The last time I bought a dedicated CD player new was 21 July 1990. How do I know that exact date? I kept scrupulously-detailed journals. I also have photos from when my mom was visiting me in San Francisco at the time and I remembered that I picked it up while she was there.
Have I mentioned I'm a little anal-retentive?
It was a Yamaha CDX-730. I'd gotten an unexpected mid-year bonus at work.
I kept this little deck around until 2005, when I lost my mind and thanks to eBay, started swapping gear in and out of my rig on what seemed like a monthly basis. I tried a couple different Sony decks (including a combo CD/Minidisc), a vintage Technics deck (the one I originally wanted to buy in 1985 but missed out on because the model year had changed), a Teac deck, and then back to a Yamaha—this time the CDX-530—the little brother to the 730, which I kept for several more years until I'd ripped everything to iTunes and stopped playing CDs altogether.
(My teachers always complained about my run-on sentences. Sorry.)
In the years that followed, I ended up selling nearly all of my extensive CD collection. The ones I kept had sentimental value for one reason or another, and were relegated to a banker box in the closet; ultimately the closet that ended up suffering the most damage in the fire two years ago.
To their credit, the firefighters pulled most everything out of that closet before they started spraying everything down, but that box was lost in the aftermath. I didn't even give it a thought until a month later when I realized it was not among the things inventoried by the salvage company and was, for all intents, gone.
Every time I thought of that my heart sank. Even though I never played those CDs—hell, I didn't even have anything to play them on at that point—they still held immense sentimental value.
A couple weeks ago (yes, two years on and I was still mourning their loss) I decided to stop crying about this and do something. So I went on eBay, located a "near mint" Yamaha CDX-530, and ordered the first two replacement CDs in my collection: Kraftwerk's Minimum/Maximum and Pet Shop Boys' Very/Relentless. The deck and the Kraftwerk disk arrived yesterday. I hooked it into my system and just laid back and enjoyed the music.
For the last ten years or so I've been in the "vinyl just sounds better" camp, but frankly after hearing Minimum/Maximum (something I will never be able to afford to buy on vinyl) on a system that I've never heard a CD played through, I may have to revise that opinion a bit. Both formats have their strengths and weaknesses, but Kraftwerk sounded damn good.
Fortunately—thanks to that anal-retentiveness—I have a list of [most of] those CDs. The document is dated 2013 and I know I purchased a few more since then to rip to iTunes, but it's a great starting point to rebuild my collection.