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Comment by te_chris

2 days ago

Yes. But shhhhh about cds, don’t want people to realise…

Also the price of decent (Sony hifi grade, not ES) CD players used is great too.

24 comments

te_chris

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WD-42  2 days ago

I did just realize after posting maybe touting how affordable CDs have become is maybe not the best idea.

  • eterm  2 days ago

    I can't remember the artist but there's a fun song about how they used to pick up second hand LPs really cheap and then they got popular and too expensive, then discovered second hand CDs are really cheap now.

    Frank turner-ish vibes but I don't think it was actually him.

    It's completely un-googlable though, and even the LLMs aren't much help on this one.

  • RIMR  2 days ago

    The people who really want to stop paying for streaming are going to turn to piracy, don't worry. Physical media will still be accessible for people who are willing to pay with space instead of money.

    • KK7NIL  1 day ago

      "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" - Gabe Newell

patates  2 days ago

Aren't CD players just reading digits? I'm not anywhere close to a hifi expert but it must be all about the DAC, no? Or do you mean the ones with a built-in DAC?

  • JohnFen  2 days ago

    > all about the DAC, no?

    Yes, it is (unless the CD player is so bad that it can't do adequate error correction). What I do is rip the CD to my music server, which is where I listen to the music from. Then the quality of the CD player isn't important, as long as it works correctly.

    • blibble  1 day ago

      it's surprising difficult to rip from audio CDs in a error free manner

      most tools do it badly and just accept what the drive gives them in default mode, often with glitches

      5 replies →

  • torginus  1 day ago

    I've had a bad experience with this just a couple years ago. I have an old DVD/CD player which at some point I realized I had no way of connecting to my new TV. The old one was a decent looking premium unit, that I got from my parents (who paid good money for it),

    The industry has collectively decided that since CDs/DVDs are just about converting digital bits into other bits deterministically, there's no value left to differentiate, and everyone started selling absolutely nasty plasticky junk.

    The new Sony unit I got was a loud rattly garbage, that even though it did the things it needed to do, made such an awful noise that I had to take it back. The other one I got (don't remember the brand) was no better.

    I took that one back too, and I shelved the issue, but it was kind of remarkably terrible experience for me.

    • mlrtime  1 day ago

      Why not look online and get a "hifi grade" older used one?

      Is it a budget issue or sound quality issue?

    • runarberg  1 day ago

      Generally DVD players make lousy CD players. Most of the annoyance is in the UI which is optimized for watching movies, not playing CDs. But there are also sometimes problems like a small buffering pause between songs, etc. which you don’t get with quality CD players.

      I say this as my primary CD player is actually a Panasonic DVD player from the year 2000. This is the exception that proves the rule. At the turn of the century many quality DVD players were sold and marketed as primarily CD players with the added capability of being able to sell DVDs.

  • pavon  1 day ago

    How common were HiFi CD players without DACs? My recollection is that S/PDIF never really caught on that much so output to the amplifier was almost always analog.

    • einr  1 day ago

      Mid range/high end CD players almost always have both analog and digital outputs and have since some time in the 90s at least, so I’d say quite common.

mlrtime  1 day ago

>(Sony hifi grade, not ES)

I don't understand this, are you saying higher than ES or lower than ES?

I thought ES was their top "Elevated" Standard?