I've owned too many portable CD players (Patreon bonus)
Added 2025-08-04 22:21:00 +0000 UTCMost people owned one portable CD player, sometimes two if the first one broke. I've owned...considerably more than that.
Comments
Oddly enough I never really got into portable CD players, and when I did it was for a very brief moment and at a weird timing. My family's famous for doing hand-me-downs. This is how before the age of 10 I've received my first Sony Discman, the D-250. A gorgeous machine that still looks futuristic. But its battery was already too weak to be practical outside the home. So it sat on my nightstand, hooked to AC power and I used it every day in bed or around the room. Then in 2000, I'm 13 years old, and I get my first MP3 player: the Sony NW-E3. A tiny player, shaped like a cigarette lighter and beautiful blue LCD backlit screen. At 64MB and a single AAA battery, it held enough music for one day (at 64kbps) and I enjoyed it a lot. It also still looks rather futuristic today. Sony sure know how to make designs last. There was also my dad's old MiniDisc that I was handed down, the MZ-R2 (Colin, I believe I shipped that one to you for your video?). I remember using it a lot, but I forgot the timeline. Could've been after the NW-E3 MP3 player. Then in 2004 I'm in my sophomore year of high school, and there is a school trip to Poland to see all the holocaust sites. It's only at this stage that I go ahead and buy a CD-MP3 player, because I needed to haul a lot of music for a full week of flights and bus rides. I dumped it pretty quickly after that, because a few months after Poland I had gotten my driver's license and borrowed some money from a friend to purchase a Sony NetMD player with a car kit (cassette adapter and wired remote). After that it was of course the iPod (again, hand-me-down from dad who had an iPod Photo and upgraded to Video I think). Now with streaming getting on my nerves, I'm going back to MP3s. I put a 512GB MicroSD card in my Sony Xperia 1 V phone, and downloaded Poweramp, and I'm really loving this experience. It's fun to be able to listen to your own music (a big chunk of it not available on Spotify) and to actually be able to customize the player to my liking! One thing that often doesn't get talked about with the rise of SaaS platforms is the lack of customizability. Damn, I miss that.
Asaf Sagi
2025-08-08 16:33:03 +0000 UTCI remember it vividly: selecting the Panasonic CD player with 3 seconds of anti shock that Consumer Reports recommended (around late 1997). By the time I went to buy it after the review was published, a 10 seconds version was out and I bought that at Circuit City (with a protection plan). That one worked for a while but then died right before the plan expired, meaning it was replaced by a 40 second skip protection version (probably was a 2 year plan). I think that must have been around 2000. Then in late 2001 I bought an MP3 CD player, which I remember being incredibly excited about. It was so cool to have that many songs on the go. But the user interface was awful and battery life terrible. Ultimately I replaced it with a 2nd Gen iPod since that generation was the first to support Windows (this was during our family’s gap in Mac ownership). Do you remember that this was before iTunes for Windows and the only way to sync an iPod to Windows was via MusicMatch? It was the official way! My regret would be buying that MP3 CD player - what a waste. It was so short lived as a device for me.
Dave Rhoads
2025-08-06 06:29:36 +0000 UTC
