Back in the day, I wanted a Sony Discman for a long time, and when I finally got one, I fell in love. The experience was far from perfect, however. Devices such as iPods and smartphones made it easy to forget just how bad using CDs could actually be.
I was really excited to buy my first Discman
CDs were replacing my cassettes
The first portable music player I ever had was a portable cassette player, a cheap knock-off of the hugely popular Sony Walkman. I absolutely loved it. I used it until the feeble foam pads of the crappy headphones were almost worn through.
Then CDs arrived. The sound quality was so much better that I started buying CDs instead of cassettes when I bought new music. For a long time, if I was on the move, I had to stick to my portable cassette player, as I couldn’t afford a Sony Discman.
Eventually, however, I found one in a second-hand electronics store for a reasonable price. It had been used, but I tested it out in the store, and it seemed to work fine. It was a Sony Discman D-141 that included a Mega Bass boost feature, and I instantly fell in love with it.
The skipping was really annoying
Motion and CDs are not a good mix
The sound quality from the Discman was so much better than my knock-off Walkman. Gone was the constant hiss and muddy sound, replaced with crisp, clear music and some serious bass thanks to the Mega Bass feature. When I was lying on my bed, listening to music, the experience was perfect.
The trouble is that portable music players are designed to be used when you’re moving around. I’d always listen to my portable cassette player whenever I was walking anywhere, and the same became true of my Discman. This was when the problems started.
The D-141 didn’t include any form of shock protection. Some models included electronic skip protection (ESP) that would buffer audio data into RAM so that if the CD skipped, the music would play uninterrupted from memory.
Since my model lacked this feature, every time my Discman got jolted, the music would skip. When I was out walking with my Discman, this would happen a lot. This is something that never happened with my cassette player, and it quickly became very annoying.
Bringing your music with you was a chore
CDs were far easier to damage
Another major annoyance when using my Discman was that if you wanted to listen to more than one album when you were out, you’d have to bring multiple CDs with you. CDs aren’t small, so you couldn’t just shove one in your back pocket like you could with a cassette.
I ended up with a CD wallet full of discs that I would carry around in a shoulder bag, but even this wasn’t ideal. To save space, the CDs were stored in a wallet with no CD trays, and it was easy to scratch them when taking them out or when they jostled around in the bag. A scratched CD would skip even when the player was completely still, making the problem even worse.
CDs could also hold less music than cassettes. I could fit two entire albums on the two sides of a blank cassette, but a CD could only fit up to 80 minutes. It meant I needed to bring more CDs with me than I did with cassettes.
Making mix tapes was a chore
Burning CDs was harder than you remember
This was the real issue when I first got my Discman. I’d been making mixtapes for years using a tape-to-tape cassette player. While the process was laborious, anyone with a dual-cassette player could do it, and blank cassettes were cheap and could store up to 120 minutes of music.
Burning CDs was a different story. You needed an entire computer with a CD burner, and early CD burners weren’t cheap. Some of the models could only burn at 1x speed, making the process slower than using a tape-to-tape machine with high-speed dubbing.
Blank CD-R discs were also fairly expensive in the early days in comparison to cassettes, and you could only fit up to 80 minutes of music on them.
Using CDs wasn’t as good as you remember
There’s a reason they were superseded
One of my favorite cassettes included a live version of The Way We Were / Try to Remember by Gladys Knight and the Pips. This song is about how everything in the past always seems better, even if that wasn’t actually the case. This is definitely true of using my Discman.
When I look back, I have fond memories of using my Discman. I have a powerful memory of walking through the streets of Sydney at sunset with Revolver by The Beatles playing on my Discman and feeling that life couldn’t get much better.
Then I remember all the times that my Discman would skip as I walked or the albums that I couldn’t listen to all the way through due to the scratches on the disc. Modern music streaming is so flawless that it’s hard to remember a time when it wasn’t perfect. I loved CDs at the time, but I don’t miss them at all.
CDs were great for their time
I loved CDs, but there’s no way I would return to using a Discman now, even if I could buy one with skip protection. We may be spoiled by the ease of use of modern media players, but honestly, using CDs would drive me insane.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
