Personal Blog

CD Player Woes

4 Comments

My CD player is shot, which I discovered late last night after tearing apart my entire room to figure out what that obnoxious buzzing noise was.

I got my first portable CD player for my birthday when I was in the 6th grade. It was a Sony, and it lasted me until my sophomore year in college. I think that…(does some finger-toe math)..8 years is quite a respectable lifespan for a cd player. Granted, by that time it was a clunky old warhorse, had to be held closed with a rubberband, and needed extra encouragement to get the buttons to work, but it still did its job.

Sophomore year of college, after Christmas and before my England trip, I decided to treat myself to a new cd player, and retire the warhorse. The wretched new thing barely lasted 6 months before it broke. I tried going up on price a bit with the next one, an Aiwa that was working wonderfully until last night. I had so much faith in it!

Now, I do put my cd players through some abuse. I fall asleep on them, drop them, smash them in my backpack, expose them to dangerous chemicals (oil paints), and the like. I might need to break down and buy a “really nice” one next. I don’t know if I can find one that I can squeeze another 8 years out of, but one that would last at *least* a year would be nice.

Anyone have any recommendations?

4 thoughts on “CD Player Woes”

  1. stick with Sony.

    It’s a good, reliable brand of stuff. I’ve got one, and so does my friend, and we both abuse them much also. Heck, his has the little silver thingy popped off, and you can touch the CD when it’s playing. It’s wierd. But they survive pretty dang good. Costs about $60.

  2. I still use my AIWA-cdplayer from 6 years ago. I don’t ‘abuse’ it and in the last few years there are hardly events in my life in which I really needed it.

    But, if I was looking for a new one,
    1) I’d inform myself about its ability to read mp3s. Those should also have no trouble with reading from a CDRW. Well, newer modles in general shouldn’t have trouble reading from a CDRW. The need of reading mp3s is not necessary, but it saves some time which would be spent with converting the files to WAV, if you’re into burning your own CDs.
    [Sidenote: Also AA-accumulators only last 3 hours in a cd-player (no antishock) and a CD full of mp3 contains ca. 10 hours of music (if cdsize = 650MB). To fully enjoy such an enormous playlist you either need four sets of 2 AA-accumulators with ‘Resume’ on your cd-player or you use a constant power supply and active speakers (the kind of speaker with the integrated amplifier; they need constant power supply, too) to still have mobility, but to bother your surroundings with whatever you’re listening to to a much higher degree. Or you simply don’t put so many mp3s on the CD(RW)].

    2) The price should be around 50€ at max (€ probably still has an ‘around 1:1-conversion’ to $). It’s a reasonable price for these devices.
    The need of ‘Antishock’ is debatable because of its powerdrain, but ‘Resume’ and ‘Hold’ should be there.

    3) And probably most important for the ‘abusive’ types: A nice time of warranty should be on that machine which lasts at least a year. Warranty which lasts longer than a year is a reason for me to pay a bit more over the above stated dynamic limit.

    Well that should be all from me about the criteria a new portable cd-palyer should fulfill. I might have forgotten some which didn’t come to mind at this hour.

    -Robat

  3. I also searched quite long for a good mobile device to listen my music on. And since the normal CD Postabls with MP3 aren’t available as well known brand like Sony or Panasonic, i looked in other segments and found a Mp3-Minidisc Player from Sony. His advantage is small size (7×8 cm), the minidiscs cost 2 $ and provide about 300 min. of music each. The player itself is also quite shock resistant….i couldnt manage to make it stutter even one time. The only disadvantage: The MD PLayer costs 200 $ 🙁

    First you have to ask yourself what purposes the Player has to serve. Size, shock resistance, prizes for the medias and so on. Best prize-value offers IMO are Mp3-Discman…but i’d suggest looking at big user-rating-portal-websites for recommendations since the “big brands” aren’t represented in that segment yet.

    I wouldn’t buy a normal CD Player nowadays since the technology is outdated, not much cheaper than normal CD portables and furthermore: Mp3 Discmans usually are more shock resistant because they don’t have to read uncompressed data.

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