When i tell you I had this exact CD player from....6th grade until well into college I am dead serious. With HEAVY USE.

It’s probably the best portable CD player ever made and I miss her every day. I didn’t even look at iPods until well into the touch generation because this thing was such a beast

is it a discman or another brand?

Sony D-SJ15!

omg at a blast from the past

I only had to retire mine because i used these mega studio-jack Sennheiser headphones on it and it bent the audio port

(Those headphones ruled but they also destroyed two computer headphone jacks before i realised they were the problem LMAO

omg I didn't know that was possible

ME EITHER LMAO

I eventually got an adaptor but only after it killed my baby

The plug was literally too bulky/heavy for most audio ports

...I still have my CD Walkman from way back when.

I still have soooo many CDs and a lot of them are stuff that’s not readily available via streaming

Ouch I'm sorry the jack killed your original one!

Mine still works and every so often I use it. Much nostalgia, muy love.

IT’S ALRIGHT....i literally did get a decade out of it, and considering the abuse and heavy use it survived, I will say that’s solid. Most people i know went through a lot more

I forget who it was who plurked about a Sony Walkman mp3 player but I just checked and it's finally being sold 👀

I’m a sony bitch for electronics, the hype is, in fact real

Fair! And same! Some things are still hard to find even with the internet...

I have one of the Sony headphones that are super noise canceling so yes

I still have my home CD stereo too which was like, baby’s first big purchase, and it works in all ways EXCEPT playing CDs and i have no idea why. I really like it, and it’s like, still in great condition otherwise

But also any audio place WILL laugh at me if I bring a 2003 EMERSON in to get repaired

They were absolutely made to be disposed of in a few years

CDs will never have the aesthetic coolness of vinyl (or even cassette) as far as collectibility, but I think like, they’re probably the best of all worlds in terms of sound quality/portability/collectibility trifecta

They also just looked cool

yeah!

Agreed. I love all my cds even if they aren't as cool to collect. But they have that other stuff going for them.

To get vinyl that looks cool it has to be a conscious decision on the part of the manufacturer to make colored vinyl. I used to have a lot of old colored vinyl singles, but it's not the standard.

But the cd jewel case and the cd itself... like, yeah, they have their issues, but in the 80s they were just so new-looking

Anyway, I still have a portable cd player... but it's Hello Kitty themed.

It's this one.Super Rare Vintage Sanrio Hello Kitty CD Player Y2K ...

I mean, if NOTHING else, CD is AT LEAST equal in sound quality to vinyl (there’s like, a lot of debate between the camps, but at the end of the day it’s kind of not discernible to 90% of people and seems to depend of what you are measuring)

And they both leave digital (specifically streamed music which is where i have been getting 100% of my music for the past 6 years) in the dust

I think the vinyl fetishism actually comes from its lower sound quality, outside of high end audiophile systems. The "noise" of the format gives it a "warmer" sound.

CD formats tend to have no noise, but that cleaner sound is not always admired.

YEAH exactly

And yeah, digital format compression is... yeah

And like, I do love the like, BIG album art of a vinyl

Why did we all collectively decide to Bluetooth everything, also

And the like, tactile experience

I DON”T KNWO

Cd long boxes were cool, because you could make little posters out of them.

Like, do I LOVE and utilize streaming a lot? YES

Do i think it created a lot of good things in terms of music access? ALSO YES

They were pretty much gone by the time I started buying cds, but once in a while I'd come across old stock somewhere.

But i actually hate how much it has disconnected me from my music and music listening

Like, i guess it’s nostalgia, but I actually do think there’s something sincerely valuable about the whole like, “buy a CD, open the wrapper, look at the art/booklet, put the CD into a machine, listen to the whole thing, really deep dive into it because you bought it”

As opposed to like, I find a new artist on Spotify and like, YOURE LUCKY IF I EVER CLICK THE ARTIST

I miss the booklets and album art

One and done

I recently had the wild experience of checking an album for an artist and discovering over the past two years i had separately, and individually added like, HALF of a single album to my likes, and i never once made the connection or realised it was a single artist

I remember being obsessed with the cd booklet for Machina by Smashing Pumpkins, and you just don't get things like that anymore. I mean, you can, but you have to seek them out.

IT WAS APPARENTLY MY FAVORITE ALBUM AND I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW IT EXISTED

detectivefiction: YEAH, booklets, albums art....having to look in the booklet for the lyrics

I love that stuff. It creates a whole like, multimedia experience that adds to the music, and kind of tells you more about goals and intent of the artist/s?

Let me explain that Machina had sincerely bizarre and complex art:Hand printed etchings for the Smashing Pumpkins albu...

I love that! It’s so interesting...

And a lot of cd packaging was like that. Just sincerely unnecessary, but so cool.

(See also: NIN hidden tracks.)

I mean the whole marriage of album art and 2D art being an expected companion to music is....pretty much as old as recorded music

Yeah. It was much more common to get a packed booklet with a CD than with vinyl, though! You got booklets with vinyl sometimes by the time the format started to wane (and before that if it was some kind of deluxe release, or required notes), but

typically the interior package design was just the record sleeve, maybe with lyrics.

For me the most memorable sleeve is the one that came with Purple Rain -- which has become a common tshirt design.

But I feel like the smaller format of CDs made some record companies willing to do some bananas experiments in the booklets

nothing like the Colorforms stuff from the Velvet Underground though

oh man i miss hidden tracks

like, sure, you can splice it out and have it as a second track, or officially add it to another one, but it ruins the fun of getting one to play

OHHH yeah hidden tracks are so much fun!