I will readily admit I prefer the sound of Sony's early, all-metal portable CD players, but there's an elegant simplicity of the later, plastic models that can't be denied.
Nugget
Such a Cute Lil' Nugget!
Another one added to the collection. (Ben has his own collections, so we're good here.)
I ordered this from shopgoodwill.com, as "untested." What attracted me to it was the fact that the case hadn't yellowed in relation to the clasp unlike so many of these units that show up on eBay. And that S2 styling! For a couple dollars more than the price of a fast-food lunch I figured it was worth the risk, and if it didn't work I could put the hours I've spent watching YouTube videos on how to service these things to use. Turns out I didn't need to. It works perfectly.
So of course I had to pop the top panel off the base and peek inside!
This is rapidly becoming my favorite of the collection.
Ooh, That's Pretty
What a Difference 38 Years Makes
Isn't technology grand?
Of the lot, the D-171 is my favorite just because I've had it for so long and its reliability after all these years, but I have an real affection for the D-10. While not being the original Discman model I owned, it was the player that—somehow, considering how much it skips if you sneeze in its general direction—got me through years of commutes in San Francisco; an undeniable nostalgia factor. The sound quality itself is also so much better than the other two there's just no comparison and for that reason alone it's the one I listen to the most. I just wish it played all disks as reliably as the other two. I'm not even talking about CDRs (surprisingly all three will play them even though CDRs weren't even a thing when the D-10 was in production). For example, the D-10 absolutely refuses to play all the way through Revolver, the last track on disk 1 of Madonna's Celebration (an absolutely pristine commercial disk, btw) and no amount of cajoling can convince it to do otherwise. (The disk plays flawlessly everywhere else.)
But admittedly I do like the quirky design of the D-EJ100. You can't see the disk spinning like with the others, but that neon lime green center circle display is an absolute chef's kiss in my opinion. Of the three, it also has the best skip protection and fits inside my headphone case like it was made for it, making it the perfect traveling companion in the already overstuffed messenger bag haul back and forth to the office. The sound quality isn't as good as the D-10, but it's good enough to get though those three days I have to be physically present at corporate HQ.
It Was That Kind Of Evening Last Night
Kicking back with Miles…
By the Late 90s…
…and early 00's, Sony had their Discman shit down to an art. It's really too bad the whole product line died only a couple years later with the advent of the iPod because it really is amazing technology.
Yeah, the Discman cases went all plastic, but everything was now consolidated onto a single circuit board, a definite improvement in terms of serviceability. Remove four screws from the bottom and the top/tray pops right off…unlike my beloved D-10 which has two double-sided circuit boards linked by a ribbon cable, multiple wire connects, and is much more complicated:
Or this, my original D-7 from 1986 with a belt-drive spindle motor. And look at that laser transport!
Still a feat of miniaturization and engineering considering that full-size CD decks only came on the scene a few years earlier.
Remember…obsessed.