top | item 46606626

(no title)

te_chris | 1 month 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.

discuss

order

WD-42|1 month ago

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

RIMR|1 month 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.

eterm|1 month 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.

patates|1 month 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|1 month 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.

torginus|1 month 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.

te_chris|1 month ago

Yeah, but most of the the old (2000s in particular) mid-range hifi units all had decent-enough DAC's to do 44.1/16bit. And they're cheap now.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/317751858636 e.g. £65 doesn't even remotely get you close to listenable in vinyl.

pavon|1 month 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.

mlrtime|1 month 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?