I Didn't Want To, But I Had To

It turns out I was unable to fully resuscitate my old CD player after all. Cleaning—and later lubricating—the rail on which the laser sled rides helped for a while, but then disks started skipping or stopping or simply refusing to play past a certain point again. I was bummed out, especially since I really liked the aesthetics of that old 90's deck.

Finding a new player for under $1200 these days is kind of daunting since the medium is has been declared dead by most manufacturers in the wake of digital files and streaming, so I was fortunate to find this Yamaha (CD-S303) at a very reasonable price that met my needs. It's nothing special to look at, but it does what it's supposed to. And with my aging ears, I'm well past my audiophile days anyway so if this sounds any different with its newer DACs and whatnot than my old unit did, I'll never know. It plays disks without randomly stopping or skipping and that's what's important at this point. So I have no complaints. (It just played all the way through Abbacadabra's Abbasalute—currently making my way through Pet Shop Boys Very/Relentless—without so much as a single hiccup; something the old deck couldn't do no matter how many invocations to the Dark Forces I uttered.)

And before you ask—yes, we do have a newish Blueray DVD player that also plays music CDs. But like all of them on the market today, it has no display and I don't know about you, but I don't want to have the television on just to navigate the disk. And because we watch so little from physical media these days, it's not even hooked up.