If CDs are obsolete, why old CD players are still expensive?

[levimax]

I pick them up at thrift shops when looking for CD's.... usually ~$10 without remote and $15 to $20 with remote. I always make sure they have digital out in case I want to use an external DAC but I have found the built in DAC is usually fine. Still looking for one that can play SACD's ....

 

[tmtomh]

I mostly use pc audio for regular playback, but still my cd players are my guilty pleasure. I use them mostly occasionally and they never fail to bring joy, unlike some difficult to set up streamers or usb dacs..
and since nobody is using cd format, I was hoping to further expand my inventory of cd players hoping that prices would drop anytime soon.
Cd players usually are not collectibles, they cannot spin forever and are going to die anyway, unless some top of the line vintage Sony or Philips, they look ugly and some don't sound that great anyway, though in my experience they sound better than most entry level dac.
So why they are still expensive? You cannot buy a 200$ player just for nostalgia and I'm not talking about the usual TDA 1541 cult, but anything old or new from Rotel to Marantz to some DVD/SACD players, that even defective demand more than 100$.

I don't know where you're located, but in the U.S. CD players can be found dirt-cheap at thrift stores (charity shops in the UK).

On eBay the asking prices are going up because CD players are considered vintage and there appear to be a lot of sellers who don't know, or don't care, about the difference between the truly collectible brands and models and the units that are more generic.

Until it was discontinued, the best CD player value IMHO was the Onkyo C-7030. It retailed for $200 and was regularly available brand new for $130 to $160. It's fast-loading, has a nice DAC implementation, and an unusually robust power supply for an inexpensive CD player. If you can find one used or new-old-stock for a good price, it has the benefit of being a newer model and therefore having a lot more life left in its laser than a 20-30 year old model.

 

[TimF]

In the last six months I have bought two cd transports to connect to two dac's: one is the Cambridge Audio cxc V2, and the other is the Audiolab 6000 cdt. I bought them months apart and bought on price finding discount specials and hence I ended up with different brands that are very much alike. I am happy they each play hybrid SACD's. I was using a Denon DCD-50 as a transport but it won't play hybrid SACD's and occasionally it would sort of jam up and I had to reach in with a tweezer and pull out a cd that wasn't playing. I lost faith in it but I am keeping it around as a backup because it isn't a bad cd player all in all. About 1.5 years ago I bought a Yamaha CD S-1000 SACD player new because I found it at a very low special price. It was swell and heavy and big. It played SACD swell, and as a cd player it was swell but not up to what I can achieve with a modest cd transport and any of the current Chinese DAC's available for under $600. That is to say, these days you can achieve very top notch cd playback for under $1,000 by buying separates--playback that equals what the major audio companies charge $2,000 and more....sometimes much more. Also, I didn't really have the space for the big Yamaha. I sold it for a $100 loss. It was fun though for a while.

 

[EJ3]

The thing about using a media player is that they load slowly. Often their controls are 'on screen' for programming or track selection. I had a Denon DCD-1500 that was great, ergonomically. An early Yamaha too. You could do everything from the front panel.

View attachment 98076

Interesting: My oppo 205 UHD doesn't seem to load that slowly. I also use a Sony RCD-W500C/W100 5 disk carousel, a KENWOOD KX-W8050 CASSETTE DECK WITH DOLBY HX PRO in both of the duel bays, 2 AKAI RtR's, a Technics SL-M3 titanium tone arm linear tracking TT and DUAL 1229 TT. I have yet to have a computer in my system or stream anything. That is not to say I won't, I hope to put a computer in with a 2TB SSD this coming year. But, as it stands, I have so many LP's (dating from 1927-today) and CD's, Blue Rays & 4K that if I lived to be 100, I likely would not be able to have played them all again. And many not yet the first time. Picking what to play is way more time consuming than a loading time.

 

[tmtomh]

Interesting: My oppo 205 UHD doesn't seem to load that slowly. I also use a Sony RCD-W500C/W100 5 disk carousel, a KENWOOD KX-W8050 CASSETTE DECK WITH DOLBY HX PRO in both of the duel bays, 2 AKAI RtR's, a Technics SL-M3 titanium tone arm linear tracking TT and DUAL 1229 TT. I have yet to have a computer in my system or stream anything. That is not to say I won't, I hope to put a computer in with a 2TB SSD this coming year. But, as it stands, I have so many LP's (dating from 1927-today) and CD's, Blue Rays & 4K that if I lived to be 100, I likely would not be able to have played them all again. And many not yet the first time. Picking what to play is way more time consuming than a loading time.

I use an Oppo 205 too. It has a revised transport from the 105 and one of their stated improvements is faster loading times. Indeed, it’s the speediest loading universal disc player I’ve ever used.

 

[restorer-john]

Originally, they suggested the CD would not last 10 years. Sony actually tried to kill them for the MD but the consumers revolted.

Not true. The compact disc format was envisaged by the inventors to have an approximate 25 year life before it was succeeded by solid state memory. MD was never intended to usurp CD. It was designed to co-exist and be a cassette replacement.

Here's part of an interview with Heitaro Nakajima January 2000:

I like this:

 

[Frank Dernie]

But Cd players are not high regarded by audiophiles

They are by music lovers though.

 

[Frank Dernie]

CD rot happened early on. Only a few labels suffered from the problem---Nimbus, for one, which gives you an idea of how limited the problem was. Soon thereafter, the issue went away. CD rot is a red herring, nothing compared to the guaranteed destruction of LPs over time.

I am going to check my Nimbus CDs now they would have been amongst the first CDs and one of them is a particular favourite, both from a music and SQ pov.
One of the reasons I know the talk of massive improvements in digital since the beginning is complete bollox.

 

[valerianf]

CD is becoming the "vinyl" of the XXI century!
I still have a CD player in my car, but do not feed it anymore, or rarely.
At home I am listening Amazon music HD.
When I switched from "vinyl" to CD I trashed all my records.
For now I am keeping my CDs, but I do not know for how long.

 

[Feelas]

I like this:
View attachment 101098

Especially impressive, since by 2020 we're still quite far for taking the personalization into account, for maybe a bunch of outliers trying.

 

[Chrispy]

While I still buy cds, I rarely play them as discs, I just rip them on receipt and then play them off a hard drive or thumb drive. I still have an old cd only carousel player, a coupla dvd players and even more bluray players.....but these days the only discs played are bluray and SACD and the dvds that dvdextractor couldn't.

 

[Frank Dernie]

since by 2020 we're still quite far for taking the personalization into account,

Well yes and no
The technology is there but a lot of people seem to want to have an "authenticated" by somebody else balance which they search for, rather than genuine personalisation which is trusting in their own taste/feeling of the moment.
Equalisation is easy if you use computer sourced digital files to listen to music.

 

[restorer-john]

But Cd players are not high regarded by audiophiles, and they don't look as cool as a 70s amplifier.

Huh? Audiophiles are the people responsible for the early success of the Compact Disc format itself. They bankrolled the early years and without the classical music audiophiles, there would have been a very slow uptake. As it was, the format stalled for a few years after the initial buzz wore off, then the mainstream acceptance took off when low priced, portable and car units became ubiquitous.

Any audiophile who doesn't hold the CD in high regard is a faux-audiophile or a wanna-be in my opinion.

I have some very early CD players that are extremely cool looking. A few of these Akai CD-D1 players for instance:
(internet pic)

 

[Feelas]

Well yes and no
The technology is there but a lot of people seem to want to have an "authenticated" by somebody else balance which they search for, rather than genuine personalisation which is trusting in their own taste/feeling of the moment.
Equalisation is easy if you use computer sourced digital files to listen to music.

I know that people seek validation, yet it's mostly manufacturers' bad will, since the technology is here already for long. EQ-ing might seem easy, yet to do it properly you'd at least have to learn basic theory + get some measurement gear, owning which you'll have a hard time justifying, after measurements are done and gone. In short words, we're forcefully dragged down just to keep the audio gear myths alive, since measured gear won't sell without a story.

Any audiophile who doesn't hold the CD in high regard is a faux-audiophile or a wanna-be in my opinion.

I think that you'd easily find, that there's a correlation between not understanding digital in general, or "understanding" as "I've seen that CD looks like 3-bit quantized staircase and I don't know about smoothing filters" and disregarding anything digital as viable. Having an absolute lack (and believe me, I'm not a titan myself) of knowledge about anything digital, you're quite likely to fall for the myths surrounding jitter, lack of time resolution, not getting the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem (but not merely in pure theory, in general what it explains!) etc. All in all, a faux-audiophile but a real-analoguephile.

 

[Frank Dernie]

I know that people seek validation, yet it's mostly manufacturers' bad will, since the technology is here already for long. EQ-ing might seem easy, yet to do it properly you'd at least have to learn basic theory + get some measurement gear, owning which you'll have a hard time justifying, after measurements are done and gone. In short words, we're forcefully dragged down just to keep the audio gear myths alive, since measured gear won't sell without a story.

I don't see the problem.
Nakajima said people would be able to alter to their taste, and they can, easily. No measuring equipment is needed, listen to the music and adjust to your taste or mood of the moment.
What he didn't predict is this search for the holy grail needing measuring equipment to adjust to a balance somebody else's experiments has shown to be preferred by many.

 

[Feelas]

I don't see the problem.
Nakajima said people would be able to alter to their taste, and they can, easily. No measuring equipment is needed, listen to the music and adjust to your taste or mood of the moment.
What he didn't predict is this search for the holy grail needing measuring equipment to adjust to a balance somebody else's experiments has shown to be preferred by many.

Well, the better you get technically, the more tools you have to chisel the sound for yourself, a'ight? That's all I had to say here, but yes - even a simple Android smartphone w/ cheap audioapp nowadays has EQ. This is absolutely impressive, actually!

 

[Frank Dernie]

Well, the better you get technically, the more tools you have to chisel the sound for yourself, a'ight?

Yes, but if the objective is to alter to individual taste no more technical knowledge is needed now that it was to twiddle tone controls or graphic equalises 40 years ago.
What has unexpectedly changed is the internet effect.

 

[Feelas]

Yes, but if the objective is to alter to individual taste no more technical knowledge is needed now that it was to twiddle tone controls or graphic equalises 40 years ago.
What has unexpectedly changed is the internet effect.

Still, traditional 10-band EQs/tone controls are inherently limited, wouldn't you agree? Knowing the full extent of what your gear can do with proper settings (summing the EQ with shelves and so on isn't that intuitive) isn't actually easy, and w/o technical knowledge you'll be bound with simple tweaks, which might bring you closer, but not as close as you'd like. Really, I'm not talking about regulating to target curves!

 

[Wombat]

Does anyone equalise for each album(or each track)? Really? Truly?

 

[Robin L]

Still, traditional 10-band EQs/tone controls are inherently limited, wouldn't you agree? Knowing the full extent of what your gear can do with proper settings (summing the EQ with shelves and so on isn't that intuitive) isn't actually easy, and w/o technical knowledge you'll be bound with simple tweaks, which might bring you closer, but not as close as you'd like. Really, I'm not talking about regulating to target curves!

But parametric EQ is now free. I doubt "traditional" 10 band equalizers are seeing much use these days. And, for the most part, EQ-ing consists of seeing the frequency response of the gear to be EQ-ed, then compensating in the other direction. Much easier to get good results with APO EQ [freeware] than with just about anything else.