My son’s teacher gave all the kids a mix CD of all their “classroom songs” at the end of the year and he was crushed to discover we didn’t have anything to play it on… I picked up a discman from goodwill for $10 and he’s been fascinated with it. I dug up my old binder of CDs and he’s been listening to stuff non-stop. It’s interesting to see the difference in engagement between physical and digital media.
My daughter (early 20's) has become a cassette tape and CD fan. It all started when she bought a used car with an original tape/CD head unit. Currently we are creating a home-made CD of Lana Del Rey's unreleased music. She is designing the CD cover, inside art work and liner notes with track listings. We used my Epson photo printer to make beautiful printed CD's with a really cool photo and text. I handled the technical parts and she made all the art and it has been really fun to collaborate with my daughter on this archaic technology. Also - her friends really love the retro cool stereo with physical media which kind of surprises me. They've been buying mix-tapes from the 90's to listen to while driving.
I think that is why vinyl is still kicking around, there is something good/nice/meaningful (cant really place the term) of having something physical rather than digital.
I did the same thing (in a way) with my dad’s old vinyl records and tapes when I discovered his collection about 20 years ago. I feel a little sad for younger generations because they won’t ever be able to stumble upon their parents’ physical media collection. It was really cool seeing the kind of music he listened to when he was my age (at the time). Guess I’ll start making playlists on Spotify specifically for my future kids to discover. Something about it doesn’t feel right though unfortunately.
Funny anecdote - earlier this year I went over to my buddy's place with a CD someone had given me that I wanted to listen to with him. We were shocked to realize that both his PS5 and PS4 were incapable of playing back CDs. The only device he had hooked up that could play CDs? A Sega Saturn!
They're not obsolete to me, still buying CDs 4 decades later, in fact I am buying more than ever since people are throwing them out or giving them away for virtually nothing!
@@Reprint001even if we don't have cd players, it will take longer still for cd drives to go entirely extinct in pcs. Desktop PCs still often have CD drives, and even when they don't they are readily available and cheap to buy. Customers with CDs can continue to legally import CD tracks to something like iTunes or RUclips Music.
Mat -- great video as always. I worked at Microsoft in the Windows group from Windows 7 through Windows 8.1. Specifically, I was on the team that ran the metadata lookup service for Windows Media Player, XBOX and Zune. It was a very complex, heavily used service at the time. Our source was Gracenote, and if the same systems were still in-place you would've seen album art for all of those titles. The group I was in was called "Windows Metadata and Internet Services," or WMIS. I'm back working in public media (NPR/PBS in Maine, USA) so I'm not sure what the system is like now. My primary job for Windows 7 was the lead Program Manager for the "Radio Tuner"/internet radio service also built into the Windows Media Player. We had a curated database of thousands of stations from around the world, with specific experiences for English, French, Spanish, German, Simplified Chinese and Portuguese . We built the back-end CMS and the services that drove this feature. Even during Windows 7 days, the Windows Media Player (or WIMP as we lovingly called it internally) was a huge amount of legacy code and the devs were very wary of changing/adding to the code for WIMP because it was so big and old -- lots of legacy code in there -- and no one had total knowledge of the app. The CD lookup system not only used table of contents data, it also used acoutstic fingerprinting to identify CD's. It was an amazing service that did an incredible amount of queries per day. We even recognized bootlegs and homemade CDs. Windows has fundamentally changed so much in the 8 years since I left Redmond -- It looks like they changed the service backend or there's a bug that breaks most album art queries. We incorporated user submissions -- including custom album art -- into the service. That resulted in some funny, inappropriate album art being posted by trolls and served by us -- we would clean those entries out by hand. For years I used my PC or my console to listen to CDs but that all changed when streaming service quality improved. However, I'm an audio engineer/nerd so I bought a universal disc player several years back -- the OPPO UDP-203. It can play any CD, DVD, Blu-ray or SACD. It wasn't cheap (around $800 USD in 2018) but it may be the last disc player I'll need. I use it for multi-channel audio releases (SACD, Blu-ray and DVD Audio) to listen to on my 7.1 system. I also have a relic -- the HD-DVD player unit for the XBOX 360 with only one HD-DVD: the pack-in "King Kong." After working on Windows, I moved to the team that launched the Microsoft Band -- our fitness tracker/smart watch released just before the Apple watch. I was in charge of the out of box experience (OOBE) for that product, which was a really good product that we did not do a good job of marketing. I'm still proud of it though. I have 5 or 6 prototype versions of the Band, and I learned so much working on that. I know this is rambling, but if you ever have any questions about how Microsoft handled these services during that time, I'm happy to answer them. Please keep doing what you do -- you're the first thing I do every Saturday morning after taking out my Golden Retriever. Any way, for those that read this whole thing -- god bless you. But I figure there may be some people out there interested in the stuff I worked on. Best from gloomy, rainy Portland, Maine.
I remember using that built in Album Art Lookup service! I would have all these MP3 files with just the artist name and song title in the filename, and I'd wish they had all the proper metadata, and one day in WIMP I saw that they automatically had said metadata, and were even categorized by year of release. Great stuff! Thank you for your service, genuinely one of the most useful features I've seen in a media playing app :-)
I did a lot of my CD ripping during that era, so you probably saved me a hundred hours or so of manually looking that data up. Thanks! A few years back I had to manually go in and assign data to several thousand files. It wasn't fun. XD
As much criticism as the RUclips comments section gets, there is the occasional gem in there. Thank you for sharing your impressions of your time at Microsoft. It's fascinating to get an insight into how things worked behind the scenes. I read your post with great interest. I work in a related field: Radio automation systems. Basically, these are media players on steroids, but geared towards on air operation. A typical RAS (the bigger ones, anyway) is also heavily networked, has a gargantuan database for metadata, supports collaboratively editable playlists (AKA schedules), provides mixing desk control and also comes with more mundane things like automated broadcast reports (e.g. for accounting of royalties). The user base is considerably smaller, but also way more demanding ;) Thanks again for the insight into how the "big guys" at Microsoft tackle this field, you don't get that every day.
i remember popping in Plastic Beach from Gorillaz on my Xbox One and having this beautiful official art from the album with the main band members that i was able to set as the home background, it was so dope
Very informative. Many people tell me that they have nothing to play an audio cd on and I will reply "you got a PlayStation, don't you?" It never occurred to me that the PS4 or PS5 couldn't play an audio cd.
@@BlahBleeBlahBlah You say it's greed, but I blame websites like Spotify. Having things that aren't computers on the internet was never a good idea, even when Steve Jobs assassinated the internet by giving dullards access with the iPhone.
I still remember being able to rip CDs to the hard drive and playing them within your games being a major selling point of the original Xbox and 360. Those were the days...
They still are the days mate! I've been buying CDs since mid-90s still buying them now! And I got my first ever Xbox and Xbox 360 a few years ago (2nd hand dirt cheap). I haven't tried the "put music in your game" feature yet but you bet I am aware of it....
And it was really smart about it. You could play your own music and it would automatically replace the game's ost with it (if you really wanted that). It's really sad to me that physical media is going away. I never thought I'd see the day when Best Buy announces they will no longer be carrying discs. I really hope that they don't stop releasing the media in this way as it's the only option for some people, and it's the best option honestly. They can't go back later and say "oh this incredibly iconic episode of this tv show that had a soundtrack that was as iconic no longer has the rights to these songs, so we're just going to replace it with something else". Like that scrubs episode. This even happened with the scrubs theme song. Try watching scrubs on streaming, it's jarring and absolutely ridiculous. So sick of "digital rights" ruining things.
Best Buy getting rid of physical media means instead of visiting their store once a month, maybe I'll visit once every 3-5 years. Doesn't help they closed the local store and the next closest is 30 minutes further away.
I actually had no idea the PS4 didn't play CDs, it still plays DVDs and has a media player which can play media files off a USB drive, so I guess I always assumed it was the case.
When it was first released the PS4 couldn't even play stuff off of a USB stick. I was surprised as to how many things they stripped out of it compared to the PS3. While the XBOX One advertised itself as a media center with media playback capabilities and it's ability to connect to a cable box, Sony focused the PS4 to be primarily a game machine.
Even though they are designed for Infrared, you can play CDs using the red laser of a DVD drive, and similarlry I believe a Bluray can resolve DVDs. But to have a drive that could play all three either requires multiple lasers of different wavelengths, or additional focusing hardware for the blue laser. I guess Sony haven't considered that extra cost worthwhile since the PS3.
It's utterly insane to me that any console with an optical drive that by it's nature will physically read CDs does not support CD playback. Insane. What could it possibly cost to add that playback support, especially if your company (Sony) created the standard in the first place??
Makes no business sense to Sony to allow customers to 'consume content' that we aren't paying to rent a.k.a. stream. These companies have one legal purpose: increasing profits to pay as dividends to shareholders. Providing physical or digital products is to be minimised as an expense.
Licensing for this sort of stuff cut into profits for the console itself and the majority of the consoles sold would never be using it. If the drive even supports the disc, expect homebrew to possibly be made for it.
im sorry but, just because something reads bluray, does not mean it can physically read cds, that requires a separate diode in the laser. aka, added cost.
It was weird that Sony stopped supporting CD in their game consoles. The one in the PS3 had some great visualizers, including one that was looking at the earth in real time.
Am I mistaken or would they need to install an entirely different laser to read CDs though? Can a standard blu-ray laser read a regular CD? I would think the pits would be too large.
@@kaitlyn__L Thanks, I knew it was something. Even if it's a small addition, the fact it's so uncommonly used so as to be an interesting topic for a video pretty much tells you why Sony probably didn't bother.
Best option is probably still to archive CDs using a proper software (i.e. Exact Audio Copy) in a lossless format (i.e. FLAC) and then listen to them via a HTPC/Streamer/etc. - they'll be accessible and playable in the future.
Provided it's backed up adequately. Then again, I imagine enthusiasts like us who jump through the hoops of ripping, cataloguing and backing up archives of music will want to keep their CDs and keep hold of a machine that can play them. Realistically, most of the public will simply not bother and just stream (in fact they already have done this).
Within the last 5 years, ive bought a lot of CDs in a now 50 album collection. Mostly because of how digitised most media has become and my urge to preserve a lot of it in case they get removed/made unavailable and become lost media. It gets you thinking about how less and less of the things we enjoy are able to be physically owned now.
Be aware that disc rot means that CDs are hardly a sturdy storage media. Make backups on multiple places and keep migrating them to newer stuff, I guess. Note that it's a variable thing, though. Some CDs will be dead within 20 years, other CDs will live for 500 years. (If you're curious, magnetic tape is also just a decade or two. As anyone with an old VHS collection will be painfully aware.)
You can physically own music without having an actual box with a CD in it, but coming from the age of records and cassettes I do get the idea of wanting something physical when playing music. Still: I like my NAS with my FLACs in it, streaming through DLNA to my receiver. It's just so handy :-)
@@Gemini476it's maybe 15 years ago I tried to back up family videos on magnetic tapes via a TV card in a pc. 1/3 of the tapes where dead empty.... Nothing left.
I loved the Dreamcast for it's Music Visualisers. the Xbox (before the 360) I enjoyed ripping CD to it.(also why had my xbox modded to larger hard drive 80g for music.)
@@keithfulkerson There are some homebrew MP3 players for the Dreamcast that do have that. I still have many CDs that I made back in the early 2000's that have DC Playa with over 150 MP3s on each CD. Looks great and sounds awesome.
This shows me that I live a quite different life than most "normal" people. I just counted the amount of devices capable of playing CDs in the room I'm sitting in alone: 5. I can think of 4 more in the household. I don't think I will run out of CD playback cabability soon. The great advantage of Audio CDs is their forward-compatibility to CD-ROMs, DVDs, Blu Rays, 4K Blu Rays. Have any of those technologies and you'll also have Audio CD playback.
I'm not embarrassed to say that I have quite a few CD players as well. Not even counting the Portable CD players that I collect (the display case has 12 on the shelf, but i have 18 more in storage) - I've got a Supercope SCD300, A Denon DN-T620 (plays cassette and has pro controls), A Sony MXD-D3 (minidisc mix), and a Sony DVP-NS90P (for SACD) in my home system. Oh! I forgot to mention the mini-component HiFi systems that I own - but I should probably stop right now so the folks from the Funny Farm don't try and collect me.
@@RebeccaTurner-ny1xx Because I like music and movies and computers. And because my wife doesn't want me to clutter the other rooms with all the hardware. :)
Yeah, I really liked how Xbox One & Series X has good support for all stuff that you're nominally supposed to be able to play on a Blu-Ray player. Oh, and Xbox has VLC available too. Can say that it pretty much plays everything I throw at it via disc or USB or network.
The Xbox One and even the 360 were marketed as home entertainment systems, not sole game consoles. It was one of the things with which Microsoft tried to compete against Sony. And then they also leaned heavily into seamless compatibility across different systems, something Sony gave up on with the PS3, which makes it much easier to maintain even "obscure" application like a CD player. An UWP app can run on Xbox One, Xbox One X/S, Xbox Series X/S and Windows 10/11, because they all run some version of Windows. Forget VLC, there is a Kodi port for Xbox. You can even install emulators without much hassle.
@@Ironhanded_Praetorian For CDs, the Windows Media Player app (as mentioned in the video), and the Blu-Ray Player app plays DVDs. Neither was installed by default (as far as I can remember).
CD's are the best physical music format to get into in my opinion. It has fantastic sound quality, they are cheap as hell and they don't degrade in quality over time or number of plays.
So do MicroSD cards full of FLAC files. Actually, cards are dime-like in size and you can't scratch FLAC files like a CD. Audio CDs still need a DAC. Your point?
CD's definately degrade, especially recordable/rewritable ones. It's in the range of decades but do not expect 'forever media' from them. Usual quoted age ranges are in the 50-100 year range, which means the oldest disks start to come into that range in about a decade. It also depends on the quality, I have game disks which are no longer readable due to disk rot (see the wiki page for examples).
In some ways I think we've come full circle with CD's. Did you know you can buy portable USB CD drives for cars now they don't come included? That might be an interesting extension to this review.
That is awesome news, although the only cars I could afford anyway are old enough to have a CD player. For me it's mandatory - no CD player, no sale. I must be able to play my CDs, no question.
@@AbjectPermanence It's a CD drive that plugs into a cars USB port and presents the songs to the car as if they're MP3's. So you'd go into the USB source of the cars infotainment and access the music just like if you had copied MP3's to a flash drive.
It comes as no surprise to me. I've been asked to fix more CD players in recent times as folk can't find new players with the same features as their beloved old kit. I wonder what Mat would have made of the demise of the LP and cassette to the new "CD" if RUclips had been around in the early 80s? How about a Retro TechMoan edition 80s style vid Mat?? 😄😉
I notice some people who don't traditionally say "folks" using that term instead of the more culturally appropriate "guys" or "people". I think James Lindsey of New Discourses has a vew things to say on the matter.
Culturally appropriate hahaha!! Seriously though, all the good old CD laser mechs are indeed slowly failing. Ive accumulated 4 expensive players all with issues except a mid 90's Rotel:)
If you'd have told me in the late 90's that you could walk into Wal-Mart or Target and buy brand new vinyl records, but NOT CD's, I'd have called you absolutely crazy. Well. Here we are.
The PS2 is supposedly an excellent CD player, a lot of Minidisc guys use them because they aren't huge (if you get the Slim) and they have optical out for live dubbing to a recorder. You forget, Mat, that in 10 years CD will probably be having a resurgence like Vinyl started a few years ago and now Cassette is starting on.
I agree. But I shudder to even hear the PS2 slim mentioned again. I had one (for over 10 years) and then the laser ribbon became unglued. It nearly destroyed my entire collection before I realized this. (including lots of rare titles) Ended up buying a Fat model, if for nothing else the peace of mind. Plus, you can always mod it with an HDD and backup your games. Runs a bit faster, too!
Vinyl only had a resurgence because it is an analog medium and audiophiles/hipsters made a case about superior sound quality, particularly in the context of the earlier days of digital music streaming. CDs are digital. You can just copy the data and get CD quality audio from a file on a computer. Nowadays, there are "lossless music" streaming services where you stream it on demand, and lossy audio codecs are more than good enough for most people anyway. CDs don't really offer any physical or mechanical advantage and have several disadvantages. Using lasers makes them kinda cool, but that won't be enough to resurrect them. Cassettes are also analog, but I think it's too early to say whatever comeback they're having is more than a fad. They aren't as reliably high quality as vinyl.
@@bingbong3221 For me it would just be more about owning something physically. I've kept all of my old CD's even though I usually listen to music on Spotify or RUclips. I buy physical copies of Playstation games too even though it would be faster to download and play them. If you have digital copies you don't really own them at all. However I'm not sure if I would buy anymore music CD's, but I'm certainly keeping my old one's.
CDs aren't gonna have a resurgence. Vinyl did because it was an analog format, and its size meant that album art could be displayed as actual wall art. If you're an audiophile, you won't listen on CDs because you can get an analog format like vinyl or a lossless digital format like FLAC. If you're underground, a CD is more costly to distribute than a Soundcloud or Bandcamp. And if you're a normie, Spotify is way more convenient.
It's fascinating to live through the changing fates of physical media. When I was young tapes were the way to listen, then I got into buying records as a teenager because CDs were so expensive and you could pick up a great album for a couple of quid on vinyl. How things change!
Yep, I like the memories as I have a very clear memory of my first time playing a CD. It was either late 80s or very early 90s. We didn't have one but next door did. When they'd go away I'd go and feed the dogs and noticed they had a CD system. It looked amazing and futuristic. Picked Frank Sinatra CD they had to play. Had to work out how to open the tray. But it fasinated me as a kid. Didn't get my own access to a CD or player for another few years after that.
@@TheStevenWhiting Similar situation for me, I bought the 10 year anniversary CDs for my favourite band several years before I could afford a CD player. About 5 years ago I ripped all my CDs (purchased in from the early 1990s) onto my Mac and gave them away to collector, and about 4 years ago I had to buy a portable CD/DVD reader/writer for work as my laptop no longer came with one.
Just last year I was buying old (popular) records for 3€ a piece. Now there isn't a single record below 10€. On the other hand, even brand new CDs are commonly sold for under 10€.
Exactly Tim, and to be honest I'm kinda sad, to see physical media dying out, while we were there to see them being introduced, praised and growing 😥 edit:: lol it was kinda silly old man talk ;-)
I never bought a record, when I was a kid my mother bought me 45s with anime themes (I still got a box full of it) that I played with one of those portable orange 45 record players. Back in the 90s when I started buying music on my own, records where already considered kind of retro, only "old" people had record players.
PS3 really was the ultimate multimedia box at the time and being able to play (and rip) CDs was a big part of that! You could keep a musical collection on it and listen to it while you gamed, which seemed very futuristic at the time.
It was crap for playing video files though. It wouldn't play mkv files and had limited codec support. I replaced mine with a Raspberry Pi running XBMC once I figured out how to rip blurays on my computer.
to me, the compact disc will never die. I still buy them, play them, and love to listen to them on my CD player. There's nothing like sticking on an album or compilation and listening to pure, uninterrupted music without any subscriptions, ads, or anything of the like. You own the cd, and nothing can take that away.
@@MrOverfloater true, but it's nice to have your own copy stored somewhere safe in case something happens to your digital copy and you can't find it on the net again to redownload
I think the big thing that means CDs will always remain somewhat in use is that they're cheap to produce and can be read by any computer as long as you bring along a portable CD reader. Even if they're not really actively useful anymore, they're also not so hard to produce or annoying to use that there's any significant reason to *stop* using them either.
About a year ago I collaborated on a compilation CD and was very exited when I received my copies of the album. My PS4 was the only device I had left with an optical drive and I must say I was quite unpleasantly surprised, then annoyed and then pretty angry that my PS4 refused to play the audio CD. Had to buy an external CD drive for my iMac to be able to play my own freakin’ CD!
I really appreciate this creator. I am 70++ years old and I think I have most likely had fairly large collections of audio media in all the different types (except wax cylinders). I am glad I kept my vinyl records because I had folks offer to purchase them. I still have some cassette styles of media but not like I once had. I still also have an immense amount of CDs and laser discs of several types. It hurts me to think that I may not be able to play them someday but maybe my players will outlast me. I wish you all the very best of health and happiness to you and your families!
Stylized CD releases are absolutely becoming a thing, since the late 90s / early 00s things becoming hip again. Pretty shocking to see both the PS4 and PS5 not able to play CDs, the PS3 was a multimedia powerhouse.
I think the worst part is that these machines are still perfectly capable of playing CDs yet they don't support them. This is a major reason for consoles getting hacked - because companies lock off features that don't need to be locked off. Half of them are built into the systems and turned off too. Sony has done this plenty of times before.
Also part of the reason why I think they Xbox One and Series haven't been hacked yet where as the PS4 has been several times. I know Xbox isn't as popular so not as large a target but I think stuff like already having plex and kodi avaliable if you want emulators or other home brew just fire up dev mode and you can play them. Removes a lot of the urge to try and hack them open as you can already do what you want for the most part.
@@thomasstone3480 They also pulled support for user-installed software like Linux on the PS3 in a firmware update and sued developers trying to restore that support. Such a lovely company!
I miss visualizers on consoles when playing CDs, like on the Sega Saturn or the original Xbox. I also loved ripping CDs to the original Xbox and having games that could play the music in-game, like GTA 3, where there was a radio station in cars that was your own installed music. I used to drive around committing crimes while listening to Radiohead or KISS.
There was nothing like listening to a brand new CD and smelling the paper insert then reading the lyrics along with the song. And I also found interesting reading the credits of each track, the writers, producers, musicians etc. And sometimes you'd get a poster or decal sticker included.
now that's a smell I have not smelled in a long time! Since I only buy 2nd hand CDs all I get now is foxing, damp smell, smoke and rusty staples! Nah, to be fair some people actually look after theirs, but yes i do remember that smell fondly.
Techmoan should get finally rewarded for a great documentary work he is doing each week on tech evolution we are experiencing over the course of our lives. Sadly now the time has come for a CD format, but thanks to this channel it won't get forgotten about when and how this happened.
@@feltedsneedand do you think he just does it for the money? Or is the money just a nice side effect? I think the man i well off already without toobz monies
@@ohnoitschris I never thought about that. I guess I was just pissed that the UHD BD is struggling while that past century relic is still around and outsells even regular BDs!
This is quite... depressing. I grew up around the time when cds were becoming the audio standard and I remember fondly how futuristic it all was, from the rainbow light bouncing of the disc to the cristal clear clarity of audio compared to worn out cassette tapes and dusty vinyls. It all has started and ended in just 3 decades... Thanks Matt for doing what you do.
Tbh, a vinyl only sounds dusty, if it's not getting cleaned. It kinda was just a scam. Vinyl still sounds better. But about those tapes... I hated them as kids. Vinyls itself where better, but i didn't liked the form factor. Yes in that reguard, the cds felt really futuristic. But as i really started to here music more frequently, i left my discman at home and used mp3s already. *shrug*
@@SONGOKU02 No vinyl does not 'sound better'. It sounds worse. I've only ever bought a handful of vinyls because even as an early teen I was very anxious about buying an LP that was already scratched. CD was a big relief for me. Never cared for cassette either, I bought a DAT in the late 80ies.
Why depressing? I remember the rise of CDS, too and it was great. But I also like its replacements for similar reasons. Piles of boxes you could stack to the ceiling replaced by a tiny magic box that lets me listen to almost anything I want, any time, anywhere at high quality.
It hasn't "ended" for me, not on the say-so of anybody else. Still buying CDs and DVDs like crazy, even more so now that you can get them as little as 5p each in some second hand shops... I implore everyone to keep throwing theirs away and sign up for expensive streaming services instead!
That Windows Media Player app is quite new actually.. It just recently got a large redesign across Xbox and Windows, of course Windows Media Player isn’t just for CDs.. So maybe that functionality will be removed eventually but I feel like it will stick on for a while, since obviously by the name, it’s on Windows too, and I assume CD reading capability on Windows computers is probably higher in demand than CD on Xbox. Although it probably is still very low in demand compared to a decade or two ago.. Nice CD pick for the thumbnail too lol
Considering Microsoft's obsession with backwards compatibility, I would say that it is more likelly that they remove the disc drive from their xboxes entirelly rather than remove a feature from an app that they make for windows PCs. Hell, even floppy drives are still recognized on modern windows....
I got actually surprised it's named Windows Media Player on Xbox, on Windows 11 the new app (same shown on the Xbox) is named just "Media Player" and is distributed as an update to the old Groove Music app. Meanwhile, the previous Windows Media Player got renamed to Windows Media Player Legacy and it's slowly losing features (it can still play CDs, though)...
@@RealGengarTV The optical drive is just on the Series X now, the more better selling Series S does not have one. Also that optical drive is primarily used to play games, barely for CDs, the PS5 has one but as shown in the video it can’t even play CDs. It’s more likely that if you have an optical drive on any Windows PC that is external or internal that you might want to play a CD on it more than on a Xbox Series X.
You got me to explore the Sony U.S. site. I hadn't for a long time and was amazed how much Sony is backing out of audio altogether. The main "audio" items they had also crossed over to the home theater area. But most of the rest is long gone. And category hopping showed tons of cross-mapping of the same items. So it's not just CD that's fading away, but maybe Sony itself in the audio realm! Good show!
I know the music player part of their business seems to have moved to the Xperia 1 range, they have all the fancy audio chips in them that the new style Walkmans have, but also work as a phone Fiio had taken all the middle ground away from Sony, and everyone else to be honest, in the Walkman business. I struggle to even think of another company offering a similar product without googling or hitting aliexpress
The decline of Sony is sad to see - as well as audio, their market share/product range in other areas seems to keep shrinking eg TVs, phones etc. Sony used to have a large hand in the broadcast industry (TV studios, post production etc) and despite there being more TV then ever, Sony's presence there is a shadow of what it was 20 years back.
Not necessarily an excuse but Blu-ray audio is also technically a thing and a Hi-Res format, they’re able to be played on any player including the PS5 so perhaps the answer is that is the replacement to the CD if we’re talking physical media.
Sony's speaker division is basically all that's left of their audio sector, and the game consoles are still down well, but in all other sectors Sony's fallen far behind or virtually disappeared. Gone is the company that was a market leader in innovation and crazy ideas. These days it seems they're merely doing everything they can to stay afloat
My approach to keep my CD collection in heavy rotation has been cheap external USB drives and a small DAC. Using a PC as basically the media player offers a lot of freedom and features.
My PC is my main home entertainment device. I guess Microsoft got that right when they started introducing multimedia enhancements into their OSes. TBH I don't understand the point of console gaming when a PC can replace audio and video playback devices as well.
Yeah exactly, I once used EAC to make Lossless files of all my CDs and have them on my NAS. Can play them almost anywhere now and have them also on some SD cards so there's a backup.
As a Gen Z child it's kinda alarming CDs are dying so blatantly, that I want to dust off my few CDs and keep them 😢 I even started thinking about buying new ones for music that I always listen to
I'm almost certain you could use VLC media player on Series X, I use it on my Series S. It is community developed so likely it will keep on working for a long time even if the official media player stops working.
I recently bought something that came with software on a CD. I put it to the side, thinking I'll save that, incase I ever need it in the future... Then I remembered I haven't had anything that can read a CD for at least 5 years 😂 You might want to make a video about the RG35XX
Over Christmas I bought myself ten audiobooks from my favorite author. These audiobooks came on CD and were of much better quality than those offered by audible, as they were read by the author himself (who passed away long before Amazon existed). I figured that I would just rip them and then store the CDs somewhere. Then I look at my PC, which I put together a year or so prior, and... there's no optical drive. Not only that, but the case has no drive caddy where would could really be installed, that whole area is made to be filled with fans. It just slipped my mind, I took it for granted. My laptop didn't have one either. I just ended up buying an external DVD drive, but that did wake me up to the fact that media drives of any kind built into PCs are really not that common anymore. I
It all goes to confirm what I have been saying all along and people just don't get it. The music industry doesn't want you to own cds. I believe the true reason is because they can't put DRM on them and prevent the user from making lossless rips from them. They tried various forms of copy protection, but their schemes failed. So they figured the best DRM method would be to release their music on vinyl and kill off the CD. If everyone could just purchase their music and rip to computer then transfer to their smart devices Spotify and other streaming services would die.
Yeah, the higher end, enthusiast PC cases generally don't have drive bays. Few people use them, and manufacturers have realized that they have a lot of space that can be repurposed to either make smaller cases, or make cases with much better airflow. You can still find plenty of budget cases that basically use the old design(often even having a slot for a 3.5 inch floppy disk), but most pre-built gaming PCs go for what's trendy - having three massive fans on the front.
@@laerin7931 This is true, even if I think that having an optical drive it's useful is some cases, especially if one has to be sure to boot with a known good unwritable media.
That is why I buy Old Tech instead of the newest "Blows away in a stiff breeze" Lightweight Computer. So my Intel i7 laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad T530 that does play CDs and DVDs.
The thing is that in most second hand/pawn shops and a lot of record shops you'll still find tons of CDs - it seems like there's a big second hand market for them that's flying under the radar. CDs still seem to be the primary medium for older generations in some ways, who presumably don't tend to buy newer CDs as often. I recently got my Mum a philips micro hifi to replace the aging Sony one she had, and it's honestly really nice. An awful lot of older people just hang on to their older players as long as possible - as a lot of those start to faff out I can imagine there might be a small uptick in production for a period.
The real problem that techmoan forgot to discuss it "bit rot" of the physical media itself. It may be that the vinyl guys are going to have the last laugh!
@@metatechnologist As far as I know disc rot is extremely rare and mostly isolated to early CDs. It is certainly far less common than warped or scratched records.
There's a thrift store near me that has all their CDs at $1 each. Unfortunately a lot of them are scratched, and one Simon & Garfunkel one I got has the last song almost completely destroyed. Although I hear that the more error prone disk system was Laserdisc, and I have yet to see how my dad's collection fared. I grew up with Laserdisc until DVD releases and rentals took over. I still want to see if the Laserdisc hype is worth it as being superior to modern formats and watch some my dad has that I never saw. It wouldn't surprise me if there are some issues as in the computing world, optical media isn't known for being the most reliable long term.
Ironically, my Steam deck, that was made by people who standardized digital downloads on and helped kill off physical game media on PC, plays CD's just fine from an external USB-C CD drive. I even used it to install my old CD copy of NFS: Underground on it lol
I'm not sure how stripped down the Linux kernel of the SteamDeck is, but if it's a full fat kernel.. you'll find it can use a lot more devices, old 5.25inch floppy drives, tape drives, other old esoteric hardware, etc. Essentially with Linux all the support for everything is put in the kernel, so if it's there it will just work. Of course most devices don't need support for hardware from 1995 so kernels will often be stripped of obsolete/esoteric/irrelevant stuff depending on the use case (to make them smaller). Why would a router running Linux need to know about ISA slots and soundcards? etc.
@@RhinoRapscallion doesn't mean it's the full fat kernel out of the box. I can assume Valve has removed some stuff, as there is a lot that is pointless having except for the most esoteric reasons and consumes resources. Anyway I don't own a Steamdeck. :P
I’m barely out of high school and younger kids are making me feel a bit old. I was lending a friend a CD and a 13 year old didn’t recognize what it was. Most of my friends grew up in the last days of VHS, mini DVD camcorders, and BlackBerry phones, so we all find the slight age gap’s difference in familiarity with older technology interesting.
"younger kids are making me feel a bit old". I remember following the research and development of the CD (I was the kind of kid who took hi-fi magazines to school). Wait until you're this ancient...
Two years ago I realized that even though I collect a lot of old electronics, I had nothing that could play CDs. I thought my PS4 was up for it, but as you confirmed, no. On the upside, I found a 5-disc SACD changer for $20 at a thrift store. Haven't used it much, but it's there!
I have a cheap crappy LG DVD player I got because I couldn't find a decent CD player at a reasonable price. It's modern e-junk, but it will at least play CDs and pretty much any kind of disc in the same shape, which is unusual for modern equipment. It mostly just sits there, unpowered, but I keep it just in case I need to play CDs on the stereo. I normally just rip discs into FLAC files these days, but it's nice to have the option to play the actual discs
That media player for Xbox is the same one for Windows. It even tone maps HDR and plays Dolby Vision videos as HDR10. It's definitely been updated in 2023.
I'm glad you've covered this. I was rather amazed when I heard that the PS5 could not play them, then discovered the PS4 can't either. Somebody said it makes them the only Blu-Ray players that can't play audio CDs.
@@chaos.cornerSeems to me, that anything good is on the way out. But not DVDs. At one retailer that I purchase movies from 98 percent of content is on DVD, 1.5 percent bluray and 0.5 percent 4k. Complete series on DVD but not BluRay. I wanted the complete series of the Twilight Zone on bluray but couldn't buy it in stores. Had to order it online. At least the Disney Movie Club still sell bluray and 4k disk.
Sony's blu-ray players also haven't been able to play CDs for close to a decade. It's not even a limitation in the hardware because they can still play DVDs. They've just stopped including the CD player software in the firmware.
@@chaos.corner Blu ray and BLu Ray 4k are trash though. Sure, the quality is great, but the DRM is atrocious and is non standard, so if they release a disk with updated DRM and menu features and your blu ray player has no way to connect to the internet (Why would you for an offline disk format?) then you're stuck with no way to play a disk you legally bought. At least with PSP games they had all required updates ON THE DISK, but this is just crap. One day in the future someone could buy a vanilla player and a disk and be unable to play them because the disk was patched with DRM too new for the player... USELESS! I only Use blu ray and BDXL for PC Data backups, that's all they're good at.
The Zune Software (basically, iTunes but much better), also used Gracenote for fetching album art and metadata. You could even run a manual search with it to find the correct data if you preferred. I seem to remember it was still working in 2019 or so. I expect Gracenote altered something in their database after that, cuz it doesn't work now.
I remember the fanfare (well BBC News story, still on their website from 2004) when the last VHS recorder was sold in Dixons and so the 'death' of the VCR was in sight. I better stock up on blank CDs!
I remember that well - it was a very clever play by the Dixons advertising team to get mentioned/advertised for free across multiple outlets (including the BBC). Getting a Dixons advert on the BBC news was quite the achievement. I also remember they tried the same trick another couple of times after that with other outgoing product lines with diminishing returns.
I don't think Windows Media Player will disappear from the Microsoft Store. They have recently rebuilt the app for Windows 11 with a new design and new features, so it will be around for a while.
Possibly related to not finding much audio equipment on their site, I vaguely remember ( in other words don't put much stock into this) reading an article saying that Sony is slowly ramping down their electronics products in general, not just audio equipment. As they aren't having much of a turn over from it and at this point they are making most of their money from their Japanese life insurance branch.
Yeah, I loved using my PS3 for browsing the media server on my PC. Also had all the memory card ports on the front which was nice if you had your video/music/photos on a memory card.
Matt - the issue isn’t cd, or record or dvd. To me the issue is being able to keep a physical, unchanging copy of content. Information that only exists being streamed from some service doesn’t exist for the long term. It honestly means that history and creative works can just disappear. Then humanity has less opportunity to understand its past and must rely on someone else to continually shape our present and tell us what things mean. The ultimate gaslighting.
That Windows Media Player app isn't AFAIK related to the old, non-"modern" application from earlier versions of Windows, it's actually based on the Groove Music app, now with video playback integrated. Groove itself was only retired in 2022, so Windows Media Player is legitimately a "new" thing. Problematic Microsoft naming strikes again, they should probably have gone with a new name to distinguish it from the old software.
You can still buy internal and external disc drives for PCs. Maybe you could do video on how good they are at playing CDs? Ironically, I have quite a collection of CDs and I have an internal disc drive in two of my PCs but I've never played a CD in either of the drives. The music I listen these days is 100% digital, same goes for movies and TV shows, it's been years since I purchased a disc. I'm pretty sure the last movie/TV show I purchased on disc was Game of Thrones Season 7. Season 8 made me rethink my whole strategy of buying physical media and to this day I still haven't purchased Season 8 and Seasons 1 - 7 just gather dust on a shelf. A disappointing conclusion can ruin and entire collection.
@@scorbiot There is more to it than just software. You can get disc drives of varying quality, as well as dedicated sound cards and high-end computer speakers. I've used a Creative Sound Blaster card in the past, but I now just use a pair of Kanto YU2 speakers connected via USB that have a subwoofer output which connects to two Earthquake FF6.5 Subwoofers. As high-end CD/DVD players become a thing of the past it's worth looking at using a PC as a multimedia/disc player. These days I do all my audio/visual entertainment on a PC, and I prefer to do it with a good set of speakers/subwoofers, rather than a pair of headphones and the sound I get is way beyond what I would have expected from a pair of speakers/subwoofers plugged into a PC, without an AV Receiver in between. I also have a HTPC, AV Receiver and 7.2 surround sound in the living room. I think using a PC/HTPC for audio visual entertainment is large untapped area with a pretty rich history and future (hopefully).
@@Benjamin.Jamin. Same here. It's a full fledged media center. That was a great selling point for SONY at the time (since the PS2 that could read DVDs) and I was seriously annoyed they've dropped the CD in the PS4.
Yeah though they did manage to deprecate functions with different iterations of the PS3 - the original one had all those media readers built in - so you could simply take the SD card out of camera, put in the PS3 and view your pictures on the big screen. They then removed those slots.
The original Playstation 3 model was a beast when it came to playing media, with the ability to play CD, DVD, SACD, Blu-Ray and 3D Blu-Ray discs. It could also play movies off of USB if formatted correctly. It was also pretty much fully compatible with PS2 games and could even play older console games if you installed Other OS and emulators.
@@Fifury161 the software has depreciated to. Various apps no longer supported etc. Modern sickness is being reliant on all of these cloud services and apps which can just disappear without wanting or degrade beyond the point of usefulness.
It's funny - I have a Sony made DVD-RW Drive in my desktop PC. I keep putting off buying an ASUS Blu Ray RW drive for archival, but the fact that Sony used to make PC components in the 2000s which are still good and function just fine is astounding to me.
There's not that much money in existing media. It's more profitable for the companies to sell you the same titles over and over again on different formats
It is scary that ALL physical media is on the way out, even video game discs and mainstream blu rays are going to be gone relatively soon I think, but this was the inevitable outcome after the dawn of digitised audio / video, which itself was inevitable, which ironically Sony had a major hand in, as you say. Having said that, I personally haven't supported new media myself much, in the last ten years I have bought only a handful of CDs / DVDs and these were only limited edition collectable type things, or independent artists, to support them, most of them I have never even opened, so I have no right to bemoan the end of physical media!
It's really sad, they even stopped ✋ all science improvements in such optical media, there was incredible discovery to make terabytes on CDs with small adjustments only changing laser lenses to "donut shape" which makes nano-laser. This discovery was tested in university, was very loud in the news several years ago(you can still find news articles by "donut lense DVD" and etc), but strangely vanished after with no data and no documents from that university test. Some say the discovery was bought away by large corpo and using now somewhere. Optical media is for this day the only sturdy and easy reproduction archival media, industry wasn't able to make anything comparable, solid state storage is unreliable.
Naw I think some will still be available as the digital versions are trash, no Lossless sound and not even high enough bitrate for the video...no thanks. I won't buy cheap digital Funimation Anime because of this.
The funny thing is young people wont know just how much better audio quality the ancient CD has over streaming a heavily compressed song and listening to it over bluetooth.
Though mainstream streaming services are starting to offer lossless audio, so those with headphones wired into their computer will be able to enjoy CD quality
On the plus side, if you’re still into CDs the market has basically bottomed out so it feels monstrously cheap. Looking at secondhand stores and pawn shops I see used discs for a dollar or less and quality players from good brands for $10-20.
A dollar or less huh...here in the UK I'm buying 10 or maybe even 20 CDs for that! That's true bottoming out! In UK people do not seem to value their possessions and just chuck everything out at the first sign of it not being "trendy" anymore. Sad really. Because in years to come they will have nothing they can sell to get them out of a financial hole, since they will own nothing and be --happy--
Ironically, just pre-ordered my favourite Japanese group’s new album (a set of 2 CDs & a DVD) tonight! They even stressed that the 2nd CD has “no plans for streaming”. Subscription services are making a dent here in Japan but despite Sony’s best efforts, I’d imagine physical media will have another decade left… After all, I saw brand new blank MiniDiscs for sale at Don Quijote just a few weeks ago! 😂
Sony still makes blank Mini-discs, albeit in very small numbers. But there's also an impressive amount of leftover stock still for sale in some stores (mostly online sadly)
You guys are resisting digitalisation, keep it up. As a European, I'm kind of in the middle: CDs here are dead, but videogames have still a huge physical market, unlike in the US.
@@DioBrando-qr6ye there's still a physical market in the U.S. as Gamestop still sees big crowds for midnight launches for AAA games, there were some big crowds when Tears of the Kingdom came out.
Tbh, japanese are built differently than most people in the world. They keep retro very serious and love to hold something in their hands. Not like most westeners, that got scammed by all digital and don't realize that. Physical media is still much more prefered. Only the random consuming of the general people got a little bit streammy, but most still keeps stuff in their shelfs.
A younger workmate asked me why I still buy and play CDs, DVDs and BluRay discs when I can just stream everything. In today's World though there is absolutely no guarantee your favourite film or music will still be available going forward given how offended the younger generations are becoming at almost everything these days. We're seeing films and TV series being removed, censored or altered because "modern" audiences are offended by something or other and I don't think music wil be immune as time marches on. We're already seeing some people on Twitter getting offended by old song lyrics and swearing and in the past that would just have meant a sticker on the disc, today that could mean the music being removed if a campaign gets big enough. Luckily I have plenty of devices to play CDs as well as my DVD and BluRay discs and will continue to buy as long as they are available.
I mean, if you want examples, you could use all the shows that became unavailable to stream this past year due to corporate greed, rather than hypothetical victims of the "woke mob"
I've never been onboard with music streaming. I flat out refuse to use it. Not only is most streaming done with a relatively low bitrate, an internet connection isn't always guaranteed. And yes, censorship is just going to get worse.
Just rip the files, you don't need to rely on the discs. And the danger of media being removed isn't in 'offended generations', it's in squeamish platforms trying to appease advertisers and entire segments of the global market requiring censorship for their delicate sensibilities so they can profit off them. It's in bullshit licensing between big companies all trying to screw each other over, leaving huge amounts of movies and shows unable to be watched anywhere legally. The future is in the mid00s past, of ripping physical media, and pirating everything so you don't have to worry about the whims of a streaming service.
@@MattExzy Most music streaming services offer high bitrate downloads, Spotify allows 320kbps mp3s whereas I believe Apple Music allows for lossless downloads. Also, yes, a connection isn't always guaranteed but that's why there's the ability to download all your music. I personally still collect Vinyl and occasionally CDs and Cassettes and have a deep love for physical media, but downplaying the capabilites of streaming services is ignoring how infinitely more convenient they are for most people.
Microsoft, for all their faults, at least has stayed fairly committed to keeping the idea of the Xbox as a multimedia device that's also really good at playing video games going. The fact that i can still watch DVDs (you initially have to download that feature, too, fwiw), play CDs, buy a fairly impressive selection of original Xbox or 360 games and be able to play them, and play some still pretty impressive new-gen games is nice.
As a late gen Xer, I remember being fascinated when I saw my first CD at my uncle's house. The rainbow effect was mesmerising. I remember pushing the tray and thinking I'd done something wrong when it proceeded to close automatically.
I think a misconception older people have about Gen Z is that they think they're the generation that grew up post-physical media, when we're really the generation that grew up during the transition period.
Damn I am shocked twice by this video. I have a PS3 and use it sometimes (rarely) as a CD player and I assumed that the PS5 would be able to do so as well. But then you said that it came out 16 years ago. DAMN I am getting old.
You gotta love the irony that Sony, having cocreated the audio-cd format in the first place, were ditching it basically outright while Microsoft contiues carrying the torch ...
It's the same with modern PC's as well Mat, I don't think any of them come with an optical drive. However, like others have said, you can buy an external drive. Windows Media Player has some really good visualizers as well.
It's getting harder these days to find a new computer case that even includes the optical drive bays... next to the basic 3.5" drive bays. New cases... while they seem to be more aesthetically (subjectively) pleasing these days, most are downgraded into being empty shells with much fewer expansion capabilities. Part of the reason on why I haven't bothered upgrading my current case in the last ten years. Because, these new empty husks do not meet my criteria needs.
I suppose there's also the USB CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drives to consider. Those are quite common, but you'd have to listen to the audio through your computer. My current laptop has no physical disc drive, so I have to use a USB Blu-Ray player/burner to rip music from CDs or access anything on a disc.
Great video, but it paints a slightly darker picture of the current state of CD players than my perception. There are still loads of new CD players available to purchase, it’s just that they’re all quite expensive. They’ve become a specialty product, but still certainly alive and kicking, just not from the brands that most folks recognize or for the price that would be expected for an old technology.
Right, what's dropped away is the consumer low end, the quality of CD-playing capability that an average person might _end up with_ - bundled into their car or their video game - without really shopping for a CD player.
Great video, really enjoyed this. About 3 years ago I purchased someones entire CD collection. In total there was around 700 cds. I paid £150 for this mans lifelong CD collection and they seemed glad to see the back of them! If CD's go the way of cassette albums the value of CD's and players value will probably go up so I'd say now is the time to buy, not sell.
Interesting perspective. You're probably right but on the other hand, there's a cost to keeping large amounts of the things around if you're not benefitting. I've recently been trying to reduce my physical media (while keeping local copies).
A long, long time ago (in a Galaxy far, far away) I got rid of my entire cassette collection, and I was glad to see the back of it. Boy, do I wish I hadn't done that now.
I'd expect the Xbox to support Audio CD's since it is running a modified version of Windows, and Windows definitely supports CD's. As for physical media? Everything is pretty much obsolete at this point, and I won't be surprised if the next generation of game consoles will remove the disc slot entirely.
There is still a good number of manufacturers making new CD players nowadays, but yeah it seems like all the big names are out of the game now. And what is available is much more expensive than one might think it should be for such an old technology, I guess because it’s now a specialty product made in low quantities.
Where I'm from, the transition from the CD to digital downloads was very fast. Mass adoption of the internet started around 2010 meaning that the technology was mature and cheap enough to replace CDs instantly meaning that I haven't really used a CD myself ever.
"Where you are from"? Where is that then? I've heard of a place called 'EARTH' where they have something called T'internet! Is that where you are from?
I had a look around my house on the current state of CD players here -- I had way more than I thought I did. I've got a Sega Saturn, a PS1, a PS3, two original Xboxes and a DVD player capable of CD playback, and portable CD drives and such. I've got a dedicated Yamaha CD player but I haven't used that in some time.
It's kinda sad to see the demise of physical media. Sure, old school records seem to survive anything, but those still are very much a niche thing. And while from a practical point of view it might not be so bad, digital media sure has its advantages, and don't we all hate the greedy record companies? But one thing that will also disappear is record collections. I mean, I still have almost every CD I ever bought, that's basically the soundtrack of 35 years of my life. Will playlists last a lifetime?
Well, for something that seems to be a niche thing most retailers abandon CDs in favor of crappy vinyl. Hope every nasty sounding record and Crosely Cruiser record grinder just sits on the shelf and collect dust.
Most music formats came out and/or discontinued before I was born but the CD and the DVD to an extent was always the format of my generation, developed and made to last a lifetime. It is truly sad to think that the CD will disappeared before I probably would. I have witness the birth and the death of a format that i can call our own, vinyl and tape was never ours, they were a format born from another era.
@@BhagwantRai654 It wasn't that popular to that point. 95 dvd was brand new but It started a little bit later. Late 90s early 2000 was the real start. Or more it got more famouse. Also thanks to the ps2, it boosted it alot.
Even when cd's were huge I was making my own custom cds and then soon after that it was all mp3. CDs were a really good way to distribute music, I was still buying CDs, the cases with little book were nice, but they were never played, just ripped, they went back into the case, and sat in a 100CD jewel case holder. I might just be a geek, I remember people had cd holders in their car long after I had given up on playing cds.
This makes me very sad, the CD is my favourite music storage media. I don't want to see it disappear. Maybe it'll make a comeback like records did. I mean in the 90s and early 2000s nobody cared about records except for audiophiles and DJs and a few other niche users, now records are back in style in a big way, who could have predicted that 20 years ago?
Why does the form that the media is in matter if essentially its all data at the end of the day no matter the medium? Is it the packaging and album art track list on back that makes you like CDs over digital?
@@the.littlest.toaster CDs don't need an Internet connection, CDs don't need a smartphone, CDs don't need a computer. I bought a very young relative a CD player a few years ago so they can listen to music whenever they want without using their parents' phones, my relative doesn't have an iPad or computer or phone, they're a bit young for that. CD's also don't require you to pay a subscription fee to use them.
@@the.littlest.toaster Also, artists and record labels can remove content from digital music services, they can't come to your house and take your physical media.
CDs will come back once people realize that their favorite classics won't be on Spotify & Co forever. Be it due to licensing disputes, lack of rentability (storage space costs money) or for other reasons (for instance the entire catalog of the band Lostprophets was removed from streaming platforms after their singer has been arrested for his disturbing crimes). But before that, we'll see the resurgence of Blu-Ray/DVD. Netflix is already deleting old classics and obscure cult movies because they can't afford to the entire global movie catalog of the last decades. There have already been outcries by people who lost access to their favorite movies they thought they had purchased forever.
I own both the Sony PS-HX500 turntable and the Sony CMT-SBT100 microcomponent, bought between 2016 and 2017. Both of them are well built and, when combined, they have a pretty good sound quality. I'm surprised to know that the SBT100 and its little brother, the SBT20, were the very last microcomponent audio systems from Sony.
I was going to mention the CMT-SBT20 as thats what I bought a while back for a conservatory. Had no idea that was their last 'hifi' offering which is really sad. (but happy I've got one I suppose). I guess the market went the way of streaming and specifically 'smart' speakers but personally I hate them.
Interesting that National Panasonic are moving in the opposite direction. They have resurrected the Technics brand and recently released some excellent two channel hifi components - a number of which include CD or SACD players.
i find external CD-ROM/DVD/Etc drives/burners pretty handy, and pretty incredibly cheap these days, though of course you have to plug them into something, and even an appropriate USB port can be harder to find lately, but things tend to be pretty hassle free plug and play when you can at least..... 😅
You can also use an internal one if you have long enough sata cables. My pc case doesn't have any 5 1/4 bays so I had to plop an internal one on top. It also has the ability to play and rip UHD blurays 😁. Very handy for backup purposes.
My parents bought a Sony micro system a few years back. It was dead out of the box. I'm not surprised Sony discontinued them. The Panasonic that replaced it has worked flawlessly. Metal case too which is nice to see.
Curious about how you'd feel about people making their own home CD players? A Raspberry Pi with either the built in 3.5 mm jack or a DAC hat with RCA outputs paired with a remote, a USB CD drive and software like VLC or MPlayer would be about 80 bucks all in (closer to 50 without the DAC hat) and make a fun little project if you enjoy tinkering.
You don't even have to make it this complicated. Computer CD- or DVD Drives have (or used to have) a sound output connector which will output sound when a CD is played. You'd just need a suitable amplifier or DAC depending on the output.
PS4 not being able to play cds was such a surprise to me when I found it out myself a few weeks ago. It looks like cds are finally starting to go the way of cassettes with only budget playback options. It does make me wonder if there will be a revival like with vinyl and in a few years when kids start finding their parents old collections and we'll start seeing high end cd players claiming to get superior sound quality from cds.
There are already plenty of CD players with claims of superior sound. "High end" may not cover it, because there's actually a wide range, starting around twice the price of a consumer game console and going up from there.
Thanks to your channel I fixed my Yamaha 5 disc cdc-765 I bought back in 1997. Haven't used it in years but knew I still owned it but wasn't working. After watching a few of your videos I replaced some belts and greased some gears and it works great now on my modem day receiver! Love your channel!!!
Cd's will stay, no question without it. Cd players, however, will be problematic, Of course we can use the dvd- and blurayplayer aswel, but we need to start repairing the current machines and keep them working as long as possible.
Windows Media Player is brand new actually. It was Groove music up until about last month which I was using to catalogue and play my flac files and after a Windows update it changed to "Media Player" with a slightly different interface and all the "Groove" branding dropped. So it should be as up to date as you can get. It automatically gets the art for CD's maybe half the time and often if it's a local release it'll just be completely wrong album info.
windows media player isn't new. windows media player is what it was until windows 8, when it became "groove". and now it is back to being "media player"
@@averagejoe9040 Of course, thanks for the correction! I was replying to the part of the video where he was wondering how up to date the WMP app on XBox was. Considering it has only just been switched back, I'd say it's pretty up to date. As far as Microsoft products go a least. Perhaps I should have clarified that Windows Media Player has indeed been around since the 90's, but I just assumed people in this comments section would already know that 🙂
@@averagejoe9040 The only thing common between the two is the name. Code wise they are completely different. The one before Win8 are win32 while the current one is UWP (which is why it can be installed on both Xbox and Windows while the old win32 based player cannot)
I don't think the CD is dying at all in enthusiast spaces, even with the younger generation. With the general population, yeah it definitely is as it doesn't have the the "coolness" of vinyl or the convenience of streaming but, at least from what I see I know many of people my age (I am 18) who collect CD's and still buy them! I think there will probably be a CD revival as it's just a very good format and it's a lot cheaper and hassle free than vinyl but still holding the physical media aspect which has a huge charm for people of my age.
@@averagejoe9040 Those "enthusiast spaces" generate a lot of commerce. There are several big audio shows around the world every year. Those manufacturers are doing well & there are lots of 'em.
My son’s teacher gave all the kids a mix CD of all their “classroom songs” at the end of the year and he was crushed to discover we didn’t have anything to play it on… I picked up a discman from goodwill for $10 and he’s been fascinated with it. I dug up my old binder of CDs and he’s been listening to stuff non-stop. It’s interesting to see the difference in engagement between physical and digital media.
My daughter (early 20's) has become a cassette tape and CD fan. It all started when she bought a used car with an original tape/CD head unit. Currently we are creating a home-made CD of Lana Del Rey's unreleased music. She is designing the CD cover, inside art work and liner notes with track listings. We used my Epson photo printer to make beautiful printed CD's with a really cool photo and text. I handled the technical parts and she made all the art and it has been really fun to collaborate with my daughter on this archaic technology. Also - her friends really love the retro cool stereo with physical media which kind of surprises me. They've been buying mix-tapes from the 90's to listen to while driving.
@@durmphoto I'm calling to report the bootleg
I think that is why vinyl is still kicking around, there is something good/nice/meaningful (cant really place the term) of having something physical rather than digital.
I did the same thing (in a way) with my dad’s old vinyl records and tapes when I discovered his collection about 20 years ago. I feel a little sad for younger generations because they won’t ever be able to stumble upon their parents’ physical media collection. It was really cool seeing the kind of music he listened to when he was my age (at the time).
Guess I’ll start making playlists on Spotify specifically for my future kids to discover. Something about it doesn’t feel right though unfortunately.
Sad that me(19) is still one of the few people that know what records and cds
Funny anecdote - earlier this year I went over to my buddy's place with a CD someone had given me that I wanted to listen to with him. We were shocked to realize that both his PS5 and PS4 were incapable of playing back CDs. The only device he had hooked up that could play CDs? A Sega Saturn!
The sega saturn had the opposite problem where it would run any disk you put in it. Even poorly made bootleg games
Love the Saturn and it’s spaceship menu.
Saturn was a nice CD player for the time.
Looking around my flat and it seems the only thing I have that can play CDs (that still works) is a £20 portable DVD drive for my laptop.
@@CAMSLAYER13 You're thinking of the Dreamcast. Saturn couldn't play burned disks without a mod chip.
Never did I actually stop to think that one day CDs would become obsolete media to most people. Makes me feel old.
@@Reprint001 we're at the last stage of capitalism, literally 1984
They're not obsolete to me, still buying CDs 4 decades later, in fact I am buying more than ever since people are throwing them out or giving them away for virtually nothing!
@@kakyoindonut3213 Late stage because CDs?
@@dustojnikhummer you missed the entire point
@@Reprint001even if we don't have cd players, it will take longer still for cd drives to go entirely extinct in pcs. Desktop PCs still often have CD drives, and even when they don't they are readily available and cheap to buy. Customers with CDs can continue to legally import CD tracks to something like iTunes or RUclips Music.
Mat -- great video as always. I worked at Microsoft in the Windows group from Windows 7 through Windows 8.1. Specifically, I was on the team that ran the metadata lookup service for Windows Media Player, XBOX and Zune. It was a very complex, heavily used service at the time. Our source was Gracenote, and if the same systems were still in-place you would've seen album art for all of those titles. The group I was in was called "Windows Metadata and Internet Services," or WMIS. I'm back working in public media (NPR/PBS in Maine, USA) so I'm not sure what the system is like now. My primary job for Windows 7 was the lead Program Manager for the "Radio Tuner"/internet radio service also built into the Windows Media Player. We had a curated database of thousands of stations from around the world, with specific experiences for English, French, Spanish, German, Simplified Chinese and Portuguese . We built the back-end CMS and the services that drove this feature. Even during Windows 7 days, the Windows Media Player (or WIMP as we lovingly called it internally) was a huge amount of legacy code and the devs were very wary of changing/adding to the code for WIMP because it was so big and old -- lots of legacy code in there -- and no one had total knowledge of the app. The CD lookup system not only used table of contents data, it also used acoutstic fingerprinting to identify CD's. It was an amazing service that did an incredible amount of queries per day. We even recognized bootlegs and homemade CDs. Windows has fundamentally changed so much in the 8 years since I left Redmond -- It looks like they changed the service backend or there's a bug that breaks most album art queries. We incorporated user submissions -- including custom album art -- into the service. That resulted in some funny, inappropriate album art being posted by trolls and served by us -- we would clean those entries out by hand. For years I used my PC or my console to listen to CDs but that all changed when streaming service quality improved. However, I'm an audio engineer/nerd so I bought a universal disc player several years back -- the OPPO UDP-203. It can play any CD, DVD, Blu-ray or SACD. It wasn't cheap (around $800 USD in 2018) but it may be the last disc player I'll need. I use it for multi-channel audio releases (SACD, Blu-ray and DVD Audio) to listen to on my 7.1 system. I also have a relic -- the HD-DVD player unit for the XBOX 360 with only one HD-DVD: the pack-in "King Kong." After working on Windows, I moved to the team that launched the Microsoft Band -- our fitness tracker/smart watch released just before the Apple watch. I was in charge of the out of box experience (OOBE) for that product, which was a really good product that we did not do a good job of marketing. I'm still proud of it though. I have 5 or 6 prototype versions of the Band, and I learned so much working on that. I know this is rambling, but if you ever have any questions about how Microsoft handled these services during that time, I'm happy to answer them. Please keep doing what you do -- you're the first thing I do every Saturday morning after taking out my Golden Retriever. Any way, for those that read this whole thing -- god bless you. But I figure there may be some people out there interested in the stuff I worked on. Best from gloomy, rainy Portland, Maine.
I remember using that built in Album Art Lookup service! I would have all these MP3 files with just the artist name and song title in the filename, and I'd wish they had all the proper metadata, and one day in WIMP I saw that they automatically had said metadata, and were even categorized by year of release. Great stuff! Thank you for your service, genuinely one of the most useful features I've seen in a media playing app :-)
I did a lot of my CD ripping during that era, so you probably saved me a hundred hours or so of manually looking that data up. Thanks!
A few years back I had to manually go in and assign data to several thousand files. It wasn't fun. XD
As much criticism as the RUclips comments section gets, there is the occasional gem in there. Thank you for sharing your impressions of your time at Microsoft. It's fascinating to get an insight into how things worked behind the scenes. I read your post with great interest. I work in a related field: Radio automation systems. Basically, these are media players on steroids, but geared towards on air operation. A typical RAS (the bigger ones, anyway) is also heavily networked, has a gargantuan database for metadata, supports collaboratively editable playlists (AKA schedules), provides mixing desk control and also comes with more mundane things like automated broadcast reports (e.g. for accounting of royalties). The user base is considerably smaller, but also way more demanding ;)
Thanks again for the insight into how the "big guys" at Microsoft tackle this field, you don't get that every day.
Mate, please use paragraphs - that's just a wall of text that is hard to read for some.
i remember popping in Plastic Beach from Gorillaz on my Xbox One and having this beautiful official art from the album with the main band members that i was able to set as the home background, it was so dope
in the past couple of years record companies started wanting money for the artwork separately. this probably led to a lot of artwork being removed.
Wow, their greed knows no bounds 😳
Very informative. Many people tell me that they have nothing to play an audio cd on and I will reply "you got a PlayStation, don't you?" It never occurred to me that the PS4 or PS5 couldn't play an audio cd.
@@BlahBleeBlahBlah You say it's greed, but I blame websites like Spotify.
Having things that aren't computers on the internet was never a good idea, even when Steve Jobs assassinated the internet by giving dullards access with the iPhone.
Oh geez, no artwork? I mean, asking because I dont know what that looks like since I use VLC.
Capitalism breeds innovation!
I still remember being able to rip CDs to the hard drive and playing them within your games being a major selling point of the original Xbox and 360. Those were the days...
They still are the days mate! I've been buying CDs since mid-90s still buying them now! And I got my first ever Xbox and Xbox 360 a few years ago (2nd hand dirt cheap). I haven't tried the "put music in your game" feature yet but you bet I am aware of it....
And it was really smart about it. You could play your own music and it would automatically replace the game's ost with it (if you really wanted that). It's really sad to me that physical media is going away. I never thought I'd see the day when Best Buy announces they will no longer be carrying discs. I really hope that they don't stop releasing the media in this way as it's the only option for some people, and it's the best option honestly. They can't go back later and say "oh this incredibly iconic episode of this tv show that had a soundtrack that was as iconic no longer has the rights to these songs, so we're just going to replace it with something else". Like that scrubs episode. This even happened with the scrubs theme song. Try watching scrubs on streaming, it's jarring and absolutely ridiculous. So sick of "digital rights" ruining things.
Best Buy getting rid of physical media means instead of visiting their store once a month, maybe I'll visit once every 3-5 years. Doesn't help they closed the local store and the next closest is 30 minutes further away.
How far we've come, how far we've fallen
I actually had no idea the PS4 didn't play CDs, it still plays DVDs and has a media player which can play media files off a USB drive, so I guess I always assumed it was the case.
When it was first released the PS4 couldn't even play stuff off of a USB stick. I was surprised as to how many things they stripped out of it compared to the PS3. While the XBOX One advertised itself as a media center with media playback capabilities and it's ability to connect to a cable box, Sony focused the PS4 to be primarily a game machine.
Yes, exactly what I thought
Even though they are designed for Infrared, you can play CDs using the red laser of a DVD drive, and similarlry I believe a Bluray can resolve DVDs. But to have a drive that could play all three either requires multiple lasers of different wavelengths, or additional focusing hardware for the blue laser. I guess Sony haven't considered that extra cost worthwhile since the PS3.
Having CD-Audio support would have sold 0 additional Playstations
@@falagarius It also would've cost Sony _absolutely nothing_
Grand Theft Zelda 🤣
well... consider Tears of the Kingdom is : Gary's Mod Zelda...
This made me laugh out loud also
Imagine Link going to San Andreas
@@WithScienceAsMySheperdZelda’s Mod
@@AurumUsagilink: ahh shit here we go again...
It's utterly insane to me that any console with an optical drive that by it's nature will physically read CDs does not support CD playback. Insane. What could it possibly cost to add that playback support, especially if your company (Sony) created the standard in the first place??
Makes no business sense to Sony to allow customers to 'consume content' that we aren't paying to rent a.k.a. stream. These companies have one legal purpose: increasing profits to pay as dividends to shareholders. Providing physical or digital products is to be minimised as an expense.
Licensing for this sort of stuff cut into profits for the console itself and the majority of the consoles sold would never be using it. If the drive even supports the disc, expect homebrew to possibly be made for it.
im sorry but, just because something reads bluray, does not mean it can physically read cds, that requires a separate diode in the laser. aka, added cost.
@@bookshelffury By this point, what does that red laser diode cost? literally a fraction of a cent. It's still a shameful oversight.
It's a whole separate laser isn't it? or at least I would assume so. We're probably talking pennies still but I can see why it has been dropped.
It was weird that Sony stopped supporting CD in their game consoles. The one in the PS3 had some great visualizers, including one that was looking at the earth in real time.
I agree, it's downright unacceptable.
Wait hold on, one of the visualizers was looking at the Earth in real time? OK, that is awesome!
Am I mistaken or would they need to install an entirely different laser to read CDs though? Can a standard blu-ray laser read a regular CD? I would think the pits would be too large.
@@theharvardyard2356 you do need a separate pickup, and undoubtedly this is hardware cost custom for the PS4 and 5.
@@kaitlyn__L Thanks, I knew it was something. Even if it's a small addition, the fact it's so uncommonly used so as to be an interesting topic for a video pretty much tells you why Sony probably didn't bother.
Best option is probably still to archive CDs using a proper software (i.e. Exact Audio Copy) in a lossless format (i.e. FLAC) and then listen to them via a HTPC/Streamer/etc. - they'll be accessible and playable in the future.
Provided it's backed up adequately. Then again, I imagine enthusiasts like us who jump through the hoops of ripping, cataloguing and backing up archives of music will want to keep their CDs and keep hold of a machine that can play them. Realistically, most of the public will simply not bother and just stream (in fact they already have done this).
@ytdrachengame1157 CDs contain uncompressed pcm audio
@@snapea my fault
please don't let physical media in general die
my contribution is keep buying CDs til i die
Same but with dvds for me
@@CrushedAsian255 🫡🫡🫡
Within the last 5 years, ive bought a lot of CDs in a now 50 album collection. Mostly because of how digitised most media has become and my urge to preserve a lot of it in case they get removed/made unavailable and become lost media. It gets you thinking about how less and less of the things we enjoy are able to be physically owned now.
Same for me with DVDs/Blurays. I have a lingering fear that someday disc players may not be available anymore.
No accident...
Be aware that disc rot means that CDs are hardly a sturdy storage media. Make backups on multiple places and keep migrating them to newer stuff, I guess.
Note that it's a variable thing, though. Some CDs will be dead within 20 years, other CDs will live for 500 years.
(If you're curious, magnetic tape is also just a decade or two. As anyone with an old VHS collection will be painfully aware.)
You can physically own music without having an actual box with a CD in it, but coming from the age of records and cassettes I do get the idea of wanting something physical when playing music.
Still: I like my NAS with my FLACs in it, streaming through DLNA to my receiver. It's just so handy :-)
@@Gemini476it's maybe 15 years ago I tried to back up family videos on magnetic tapes via a TV card in a pc.
1/3 of the tapes where dead empty.... Nothing left.
The PS3 was awesome for CDs. An amazing visualiser for your music and you could rip your CDs to mp3.
Same fot the Xbox 360.
I loved the Dreamcast for it's Music Visualisers. the Xbox (before the 360) I enjoyed ripping CD to it.(also why had my xbox modded to larger hard drive 80g for music.)
@@MrTechblackdog Dreamcast didn't have any visualizers. The later ps1s had one.
@@keithfulkerson There are some homebrew MP3 players for the Dreamcast that do have that. I still have many CDs that I made back in the early 2000's that have DC Playa with over 150 MP3s on each CD. Looks great and sounds awesome.
You could also rip them to atrac. Ps3 could also play wav files but you have to rip them externally and add them via usb.
This shows me that I live a quite different life than most "normal" people. I just counted the amount of devices capable of playing CDs in the room I'm sitting in alone: 5. I can think of 4 more in the household. I don't think I will run out of CD playback cabability soon. The great advantage of Audio CDs is their forward-compatibility to CD-ROMs, DVDs, Blu Rays, 4K Blu Rays. Have any of those technologies and you'll also have Audio CD playback.
I'm not embarrassed to say that I have quite a few CD players as well. Not even counting the Portable CD players that I collect (the display case has 12 on the shelf, but i have 18 more in storage) - I've got a Supercope SCD300, A Denon DN-T620 (plays cassette and has pro controls), A Sony MXD-D3 (minidisc mix), and a Sony DVP-NS90P (for SACD) in my home system. Oh! I forgot to mention the mini-component HiFi systems that I own - but I should probably stop right now so the folks from the Funny Farm don't try and collect me.
Technically, it's recommended but not required that Blu-ray drives (players) be capable of reading standard DVDs and CDs.
Perhaps you might ask yourself why you are sitting *alone* in a room with five CD-capable machines...
@@RebeccaTurner-ny1xx Because I like music and movies and computers. And because my wife doesn't want me to clutter the other rooms with all the hardware. :)
I have 9 devices in front of me that can play cd's. I have another dozen in storage, mostly portable cd players. "Normal" people are boring.
Yeah, I really liked how Xbox One & Series X has good support for all stuff that you're nominally supposed to be able to play on a Blu-Ray player. Oh, and Xbox has VLC available too. Can say that it pretty much plays everything I throw at it via disc or USB or network.
The Xbox One and even the 360 were marketed as home entertainment systems, not sole game consoles. It was one of the things with which Microsoft tried to compete against Sony. And then they also leaned heavily into seamless compatibility across different systems, something Sony gave up on with the PS3, which makes it much easier to maintain even "obscure" application like a CD player. An UWP app can run on Xbox One, Xbox One X/S, Xbox Series X/S and Windows 10/11, because they all run some version of Windows.
Forget VLC, there is a Kodi port for Xbox. You can even install emulators without much hassle.
I use my Xbox One more as an entertainment center more than a game console
I can't get my Xbox one to play CDs or DvDs. Searched the app store and found no app able to do it, any suggestions?
@@Ironhanded_Praetorian For CDs, the Windows Media Player app (as mentioned in the video), and the Blu-Ray Player app plays DVDs. Neither was installed by default (as far as I can remember).
@@lukaszwodzynskiHNB glad i"m not the only one who does this
CD's are the best physical music format to get into in my opinion. It has fantastic sound quality, they are cheap as hell and they don't degrade in quality over time or number of plays.
Just make sure you keep it free from dust
So true! well said
So do MicroSD cards full of FLAC files. Actually, cards are dime-like in size and you can't scratch FLAC files like a CD. Audio CDs still need a DAC.
Your point?
They are all ruined by the disc rot, in next 20 years
CD's definately degrade, especially recordable/rewritable ones. It's in the range of decades but do not expect 'forever media' from them. Usual quoted age ranges are in the 50-100 year range, which means the oldest disks start to come into that range in about a decade. It also depends on the quality, I have game disks which are no longer readable due to disk rot (see the wiki page for examples).
In some ways I think we've come full circle with CD's. Did you know you can buy portable USB CD drives for cars now they don't come included? That might be an interesting extension to this review.
That is awesome news, although the only cars I could afford anyway are old enough to have a CD player. For me it's mandatory - no CD player, no sale. I must be able to play my CDs, no question.
So it's like a USB-powered walkman? I could plug it into my USB battery instead and use it like a walkman?
@@AbjectPermanence It's a CD drive that plugs into a cars USB port and presents the songs to the car as if they're MP3's. So you'd go into the USB source of the cars infotainment and access the music just like if you had copied MP3's to a flash drive.
It comes as no surprise to me. I've been asked to fix more CD players in recent times as folk can't find new players with the same features as their beloved old kit.
I wonder what Mat would have made of the demise of the LP and cassette to the new "CD" if RUclips had been around in the early 80s? How about a Retro TechMoan edition 80s style vid Mat?? 😄😉
I notice some people who don't traditionally say "folks" using that term instead of the more culturally appropriate "guys" or "people".
I think James Lindsey of New Discourses has a vew things to say on the matter.
@@KopperNeoman I’m sorry, what?
Culturally appropriate hahaha!! Seriously though, all the good old CD laser mechs are indeed slowly failing. Ive accumulated 4 expensive players all with issues except a mid 90's Rotel:)
Not the wigs. Please not the wigs again!
@@Dreijer94 are we not allowed to say folk any more?
If you'd have told me in the late 90's that you could walk into Wal-Mart or Target and buy brand new vinyl records, but NOT CD's, I'd have called you absolutely crazy. Well. Here we are.
The PS2 is supposedly an excellent CD player, a lot of Minidisc guys use them because they aren't huge (if you get the Slim) and they have optical out for live dubbing to a recorder.
You forget, Mat, that in 10 years CD will probably be having a resurgence like Vinyl started a few years ago and now Cassette is starting on.
I agree. But I shudder to even hear the PS2 slim mentioned again. I had one (for over 10 years) and then the laser ribbon became unglued. It nearly destroyed my entire collection before I realized this. (including lots of rare titles) Ended up buying a Fat model, if for nothing else the peace of mind. Plus, you can always mod it with an HDD and backup your games. Runs a bit faster, too!
Oh, I had no idea that they had an optical out! I occasionally use a PS2 for CD playback and it does the job. Nothing super fancy though
Vinyl only had a resurgence because it is an analog medium and audiophiles/hipsters made a case about superior sound quality, particularly in the context of the earlier days of digital music streaming. CDs are digital. You can just copy the data and get CD quality audio from a file on a computer. Nowadays, there are "lossless music" streaming services where you stream it on demand, and lossy audio codecs are more than good enough for most people anyway. CDs don't really offer any physical or mechanical advantage and have several disadvantages. Using lasers makes them kinda cool, but that won't be enough to resurrect them.
Cassettes are also analog, but I think it's too early to say whatever comeback they're having is more than a fad. They aren't as reliably high quality as vinyl.
@@bingbong3221 For me it would just be more about owning something physically. I've kept all of my old CD's even though I usually listen to music on Spotify or RUclips. I buy physical copies of Playstation games too even though it would be faster to download and play them. If you have digital copies you don't really own them at all. However I'm not sure if I would buy anymore music CD's, but I'm certainly keeping my old one's.
CDs aren't gonna have a resurgence. Vinyl did because it was an analog format, and its size meant that album art could be displayed as actual wall art. If you're an audiophile, you won't listen on CDs because you can get an analog format like vinyl or a lossless digital format like FLAC. If you're underground, a CD is more costly to distribute than a Soundcloud or Bandcamp. And if you're a normie, Spotify is way more convenient.
It's fascinating to live through the changing fates of physical media. When I was young tapes were the way to listen, then I got into buying records as a teenager because CDs were so expensive and you could pick up a great album for a couple of quid on vinyl. How things change!
Yep, I like the memories as I have a very clear memory of my first time playing a CD. It was either late 80s or very early 90s. We didn't have one but next door did. When they'd go away I'd go and feed the dogs and noticed they had a CD system. It looked amazing and futuristic. Picked Frank Sinatra CD they had to play. Had to work out how to open the tray. But it fasinated me as a kid. Didn't get my own access to a CD or player for another few years after that.
@@TheStevenWhiting Similar situation for me, I bought the 10 year anniversary CDs for my favourite band several years before I could afford a CD player. About 5 years ago I ripped all my CDs (purchased in from the early 1990s) onto my Mac and gave them away to collector, and about 4 years ago I had to buy a portable CD/DVD reader/writer for work as my laptop no longer came with one.
Just last year I was buying old (popular) records for 3€ a piece. Now there isn't a single record below 10€. On the other hand, even brand new CDs are commonly sold for under 10€.
Exactly Tim, and to be honest I'm kinda sad, to see physical media dying out, while we were there to see them being introduced, praised and growing 😥
edit:: lol it was kinda silly old man talk ;-)
I never bought a record, when I was a kid my mother bought me 45s with anime themes (I still got a box full of it) that I played with one of those portable orange 45 record players.
Back in the 90s when I started buying music on my own, records where already considered kind of retro, only "old" people had record players.
PS3 really was the ultimate multimedia box at the time and being able to play (and rip) CDs was a big part of that! You could keep a musical collection on it and listen to it while you gamed, which seemed very futuristic at the time.
You could do the same on the OG Xbox
It was crap for playing video files though. It wouldn't play mkv files and had limited codec support. I replaced mine with a Raspberry Pi running XBMC once I figured out how to rip blurays on my computer.
@@bobothnand the user music was a requirement for games on the 360
@@bobothnI was going to say this! It was an awesome feature.
@@rocketman221projects and yet, some people transcoded them into the right format for the PS3. An ex-gf of mine had all of Metalocalypse on hers
to me, the compact disc will never die. I still buy them, play them, and love to listen to them on my CD player. There's nothing like sticking on an album or compilation and listening to pure, uninterrupted music without any subscriptions, ads, or anything of the like. You own the cd, and nothing can take that away.
yes, this is why I still buy CDs too! I make a digital copy as well and put it directly on my phone and pc as well, so no ads :)
Same.
u don't need CDs for uninterrupted listening
@@MrOverfloater true, but it's nice to have your own copy stored somewhere safe in case something happens to your digital copy and you can't find it on the net again to redownload
I think the big thing that means CDs will always remain somewhat in use is that they're cheap to produce and can be read by any computer as long as you bring along a portable CD reader.
Even if they're not really actively useful anymore, they're also not so hard to produce or annoying to use that there's any significant reason to *stop* using them either.
About a year ago I collaborated on a compilation CD and was very exited when I received my copies of the album. My PS4 was the only device I had left with an optical drive and I must say I was quite unpleasantly surprised, then annoyed and then pretty angry that my PS4 refused to play the audio CD. Had to buy an external CD drive for my iMac to be able to play my own freakin’ CD!
Was it worth it?
They should've put it on cassette...that's what all the cool kids are doing.
Buy Old Tech, when manufacturers still cared.
I really appreciate this creator. I am 70++ years old and I think I have most likely had fairly large collections of audio media in all the different types (except wax cylinders). I am glad I kept my vinyl records because I had folks offer to purchase them. I still have some cassette styles of media but not like I once had. I still also have an immense amount of CDs and laser discs of several types. It hurts me to think that I may not be able to play them someday but maybe my players will outlast me. I wish you all the very best of health and happiness to you and your families!
"maybe my players will outlast me" :D :D
good luck outlasting the players though!
@@aigarskadikis Thanks you sir!
You should consider filming your collection and talking about it, it'd be really interesting to see.
Stylized CD releases are absolutely becoming a thing, since the late 90s / early 00s things becoming hip again. Pretty shocking to see both the PS4 and PS5 not able to play CDs, the PS3 was a multimedia powerhouse.
I think the worst part is that these machines are still perfectly capable of playing CDs yet they don't support them. This is a major reason for consoles getting hacked - because companies lock off features that don't need to be locked off. Half of them are built into the systems and turned off too. Sony has done this plenty of times before.
Also part of the reason why I think they Xbox One and Series haven't been hacked yet where as the PS4 has been several times. I know Xbox isn't as popular so not as large a target but I think stuff like already having plex and kodi avaliable if you want emulators or other home brew just fire up dev mode and you can play them. Removes a lot of the urge to try and hack them open as you can already do what you want for the most part.
@@bobothn Not really main reason is DRM on xbox always online compare to PS4/PS5
sony loves removing features, like you can't do 3d blu ray playback in a ps5 even though it was supported in both the ps3 and ps4
@@thomasstone3480 They also pulled support for user-installed software like Linux on the PS3 in a firmware update and sued developers trying to restore that support. Such a lovely company!
Sony even gutted he web browser on the PS5 after hackers used an exploit to jailbreak the PS4
I miss visualizers on consoles when playing CDs, like on the Sega Saturn or the original Xbox. I also loved ripping CDs to the original Xbox and having games that could play the music in-game, like GTA 3, where there was a radio station in cars that was your own installed music. I used to drive around committing crimes while listening to Radiohead or KISS.
karma police arrest this man
In case of visualizers..nothing beats Winamp 😂 Spend stoner hours looking at psychedelics
There was nothing like listening to a brand new CD and smelling the paper insert then reading the lyrics along with the song. And I also found interesting reading the credits of each track, the writers, producers, musicians etc. And sometimes you'd get a poster or decal sticker included.
now that's a smell I have not smelled in a long time! Since I only buy 2nd hand CDs all I get now is foxing, damp smell, smoke and rusty staples! Nah, to be fair some people actually look after theirs, but yes i do remember that smell fondly.
Haha. So true. But then again, I felt the same way about vinyl records in that same era.
The first cd I ever bought was Like A Prayer by Madonna - the booklet was scented with patchouli 😊
Techmoan should get finally rewarded for a great documentary work he is doing each week on tech evolution we are experiencing over the course of our lives. Sadly now the time has come for a CD format, but thanks to this channel it won't get forgotten about when and how this happened.
"finally"? you think with 1.3M subs he makes those videos as charity?...please...
@@feltedsneedand do you think he just does it for the money? Or is the money just a nice side effect? I think the man i well off already without toobz monies
-Meanwhile, I'm amazed that the DVD is still around, that format should have died years ago.- OPS, wrong thread
@@DioBrando-qr6ye The death of DVD's gonna be a tragedy, there are a ton of commentary tracks and extras that never got rereleased on anything else.
@@ohnoitschris I never thought about that. I guess I was just pissed that the UHD BD is struggling while that past century relic is still around and outsells even regular BDs!
I see that 13:37 run time -- very elite!
This is quite... depressing. I grew up around the time when cds were becoming the audio standard and I remember fondly how futuristic it all was, from the rainbow light bouncing of the disc to the cristal clear clarity of audio compared to worn out cassette tapes and dusty vinyls. It all has started and ended in just 3 decades... Thanks Matt for doing what you do.
Tbh, a vinyl only sounds dusty, if it's not getting cleaned. It kinda was just a scam. Vinyl still sounds better. But about those tapes... I hated them as kids. Vinyls itself where better, but i didn't liked the form factor. Yes in that reguard, the cds felt really futuristic. But as i really started to here music more frequently, i left my discman at home and used mp3s already. *shrug*
@@SONGOKU02 No vinyl does not 'sound better'. It sounds worse. I've only ever bought a handful of vinyls because even as an early teen I was very anxious about buying an LP that was already scratched. CD was a big relief for me. Never cared for cassette either, I bought a DAT in the late 80ies.
Why depressing? I remember the rise of CDS, too and it was great. But I also like its replacements for similar reasons. Piles of boxes you could stack to the ceiling replaced by a tiny magic box that lets me listen to almost anything I want, any time, anywhere at high quality.
It hasn't ended. The doctor didn't say the patient is dead. Don't call the funeral home to come get the body.
It hasn't "ended" for me, not on the say-so of anybody else. Still buying CDs and DVDs like crazy, even more so now that you can get them as little as 5p each in some second hand shops... I implore everyone to keep throwing theirs away and sign up for expensive streaming services instead!
That Windows Media Player app is quite new actually.. It just recently got a large redesign across Xbox and Windows, of course Windows Media Player isn’t just for CDs.. So maybe that functionality will be removed eventually but I feel like it will stick on for a while, since obviously by the name, it’s on Windows too, and I assume CD reading capability on Windows computers is probably higher in demand than CD on Xbox. Although it probably is still very low in demand compared to a decade or two ago.. Nice CD pick for the thumbnail too lol
How many PCs have optical media players today? Less than consoles belive me but then again, just buy an external USB drive.
Considering Microsoft's obsession with backwards compatibility, I would say that it is more likelly that they remove the disc drive from their xboxes entirelly rather than remove a feature from an app that they make for windows PCs. Hell, even floppy drives are still recognized on modern windows....
I got actually surprised it's named Windows Media Player on Xbox, on Windows 11 the new app (same shown on the Xbox) is named just "Media Player" and is distributed as an update to the old Groove Music app. Meanwhile, the previous Windows Media Player got renamed to Windows Media Player Legacy and it's slowly losing features (it can still play CDs, though)...
It's a shame it doesn't have a version of Neon in it, which is Jeff Minter's visualiser. It came built-in on the XBox 360 and was, like, epic.
@@RealGengarTV The optical drive is just on the Series X now, the more better selling Series S does not have one. Also that optical drive is primarily used to play games, barely for CDs, the PS5 has one but as shown in the video it can’t even play CDs. It’s more likely that if you have an optical drive on any Windows PC that is external or internal that you might want to play a CD on it more than on a Xbox Series X.
You got me to explore the Sony U.S. site. I hadn't for a long time and was amazed how much Sony is backing out of audio altogether. The main "audio" items they had also crossed over to the home theater area. But most of the rest is long gone. And category hopping showed tons of cross-mapping of the same items. So it's not just CD that's fading away, but maybe Sony itself in the audio realm! Good show!
I know the music player part of their business seems to have moved to the Xperia 1 range, they have all the fancy audio chips in them that the new style Walkmans have, but also work as a phone
Fiio had taken all the middle ground away from Sony, and everyone else to be honest, in the Walkman business. I struggle to even think of another company offering a similar product without googling or hitting aliexpress
The decline of Sony is sad to see - as well as audio, their market share/product range in other areas seems to keep shrinking eg TVs, phones etc. Sony used to have a large hand in the broadcast industry (TV studios, post production etc) and despite there being more TV then ever, Sony's presence there is a shadow of what it was 20 years back.
Not necessarily an excuse but Blu-ray audio is also technically a thing and a Hi-Res format, they’re able to be played on any player including the PS5 so perhaps the answer is that is the replacement to the CD if we’re talking physical media.
@@dashtesla those of us with some SACDs and DVD audio 5.1 or even some 7.1 surround discs may well look upon blueray music with some skepticism 🤨 🤣
Sony's speaker division is basically all that's left of their audio sector, and the game consoles are still down well, but in all other sectors Sony's fallen far behind or virtually disappeared. Gone is the company that was a market leader in innovation and crazy ideas. These days it seems they're merely doing everything they can to stay afloat
I was looking at Sony's site about a year ago and was shocked and the meager offerings for audio components. It was mostly speakers and headphones.
My approach to keep my CD collection in heavy rotation has been cheap external USB drives and a small DAC. Using a PC as basically the media player offers a lot of freedom and features.
My PC is my main home entertainment device. I guess Microsoft got that right when they started introducing multimedia enhancements into their OSes. TBH I don't understand the point of console gaming when a PC can replace audio and video playback devices as well.
Yeah exactly, I once used EAC to make Lossless files of all my CDs and have them on my NAS. Can play them almost anywhere now and have them also on some SD cards so there's a backup.
You can also plug those into an Android phone to play CDs and DVDs with a bit of effort.
Most laptops still have a disk drive and CDs still work on those.
@@HOLLASOUNDS I haven't come across any laptop with a CD drive in the last couple of years.
As a Gen Z child it's kinda alarming CDs are dying so blatantly, that I want to dust off my few CDs and keep them 😢 I even started thinking about buying new ones for music that I always listen to
Try checking out yard sales around where you live, people tend to sell off their CDs for very cheap.
I'm almost certain you could use VLC media player on Series X, I use it on my Series S. It is community developed so likely it will keep on working for a long time even if the official media player stops working.
I recently bought something that came with software on a CD. I put it to the side, thinking I'll save that, incase I ever need it in the future...
Then I remembered I haven't had anything that can read a CD for at least 5 years 😂
You might want to make a video about the RG35XX
Over Christmas I bought myself ten audiobooks from my favorite author. These audiobooks came on CD and were of much better quality than those offered by audible, as they were read by the author himself (who passed away long before Amazon existed). I figured that I would just rip them and then store the CDs somewhere. Then I look at my PC, which I put together a year or so prior, and... there's no optical drive. Not only that, but the case has no drive caddy where would could really be installed, that whole area is made to be filled with fans. It just slipped my mind, I took it for granted. My laptop didn't have one either. I just ended up buying an external DVD drive, but that did wake me up to the fact that media drives of any kind built into PCs are really not that common anymore. I
It all goes to confirm what I have been saying all along and people just don't get it. The music industry doesn't want you to own cds. I believe the true reason is because they can't put DRM on them and prevent the user from making lossless rips from them. They tried various forms of copy protection, but their schemes failed. So they figured the best DRM method would be to release their music on vinyl and kill off the CD. If everyone could just purchase their music and rip to computer then transfer to their smart devices Spotify and other streaming services would die.
I build my own PC’s. I always include an optical drive in the build. But it’s getting harder to find OC cases with external drive bays.
Yeah, the higher end, enthusiast PC cases generally don't have drive bays. Few people use them, and manufacturers have realized that they have a lot of space that can be repurposed to either make smaller cases, or make cases with much better airflow. You can still find plenty of budget cases that basically use the old design(often even having a slot for a 3.5 inch floppy disk), but most pre-built gaming PCs go for what's trendy - having three massive fans on the front.
@@laerin7931 This is true, even if I think that having an optical drive it's useful is some cases, especially if one has to be sure to boot with a known good unwritable media.
That is why I buy Old Tech instead of the newest "Blows away in a stiff breeze" Lightweight Computer. So my Intel i7 laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad T530 that does play CDs and DVDs.
The thing is that in most second hand/pawn shops and a lot of record shops you'll still find tons of CDs - it seems like there's a big second hand market for them that's flying under the radar. CDs still seem to be the primary medium for older generations in some ways, who presumably don't tend to buy newer CDs as often. I recently got my Mum a philips micro hifi to replace the aging Sony one she had, and it's honestly really nice. An awful lot of older people just hang on to their older players as long as possible - as a lot of those start to faff out I can imagine there might be a small uptick in production for a period.
The real problem that techmoan forgot to discuss it "bit rot" of the physical media itself. It may be that the vinyl guys are going to have the last laugh!
@@metatechnologist As far as I know disc rot is extremely rare and mostly isolated to early CDs.
It is certainly far less common than warped or scratched records.
There's a thrift store near me that has all their CDs at $1 each. Unfortunately a lot of them are scratched, and one Simon & Garfunkel one I got has the last song almost completely destroyed. Although I hear that the more error prone disk system was Laserdisc, and I have yet to see how my dad's collection fared. I grew up with Laserdisc until DVD releases and rentals took over. I still want to see if the Laserdisc hype is worth it as being superior to modern formats and watch some my dad has that I never saw. It wouldn't surprise me if there are some issues as in the computing world, optical media isn't known for being the most reliable long term.
Ironically, my Steam deck, that was made by people who standardized digital downloads on and helped kill off physical game media on PC, plays CD's just fine from an external USB-C CD drive. I even used it to install my old CD copy of NFS: Underground on it lol
I'm not sure how stripped down the Linux kernel of the SteamDeck is, but if it's a full fat kernel.. you'll find it can use a lot more devices, old 5.25inch floppy drives, tape drives, other old esoteric hardware, etc. Essentially with Linux all the support for everything is put in the kernel, so if it's there it will just work. Of course most devices don't need support for hardware from 1995 so kernels will often be stripped of obsolete/esoteric/irrelevant stuff depending on the use case (to make them smaller). Why would a router running Linux need to know about ISA slots and soundcards? etc.
@@TheLimeyDragon if I’m not mistaken SteamOS is a custom Debian-based distro, so it should have all the kernel drivers you need.
@@RhinoRapscallion doesn't mean it's the full fat kernel out of the box. I can assume Valve has removed some stuff, as there is a lot that is pointless having except for the most esoteric reasons and consumes resources. Anyway I don't own a Steamdeck. :P
4K players do a good CD playback. I've been using my standard DVD player as a CD player for about a decade now.
I got DVD 4K player for 99 Euro about 2 years ago it was valued over 400 euros when it was first released
I’m barely out of high school and younger kids are making me feel a bit old. I was lending a friend a CD and a 13 year old didn’t recognize what it was. Most of my friends grew up in the last days of VHS, mini DVD camcorders, and BlackBerry phones, so we all find the slight age gap’s difference in familiarity with older technology interesting.
"younger kids are making me feel a bit old". I remember following the research and development of the CD (I was the kind of kid who took hi-fi magazines to school). Wait until you're this ancient...
Two years ago I realized that even though I collect a lot of old electronics, I had nothing that could play CDs. I thought my PS4 was up for it, but as you confirmed, no.
On the upside, I found a 5-disc SACD changer for $20 at a thrift store. Haven't used it much, but it's there!
I have a cheap crappy LG DVD player I got because I couldn't find a decent CD player at a reasonable price. It's modern e-junk, but it will at least play CDs and pretty much any kind of disc in the same shape, which is unusual for modern equipment. It mostly just sits there, unpowered, but I keep it just in case I need to play CDs on the stereo. I normally just rip discs into FLAC files these days, but it's nice to have the option to play the actual discs
That media player for Xbox is the same one for Windows. It even tone maps HDR and plays Dolby Vision videos as HDR10. It's definitely been updated in 2023.
I really appreciate what you're doing with this channel and wanted to let you know. Keep up the good work !🙂
There is a Nintendo Gamecube variant that can play CDs. Panasonic Q. It only came out in Japan tho.
I'm glad you've covered this. I was rather amazed when I heard that the PS5 could not play them, then discovered the PS4 can't either. Somebody said it makes them the only Blu-Ray players that can't play audio CDs.
Blu-ray is on the out too.
@@chaos.cornerSeems to me, that anything good is on the way out. But not DVDs. At one retailer that I purchase movies from 98 percent of content is on DVD, 1.5 percent bluray and 0.5 percent 4k. Complete series on DVD but not BluRay. I wanted the complete series of the Twilight Zone on bluray but couldn't buy it in stores. Had to order it online. At least the Disney Movie Club still sell bluray and 4k disk.
Sony's blu-ray players also haven't been able to play CDs for close to a decade. It's not even a limitation in the hardware because they can still play DVDs. They've just stopped including the CD player software in the firmware.
@@chaos.corner Blu ray and BLu Ray 4k are trash though. Sure, the quality is great, but the DRM is atrocious and is non standard, so if they release a disk with updated DRM and menu features and your blu ray player has no way to connect to the internet (Why would you for an offline disk format?) then you're stuck with no way to play a disk you legally bought. At least with PSP games they had all required updates ON THE DISK, but this is just crap. One day in the future someone could buy a vanilla player and a disk and be unable to play them because the disk was patched with DRM too new for the player... USELESS! I only Use blu ray and BDXL for PC Data backups, that's all they're good at.
The Zune Software (basically, iTunes but much better), also used Gracenote for fetching album art and metadata. You could even run a manual search with it to find the correct data if you preferred. I seem to remember it was still working in 2019 or so. I expect Gracenote altered something in their database after that, cuz it doesn't work now.
I remember the fanfare (well BBC News story, still on their website from 2004) when the last VHS recorder was sold in Dixons and so the 'death' of the VCR was in sight. I better stock up on blank CDs!
I remember that well - it was a very clever play by the Dixons advertising team to get mentioned/advertised for free across multiple outlets (including the BBC). Getting a Dixons advert on the BBC news was quite the achievement. I also remember they tried the same trick another couple of times after that with other outgoing product lines with diminishing returns.
Please tell me this isn't true!!, I better stock up on blank VHS tapes now!
I don't think Windows Media Player will disappear from the Microsoft Store. They have recently rebuilt the app for Windows 11 with a new design and new features, so it will be around for a while.
Possibly related to not finding much audio equipment on their site, I vaguely remember ( in other words don't put much stock into this) reading an article saying that Sony is slowly ramping down their electronics products in general, not just audio equipment. As they aren't having much of a turn over from it and at this point they are making most of their money from their Japanese life insurance branch.
Most of their tech is going into PlayStation because Sony is making the majority of their money that way.
I never thought that modern gen consoles actually didn't have this functionality. The PS3 was a godsend to households, being a jack of all trades.
Yeah, I loved using my PS3 for browsing the media server on my PC. Also had all the memory card ports on the front which was nice if you had your video/music/photos on a memory card.
Matt - the issue isn’t cd, or record or dvd. To me the issue is being able to keep a physical, unchanging copy of content. Information that only exists being streamed from some service doesn’t exist for the long term. It honestly means that history and creative works can just disappear. Then humanity has less opportunity to understand its past and must rely on someone else to continually shape our present and tell us what things mean. The ultimate gaslighting.
1984
What they're doing to movies, removing or changing "bad" things for example, they could end up doing to music as well.
That Windows Media Player app isn't AFAIK related to the old, non-"modern" application from earlier versions of Windows, it's actually based on the Groove Music app, now with video playback integrated. Groove itself was only retired in 2022, so Windows Media Player is legitimately a "new" thing. Problematic Microsoft naming strikes again, they should probably have gone with a new name to distinguish it from the old software.
You can still buy internal and external disc drives for PCs. Maybe you could do video on how good they are at playing CDs? Ironically, I have quite a collection of CDs and I have an internal disc drive in two of my PCs but I've never played a CD in either of the drives. The music I listen these days is 100% digital, same goes for movies and TV shows, it's been years since I purchased a disc. I'm pretty sure the last movie/TV show I purchased on disc was Game of Thrones Season 7. Season 8 made me rethink my whole strategy of buying physical media and to this day I still haven't purchased Season 8 and Seasons 1 - 7 just gather dust on a shelf. A disappointing conclusion can ruin and entire collection.
I can download all of GOT in about an hour
@@scorbiot There is more to it than just software. You can get disc drives of varying quality, as well as dedicated sound cards and high-end computer speakers. I've used a Creative Sound Blaster card in the past, but I now just use a pair of Kanto YU2 speakers connected via USB that have a subwoofer output which connects to two Earthquake FF6.5 Subwoofers. As high-end CD/DVD players become a thing of the past it's worth looking at using a PC as a multimedia/disc player.
These days I do all my audio/visual entertainment on a PC, and I prefer to do it with a good set of speakers/subwoofers, rather than a pair of headphones and the sound I get is way beyond what I would have expected from a pair of speakers/subwoofers plugged into a PC, without an AV Receiver in between. I also have a HTPC, AV Receiver and 7.2 surround sound in the living room. I think using a PC/HTPC for audio visual entertainment is large untapped area with a pretty rich history and future (hopefully).
@@castorchua So what.
The ps3 being a multimedia machine was so cool. We had photos on ours so we could view them on the tv.
Yes our PS3 go a lot more use as media device than it did as a games console. It's still our only DVD player.
@@Benjamin.Jamin. Same here. It's a full fledged media center. That was a great selling point for SONY at the time (since the PS2 that could read DVDs) and I was seriously annoyed they've dropped the CD in the PS4.
Yeah though they did manage to deprecate functions with different iterations of the PS3 - the original one had all those media readers built in - so you could simply take the SD card out of camera, put in the PS3 and view your pictures on the big screen. They then removed those slots.
The original Playstation 3 model was a beast when it came to playing media, with the ability to play CD, DVD, SACD, Blu-Ray and 3D Blu-Ray discs. It could also play movies off of USB if formatted correctly. It was also pretty much fully compatible with PS2 games and could even play older console games if you installed Other OS and emulators.
@@Fifury161 the software has depreciated to. Various apps no longer supported etc. Modern sickness is being reliant on all of these cloud services and apps which can just disappear without wanting or degrade beyond the point of usefulness.
i am adamant about keeping a bluray drive in my computer to digitize different disk media. why companies deny existing media is beyond me.
cost and demand. if there is no demand for something, and excluding it can save a buck, it will be excluded.
It's funny - I have a Sony made DVD-RW Drive in my desktop PC. I keep putting off buying an ASUS Blu Ray RW drive for archival, but the fact that Sony used to make PC components in the 2000s which are still good and function just fine is astounding to me.
They want you to own nothing and pay subscriptions till you die. Digital is great if it’s your own backups without any drm.
There's not that much money in existing media. It's more profitable for the companies to sell you the same titles over and over again on different formats
It is scary that ALL physical media is on the way out, even video game discs and mainstream blu rays are going to be gone relatively soon I think, but this was the inevitable outcome after the dawn of digitised audio / video, which itself was inevitable, which ironically Sony had a major hand in, as you say. Having said that, I personally haven't supported new media myself much, in the last ten years I have bought only a handful of CDs / DVDs and these were only limited edition collectable type things, or independent artists, to support them, most of them I have never even opened, so I have no right to bemoan the end of physical media!
It's really sad, they even stopped ✋ all science improvements in such optical media, there was incredible discovery to make terabytes on CDs with small adjustments only changing laser lenses to "donut shape" which makes nano-laser. This discovery was tested in university, was very loud in the news several years ago(you can still find news articles by "donut lense DVD" and etc), but strangely vanished after with no data and no documents from that university test. Some say the discovery was bought away by large corpo and using now somewhere.
Optical media is for this day the only sturdy and easy reproduction archival media, industry wasn't able to make anything comparable, solid state storage is unreliable.
Naw I think some will still be available as the digital versions are trash, no Lossless sound and not even high enough bitrate for the video...no thanks. I won't buy cheap digital Funimation Anime because of this.
I will always want a physical copy of something. Streaming is just like renting.
The funny thing is young people wont know just how much better audio quality the ancient CD has over streaming a heavily compressed song and listening to it over bluetooth.
Though mainstream streaming services are starting to offer lossless audio, so those with headphones wired into their computer will be able to enjoy CD quality
Streaming services offer lossless audio as well. Costs a bit more.
On the plus side, if you’re still into CDs the market has basically bottomed out so it feels monstrously cheap. Looking at secondhand stores and pawn shops I see used discs for a dollar or less and quality players from good brands for $10-20.
A dollar or less huh...here in the UK I'm buying 10 or maybe even 20 CDs for that! That's true bottoming out! In UK people do not seem to value their possessions and just chuck everything out at the first sign of it not being "trendy" anymore. Sad really. Because in years to come they will have nothing they can sell to get them out of a financial hole, since they will own nothing and be --happy--
Ironically, just pre-ordered my favourite Japanese group’s new album (a set of 2 CDs & a DVD) tonight! They even stressed that the 2nd CD has “no plans for streaming”. Subscription services are making a dent here in Japan but despite Sony’s best efforts, I’d imagine physical media will have another decade left… After all, I saw brand new blank MiniDiscs for sale at Don Quijote just a few weeks ago! 😂
Sony still makes blank Mini-discs, albeit in very small numbers. But there's also an impressive amount of leftover stock still for sale in some stores (mostly online sadly)
You guys are resisting digitalisation, keep it up. As a European, I'm kind of in the middle: CDs here are dead, but videogames have still a huge physical market, unlike in the US.
@@DioBrando-qr6ye there's still a physical market in the U.S. as Gamestop still sees big crowds for midnight launches for AAA games, there were some big crowds when Tears of the Kingdom came out.
Tbh, japanese are built differently than most people in the world. They keep retro very serious and love to hold something in their hands. Not like most westeners, that got scammed by all digital and don't realize that. Physical media is still much more prefered. Only the random consuming of the general people got a little bit streammy, but most still keeps stuff in their shelfs.
@@thesteelrodent1796 Yeah. Because many people still using them in japan. Btw... Rodent all the way!
A younger workmate asked me why I still buy and play CDs, DVDs and BluRay discs when I can just stream everything. In today's World though there is absolutely no guarantee your favourite film or music will still be available going forward given how offended the younger generations are becoming at almost everything these days. We're seeing films and TV series being removed, censored or altered because "modern" audiences are offended by something or other and I don't think music wil be immune as time marches on. We're already seeing some people on Twitter getting offended by old song lyrics and swearing and in the past that would just have meant a sticker on the disc, today that could mean the music being removed if a campaign gets big enough.
Luckily I have plenty of devices to play CDs as well as my DVD and BluRay discs and will continue to buy as long as they are available.
I mean, if you want examples, you could use all the shows that became unavailable to stream this past year due to corporate greed, rather than hypothetical victims of the "woke mob"
I've never been onboard with music streaming. I flat out refuse to use it. Not only is most streaming done with a relatively low bitrate, an internet connection isn't always guaranteed. And yes, censorship is just going to get worse.
Just rip the files, you don't need to rely on the discs. And the danger of media being removed isn't in 'offended generations', it's in squeamish platforms trying to appease advertisers and entire segments of the global market requiring censorship for their delicate sensibilities so they can profit off them. It's in bullshit licensing between big companies all trying to screw each other over, leaving huge amounts of movies and shows unable to be watched anywhere legally. The future is in the mid00s past, of ripping physical media, and pirating everything so you don't have to worry about the whims of a streaming service.
I still buy my favorite movies on Blu-Ray, but I almost think of it as a collector's item.
@@MattExzy Most music streaming services offer high bitrate downloads, Spotify allows 320kbps mp3s whereas I believe Apple Music allows for lossless downloads. Also, yes, a connection isn't always guaranteed but that's why there's the ability to download all your music. I personally still collect Vinyl and occasionally CDs and Cassettes and have a deep love for physical media, but downplaying the capabilites of streaming services is ignoring how infinitely more convenient they are for most people.
Microsoft, for all their faults, at least has stayed fairly committed to keeping the idea of the Xbox as a multimedia device that's also really good at playing video games going. The fact that i can still watch DVDs (you initially have to download that feature, too, fwiw), play CDs, buy a fairly impressive selection of original Xbox or 360 games and be able to play them, and play some still pretty impressive new-gen games is nice.
Didn’t cross my mind before, but that’s crazy. I remember growing up with CDs as a zoomer.
As a late gen Xer, I remember being fascinated when I saw my first CD at my uncle's house. The rainbow effect was mesmerising. I remember pushing the tray and thinking I'd done something wrong when it proceeded to close automatically.
I remember my family didnt have a cd player. Only records and tapes
I think a misconception older people have about Gen Z is that they think they're the generation that grew up post-physical media, when we're really the generation that grew up during the transition period.
those streaming services can take physical media from my cold dead hands
Damn I am shocked twice by this video. I have a PS3 and use it sometimes (rarely) as a CD player and I assumed that the PS5 would be able to do so as well. But then you said that it came out 16 years ago.
DAMN I am getting old.
You gotta love the irony that Sony, having cocreated the audio-cd format in the first place, were ditching it basically outright while Microsoft contiues carrying the torch ...
I haven't heard the doctor declare time of death, yet.
It's the same with modern PC's as well Mat, I don't think any of them come with an optical drive. However, like others have said, you can buy an external drive. Windows Media Player has some really good visualizers as well.
Optical drives on laptops are indeed a dying breed.
It's getting harder these days to find a new computer case that even includes the optical drive bays... next to the basic 3.5" drive bays.
New cases... while they seem to be more aesthetically (subjectively) pleasing these days, most are downgraded into being empty shells with much fewer expansion capabilities.
Part of the reason on why I haven't bothered upgrading my current case in the last ten years. Because, these new empty husks do not meet my criteria needs.
I suppose there's also the USB CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drives to consider. Those are quite common, but you'd have to listen to the audio through your computer. My current laptop has no physical disc drive, so I have to use a USB Blu-Ray player/burner to rip music from CDs or access anything on a disc.
Great video, but it paints a slightly darker picture of the current state of CD players than my perception. There are still loads of new CD players available to purchase, it’s just that they’re all quite expensive. They’ve become a specialty product, but still certainly alive and kicking, just not from the brands that most folks recognize or for the price that would be expected for an old technology.
Right, what's dropped away is the consumer low end, the quality of CD-playing capability that an average person might _end up with_ - bundled into their car or their video game - without really shopping for a CD player.
Great video, really enjoyed this. About 3 years ago I purchased someones entire CD collection. In total there was around 700 cds. I paid £150 for this mans lifelong CD collection and they seemed glad to see the back of them! If CD's go the way of cassette albums the value of CD's and players value will probably go up so I'd say now is the time to buy, not sell.
Interesting perspective. You're probably right but on the other hand, there's a cost to keeping large amounts of the things around if you're not benefitting. I've recently been trying to reduce my physical media (while keeping local copies).
@@chaos.corner Yeah, having that much physical media to cart around sounds like a tremendous hassle for nowhere near enough benefit.
A long, long time ago (in a Galaxy far, far away) I got rid of my entire cassette collection, and I was glad to see the back of it. Boy, do I wish I hadn't done that now.
older CD players are already very expensive. And unfortunately many of them are worn out, so the choices are limited
@@chaos.corner I have a house not a storage unit so keeping my physical media doesn't cost me anything to keep.
I'd expect the Xbox to support Audio CD's since it is running a modified version of Windows, and Windows definitely supports CD's.
As for physical media? Everything is pretty much obsolete at this point, and I won't be surprised if the next generation of game consoles will remove the disc slot entirely.
I can't believe the industry is trying to basically kill off the CD player. I didn't think it was this bad!
Buy a CD, you've got it for life. Buy a stream, pay over and over. Makes sense for Sony.
Supply and demand. I'm sad, but not surprised at all.
There is still a good number of manufacturers making new CD players nowadays, but yeah it seems like all the big names are out of the game now. And what is available is much more expensive than one might think it should be for such an old technology, I guess because it’s now a specialty product made in low quantities.
I don't think it's a conspiracy. The industry didn't try to kill steam trains or top hats.
I love CDs, cheap, drop into pc, transfer to hd Walkman it's mine forever and to pass to future generations.
Where I'm from, the transition from the CD to digital downloads was very fast. Mass adoption of the internet started around 2010 meaning that the technology was mature and cheap enough to replace CDs instantly meaning that I haven't really used a CD myself ever.
And where are you from?
Where are you from?
Where I'm from, there are lolly-pop trees, rivers of pink lemonade, and money falls from the sky. But I'm not saying where I am. :p
"Where you are from"? Where is that then? I've heard of a place called 'EARTH' where they have something called T'internet! Is that where you are from?
@@hermanmunster3358 I don’t think we’re gonna get an answer from him. Let’s just say he’s from Texas
I had a look around my house on the current state of CD players here -- I had way more than I thought I did. I've got a Sega Saturn, a PS1, a PS3, two original Xboxes and a DVD player capable of CD playback, and portable CD drives and such. I've got a dedicated Yamaha CD player but I haven't used that in some time.
It's kinda sad to see the demise of physical media. Sure, old school records seem to survive anything, but those still are very much a niche thing. And while from a practical point of view it might not be so bad, digital media sure has its advantages, and don't we all hate the greedy record companies? But one thing that will also disappear is record collections. I mean, I still have almost every CD I ever bought, that's basically the soundtrack of 35 years of my life. Will playlists last a lifetime?
Well, for something that seems to be a niche thing most retailers abandon CDs in favor of crappy vinyl. Hope every nasty sounding record and Crosely Cruiser record grinder just sits on the shelf and collect dust.
Don't worry, there are plenty of CD players in this old mans house! I could never believe how Sony abandoned the CD either. Thanks Matt, be well! 😎
Unmentioned in the piece is the other creator of the CD: Philips, which has, it seems, almost vanished as a company making anything at all.
Never bought a thing from "Sony" ... never will.
Marshall, Electro Voice, NAD, Pioneer, Wangine .... ........
Most music formats came out and/or discontinued before I was born but the CD and the DVD to an extent was always the format of my generation, developed and made to last a lifetime. It is truly sad to think that the CD will disappeared before I probably would. I have witness the birth and the death of a format that i can call our own, vinyl and tape was never ours, they were a format born from another era.
@@TheAbandonedAccount7 CDs and DVDs are from the 80s and 90s...
@@BhagwantRai654 And this makes him most likely younger than 25. So what is your point then?
@@SONGOKU02 *28 (If you're using the start point of the DVD).
Clearly the point is that 28 or 25 does not equal 18.
@@SONGOKU02Bro thinks nearly 30 equates to 18 yrars old 😂
@@BhagwantRai654 It wasn't that popular to that point. 95 dvd was brand new but It started a little bit later. Late 90s early 2000 was the real start. Or more it got more famouse. Also thanks to the ps2, it boosted it alot.
Even when cd's were huge I was making my own custom cds and then soon after that it was all mp3. CDs were a really good way to distribute music, I was still buying CDs, the cases with little book were nice, but they were never played, just ripped, they went back into the case, and sat in a 100CD jewel case holder. I might just be a geek, I remember people had cd holders in their car long after I had given up on playing cds.
Technology is going backwards. Getting rid of a person's control over their music is the opposite of progress.
This makes me very sad, the CD is my favourite music storage media. I don't want to see it disappear. Maybe it'll make a comeback like records did. I mean in the 90s and early 2000s nobody cared about records except for audiophiles and DJs and a few other niche users, now records are back in style in a big way, who could have predicted that 20 years ago?
Why does the form that the media is in matter if essentially its all data at the end of the day no matter the medium? Is it the packaging and album art track list on back that makes you like CDs over digital?
@@the.littlest.toaster CDs don't need an Internet connection, CDs don't need a smartphone, CDs don't need a computer. I bought a very young relative a CD player a few years ago so they can listen to music whenever they want without using their parents' phones, my relative doesn't have an iPad or computer or phone, they're a bit young for that. CD's also don't require you to pay a subscription fee to use them.
@@the.littlest.toaster Also, artists and record labels can remove content from digital music services, they can't come to your house and take your physical media.
@@Lachlant1984 I meant in the case of just owning the media why do you prefer CDs over say owing it digitally (not including streaming services).
CDs will come back once people realize that their favorite classics won't be on Spotify & Co forever. Be it due to licensing disputes, lack of rentability (storage space costs money) or for other reasons (for instance the entire catalog of the band Lostprophets was removed from streaming platforms after their singer has been arrested for his disturbing crimes).
But before that, we'll see the resurgence of Blu-Ray/DVD. Netflix is already deleting old classics and obscure cult movies because they can't afford to the entire global movie catalog of the last decades. There have already been outcries by people who lost access to their favorite movies they thought they had purchased forever.
I own both the Sony PS-HX500 turntable and the Sony CMT-SBT100 microcomponent, bought between 2016 and 2017. Both of them are well built and, when combined, they have a pretty good sound quality. I'm surprised to know that the SBT100 and its little brother, the SBT20, were the very last microcomponent audio systems from Sony.
I was going to mention the CMT-SBT20 as thats what I bought a while back for a conservatory. Had no idea that was their last 'hifi' offering which is really sad. (but happy I've got one I suppose). I guess the market went the way of streaming and specifically 'smart' speakers but personally I hate them.
Interesting that National Panasonic are moving in the opposite direction. They have resurrected the Technics brand and recently released some excellent two channel hifi components - a number of which include CD or SACD players.
i find external CD-ROM/DVD/Etc drives/burners pretty handy, and pretty incredibly cheap these days, though of course you have to plug them into something, and even an appropriate USB port can be harder to find lately, but things tend to be pretty hassle free plug and play when you can at least..... 😅
You can also use an internal one if you have long enough sata cables. My pc case doesn't have any 5 1/4 bays so I had to plop an internal one on top. It also has the ability to play and rip UHD blurays 😁. Very handy for backup purposes.
Alternative title "How to write off your gaming expenses as business expenses"
Hey, if you can, do.
Grand Theft Zelda was a great game, but I liked Call of Mass Effect better
My parents bought a Sony micro system a few years back. It was dead out of the box. I'm not surprised Sony discontinued them. The Panasonic that replaced it has worked flawlessly. Metal case too which is nice to see.
Curious about how you'd feel about people making their own home CD players? A Raspberry Pi with either the built in 3.5 mm jack or a DAC hat with RCA outputs paired with a remote, a USB CD drive and software like VLC or MPlayer would be about 80 bucks all in (closer to 50 without the DAC hat) and make a fun little project if you enjoy tinkering.
You don't even have to make it this complicated. Computer CD- or DVD Drives have (or used to have) a sound output connector which will output sound when a CD is played. You'd just need a suitable amplifier or DAC depending on the output.
@@radry100 that's not (as a bare drive) going to give you the features he mentions wanting, like album art and different play modes.
That's why I decided not to buy the PS4 when it first came out. I had a stash of CDs at the time and hated that I couldn't play them
PS4 not being able to play cds was such a surprise to me when I found it out myself a few weeks ago. It looks like cds are finally starting to go the way of cassettes with only budget playback options. It does make me wonder if there will be a revival like with vinyl and in a few years when kids start finding their parents old collections and we'll start seeing high end cd players claiming to get superior sound quality from cds.
There are already plenty of CD players with claims of superior sound. "High end" may not cover it, because there's actually a wide range, starting around twice the price of a consumer game console and going up from there.
Marantz and a lot of high end CD players (although a lot are just transports) do claim exactly that and have done for 30 years
The joy of playing cd's on a console, having your tv on as well..... and probably a sound bar or sound system...
Thanks to your channel I fixed my Yamaha 5 disc cdc-765 I bought back in 1997. Haven't used it in years but knew I still owned it but wasn't working. After watching a few of your videos I replaced some belts and greased some gears and it works great now on my modem day receiver! Love your channel!!!
I’ve said this before but it bares repeating. Your channel brings me such joy, Mat! Thanks for all your hard work. 😁👍
Cd's will stay, no question without it. Cd players, however, will be problematic, Of course we can use the dvd- and blurayplayer aswel, but we need to start repairing the current machines and keep them working as long as possible.
They'll need legacy support. CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Rays are fundamentally different formats, all needing different laser frequencies.
Windows Media Player is brand new actually. It was Groove music up until about last month which I was using to catalogue and play my flac files and after a Windows update it changed to "Media Player" with a slightly different interface and all the "Groove" branding dropped. So it should be as up to date as you can get. It automatically gets the art for CD's maybe half the time and often if it's a local release it'll just be completely wrong album info.
windows media player isn't new. windows media player is what it was until windows 8, when it became "groove". and now it is back to being "media player"
@@averagejoe9040 Of course, thanks for the correction!
I was replying to the part of the video where he was wondering how up to date the WMP app on XBox was. Considering it has only just been switched back, I'd say it's pretty up to date. As far as Microsoft products go a least.
Perhaps I should have clarified that Windows Media Player has indeed been around since the 90's, but I just assumed people in this comments section would already know that 🙂
It isnt new as of last month I have use it since last year offcurse it depends on we’re you are from
@@averagejoe9040 the name windows media player isn't new, but the application itself is a few months old
@@averagejoe9040 The only thing common between the two is the name. Code wise they are completely different. The one before Win8 are win32 while the current one is UWP (which is why it can be installed on both Xbox and Windows while the old win32 based player cannot)
I don't think the CD is dying at all in enthusiast spaces, even with the younger generation. With the general population, yeah it definitely is as it doesn't have the the "coolness" of vinyl or the convenience of streaming but, at least from what I see I know many of people my age (I am 18) who collect CD's and still buy them! I think there will probably be a CD revival as it's just a very good format and it's a lot cheaper and hassle free than vinyl but still holding the physical media aspect which has a huge charm for people of my age.
"enthusiast spaces" dont count. they never let anything die. you can still find tubes for edison's phonograph.
@@averagejoe9040 Those "enthusiast spaces" generate a lot of commerce. There are several big audio shows around the world every year. Those manufacturers are doing well & there are lots of 'em.