/craigslist, you can get stuff that was once pretty high end cd players for peanuts

shhh ...

i am beginning to feel that the tide is begining to turn re cds.
now that the format that cannot be named is getting to be priced beyond the scope of anyone other than folks who can go into space,
i have read a few articles re the revival of the cd.
this is not good for us tight f*ckers who have soaked up the cd groove in recent years ...

I feel a bit lost with regards to amps, receivers, DAC and LAN, don't know anything about that stuff. I'm not buying anytime soon so the bluray player will have to do for 5 of my stuttering CDs

(the LAN socket is just a standard wired network connection to allow the bluray player to show me netflix, not that you'd ever choose to do that because the ui looks like it was an afterthought)

((all my stereo stuff, apart from the bluray player, is 200x vintage or before and i don't really use it enough to make buying anything else worthwhile. these days it's mainly standalone pi jukebox -> amp. could do with a dab radio for the bedroom so i can stop using the tv for 6music.))