Comment by 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.
Why not look online and get a "hifi grade" older used one?
Is it a budget issue or sound quality issue?
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.