Hello, Old Friend

My holiday present to myself.

Okay, to most of you, this is just another piece of BPC [black plastic crap] from the early 90s, but to me, it’s an old friend. (And it’s not plastic; that’s an anodized aluminum faceplate and solid metal case.)

I bought this identical model back in July 1990 to replace my very first CD player that I got sometime in the mid 80s. How do I know the date? I was living in San Francisco at the time, I’d just gotten a mid-year bonus, and my mom was visiting. One day we went shopping and I came home with a new futon mattress (it was the 90s, after all), and this little gem.

It was my player for ten years or so and then it just disappeared. I don’t remember getting rid of it, but all of a sudden it was gone from the photographic record—along with my memory of what happened to it. At some point I think I must’ve pivoted to playing all my CDs through my DVD player and probably just felt that it was redundant and didn’t need it any more.

All I’m sure of is that it was gone by the time I moved back to Phoenix in 2002. At some point in 2003—after surviving seven weeks of radiation for my first cancer—I rewarded myself by returning to a dedicated CD player and then flipping units in and out of my system on almost a monthly basis trying to find digital nirvana (buying this shit used was still dirt cheap back then).

At some point between then and 2022 I got rid of my last CD player, only replacing it with a CDX-530 when I decided to get over myself and stop mourning the loss of my remaining discs. (I couldn’t find a CDX-730 at the time.)

When the 530 got too picky about reading discs, and my attempts to resuscitate it failed, I bit the bullet and bought a brand new player. It’s served me well over the past few years, and it sounded fine, but it never truly wowed me, y’know? It lacked the “personality” of those awesome 90s era machines, and since I really wanted a 730, I set a trigger on eBay to notify me whenever one was posted.

To be honest, the pickings have been slim since I first set that trigger. They don’t show up that often (I don’t know it’s because they’ve all died and been consigned to landfills, or if  they’re tanks and people hold onto them forever) but when they do show up they’re either listed as not working at all (after watching literally dozens of repair videos on these things, it might be a simple fix but I didn’t want to deal with it) or working but so beat up cosmetically they were an automatic pass.

Then a couple weeks ago I woke to an email that another had been posted and—though it was missing the remote control (a common issue)—it was pristine and working.

It arrived today. And yes, it works—and looks as good as it did in the seller’s photos.

And I have a secret to share: Yamaha hasn’t changed their CD remote codes in the last 40 years. While it would be nice to have the original remote that was paired with this player, they seem to be impossible to find, and pretty much any Yamaha CD remote will cover all the basic functions on any player. (As of this writing, I’m using the one from the new player I bought two years ago and it’s working fine, although I have ordered an era-appropriate remote so this one can go back with my 2 year old player should I decide to sell it.)