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Old 8th Feb 2023, 5:47 pm   #81
hamid_1
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Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: High Wycombe, Bucks. UK.
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Default Re: On This Day In 1983 Philips Launched The CD.

Certainly CDs are not dead yet. I bought a few new ones last year. Sainsburys stopped selling them a year ago. Locally, Asda and HMV stores still have them, plus they can be bought online. True, they're more of a niche product now, rather like vinyl records, whose 'death' was proclaimed years ago, yet they haven't actually gone away.

In the last few years, some bands have released music on formats that are no longer in production, such as 8-track tape and MiniDisc. Even after the major music companies stop producing CDs, some could be made using recordable CDs. These are likely to be available as NOS in small quantities for many years to come.

Being able to make your own CDs is part of the fun. I got a PC CD-RW drive in the late 1990s and was soon making my own compilation CDs. I also got a portable MP3 CD player in 2000. The first one was rather awkward to use. It didn't display track names, so it was very difficult to find a specific song on the disc. I quickly got another one with a display showing the track title / artist / album. It was also possible to search for a track by name. Battery life was good. It read the MP3 file into RAM, then the CD stopped spinning for a while.

Another little novelty I have is an Aiwa 3 inch CD player that can play MP3 files from 3" CD-R/RW discs as well as play 3" CD singles, though the latter never became very popular - I only have one or two of them.

MP3 CD players were fairly short-lived, once hard drive / flash memory MP3 players became cheaper. Many DVD players can play MP3 CDs. Ordinary CDs can be played on all sorts of things fron home, car and portable stereos to computers and game consoles. That's one thing that's really good about them. And audio CDs are universal - there are no region-locks. There should be enough players to keep listening to CDs for many more years.
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Old 9th Feb 2023, 12:05 am   #82
Lucien Nunes
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Default Re: On This Day In 1983 Philips Launched The CD.

Quote:
My first player was a Sony D50 (tiny unit)
The D50 was an interesting product; the first portable released in 1984. Its design brief allegedly limited the size to no more than four stacked jewel cases. Which it achieves successfully, so long as you don't want to use it, as that doesn't include any power source. You can dock it either to a battery box in a holster, or to a mains PSU with a line output port that 'converts' it into a tabletop player. My CDP-101-owning friend and I both have them too, and like our original HiFi players, IIRC each unit has had one breakdown. I didn't have my D50 in the early days; as an inveterate mixtape maker equipped with a top-of-the-range personal cassette, I had less interest in portable CD before CD-R.

Which reminds me of a CD-dubbing frenzy that occurred when I got my first portable MiniDisc. I was moving into larger and larger live sound production jobs and MD was a powerful tool that unlocked many possibilities for the events noise boy on the move. Equipped with Sony's best portable CD and MD units in my bag, a stash of media and a mini-TOSLink cable, I could sit comfortably in my hotel room (or bar) editing tomorrow's show.

Moving into CD-R was less immediately successful. I had many issues with my two Philips CDR775 dual machines, which I eventually abandoned in about 2003 with Sony's launch of the RCD-W100 (which I still have in regular use) They were the only Philips products I had ever been unhappy with.
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