It’s time to dust off those old CD binders.
Nah man. If you care about your CDs you should already have them ripped to flac format, so the disc rot can’t kill them. Convert to mp3 vbr0 for tossing them on a player or your phone. Listen with whatever ear buds you like.
It’s not like vinyl or casette tape, where the analog nature of the storage medium is going to effect the sound. CDs are pure digital, just a carrying case for the files on them.
The only reason to use mp3 is if you want to play it on old devices. It’s much better to use opus on anything that supports it.
Or buy your music from a source that offers both. I have flacs from bandcamp, but also CDs from those same albums
I agree about ripping the CDs to files, but disc rot is not a big deal to worry about if you’re storing the CDs properly away from sunlight and heat. Recently I’ve been going through my collection and ripping old CDs of stuff I didn’t have in the digital library… and all my CDs from the 90s that I’ve tried are still good. Many of these are 30+ years old and still sound perfect
wav is uncompressed PCM usually, flac is compressed and as such smaller (difference in size depending on the kind of music), but they’re both lossless with the resulting signal being bit for bit identical to the data on the CD.
320 kbps MP3 makes little sense nowadays except for when you need maximum quality for a device supporting nothing else. For long term storage, use flac.
There’s still some use cases for sure. My 4 gig Garmin running watch (2.5 usable) might play flac but I want more than a few albums on it.
This is one of those “they were so concerned with if they could do it, they didn’t stop to think if they should” sort of things.
Portable cd players were never actually that portable, because cds are just big. Minidisc players sure, but those never really caught on. MP3 players, however, caught on because they are small and easily portable, and the library doesn’t take up a binder.
Also portable CD players skipped constantly. Minidisc was way better for that, but then MP3 (and Limewire) hit…
With current technology you could make them a lot better. Basically put 700mb of flash memory on the player and rip the whole thing as soon as you put the CD in, then play from flash. But then you get back to why you would want to do something like that again.
Heck yeah!
I had a Sony atrak 3+ player back in the day (around 2003-4, probably, because I used it at work) which was just an mp3 file compression alternative served up on a special cd player instead of an mp3 player… they tried… anyway I had a re-writable disc that I’d add stuff to whenever I downloaded it, and I think the one cd had like 1800 songs on it or so (and lots of space left)
That didn’t skip, even working a physical job, unless I banged it against something. Part of why I got it. But when I put regular discs in, they would skip a lot if I didn’t have it laying flat.
No they aren’t
This may sound crazy, but hear me out. What if instead of a spinning plastic disc we use a spinning metal one, for durability and to reduce movement of the medium while accessing data. It would also allow for much greater storage density if we stack a bunch of them.
It’s not a bad idea if you have a good library, but $180 is crazy
It’s got a balanced headphone output, so they are obviously targeting the audiophile market.
I don’t know why anyone would want to use a portable CD player though. They scratch up your discs and skip if you move around too much.
What would a balanced output do for the 3 feet of cable that will most likely be connected to it? I mean sure, put it in if you can’t help it, but even though it’s a portable player, no one is gonna take that to the next motor fab where it would benefit from a balanced output, and at home an audiophile most likely already has a better player around.
And yes you’re right - the whole idea is nonsense to begin with. CDs have always been fully digital, so better listening options exist.
A balanced output will have less crosstalk between the channels. I’ve never used balanced headphones, so I don’t know if it’s noticeable. My guess is the only really noticeable thing is that the higher output voltage swing from the differential amplifiers will make high impedance headphones louder.