Would you bother with a CD player?

Beogram CD 3500

 

Why is that?

 

Yes I “bother” with a CD player daily. Although my Marantz CD6006 is far from high end it sounds good to me and has played flawlessly for 2 years. If I ever have an issue with it I’d probably look at a cd transport since my Cambridge integrated amp has a DAC.

 

You're more high than me and my old CD5003 with my old CS4392 DAC. You have the CS4398 DAC. I'm envious, although I still like my old player.

 

The question was, "who is going to punish/arrest you?

 

I keep all the cd's and records I buy.

 

I honestly can’t comprehend the desire to sell any of them. CDs are pretty easy to pack up and store (they are compact, after all).

 

I"ve been using DVD and Blueray players for playing CD's for almost 20 years. My last dedicated CD player failed about 20 years ago.

The annoyance today is that my latest player only has HDMI out. My TV has no RCA out and my hi-fi is 70's vintage. I had to buy an adapter that converts an hdmi out (from the TV) to RCA.

I'm sure there is no fidelity loss there.

 

I’ve just given up on Roon and streaming and gone back to CDs. Absolutely loving them and about to order 90 and would love a new CD player. That’s me for life. Tried all the other ways and gone back to something I love, no computers or tablets, no distractions, always works, simple and can find a track within seconds of pulling CD off the shelf.

 

We have a couple hundred DVD's and BlueRays. We only keep the disc and throw away the box.

 

You don't keep the papers or inserts?

 

Just get on ebay and buy a decent vintage CD player. I have bought 4 cd players in the past year or so and all of them have been fine and work perfectly. One I sent back because the circuit board got broken in shipping.

 

Nothing. Just the disks. We don't buy them to collect. We just want them to be around to watch. We dumped TV in 1998 so we lived by tapes and DVDs and, in the end, BlueRays. We bought a lot of stuff at first from Pawn shops used.

 

We find that DVD players tend to last about two years before they become extremely sensitive and skip too much. But at $35 a pop, so what? I wear hearing aids (decades playing bass next to too loud drummers) and my wife just listens as background music.

i.e. the law of diminishing returns regarding player sound quality kicks in early for me.

 

Wow...a "vintage" cord-cutter!

 

It changed my life. It allowed me to meet my wife and gave me time to become a bass player.

 

Funny, I did the same in 1997. But never parted with a CD player.

 

I have little interest in TV...now it's that darn internet I need to dump

 

Actually, it was april of 1997 for me. And no, I had a CD player until 2000. Actually, I had two. they were identical front loaders in dark brown plastic and had a numeric keyboard for track selection. Sony or Teac. I forget which. They both died.

 

Similar case here; I got my first CD player, a Panasonic mini-tower with a double deck cassette player included, around 1998, I think.

Paradoxically, I had started to buy CDs a few years earlier, asking my friends to copy them onto blank cassettes (I had been "ripping" my CDs before the proper ripping entered the stage!), but after a (good) while I realized that it would be easier to have an own CD player and play them myself. And that was a death blow to my cassette collection!

 

It killed cassette and records for me. But I came back to records after about a decade. Cassette will be forever only a fun historic thing for me - like my small collection of 78's. But to play them I kept my favorite "over the top" cassette player of all time. It's not the best sounding, but for me it's the 1959 pink Cadillac convertible of cassette decks: Pioneer CT-F1250.

 

The move away from including output options was surprising and frustrating to me when I looked at UHD Blu-ray players after getting a 4K TV last year. The Blu-ray player I have now includes HDMI, S/PDIF coax, and analog RCA outs. I understand why there is less demand for non-HDMI connections now, but it seems a lot of the lower-cost players on the market now are not conducive to CD playback in a 2-channel system.

 

I think the real problem is that if they are trying to cut costs, the natural thing to cut is the RCA plugs. It's like removing the ash tray from a car. Most won't care?

My biggest gripe, though, is that my $20 converter sometimes has problems with one channel or the other cutting out.

It's been pretty stable lately, but it used to be a problem. I'm actually considering dumping all the vintage stuff and going with that $400 receiver at Costco that's 5.1 or 7.1 or 32.1 or something surround sound and just be done with the whole thing.

Sometimes we are all like a bunch of teenagers constantly fiddling with our souped up 10 year old honda civic when we need to just be moving on to a Camry and/or Posche 911.

 

The lack of RCA outs isn’t even that big a deal to me, since I would probably prefer a DAC other than the one built into an inexpensive Blu-ray player. However, when I see them without a coax or TOSlink, that’s automatically useless to me. Thankfully, that still doesn’t seem to be as widespread an omission.

 

Your DVD players only last 2 years. Where do you live, Chernobyl?