Long Weekend Yard Sale
A yard sale, saturday morning. On a table full of electronics I spot two logos: Pioneer and Sony. The Pioneer is a receiver and I'm not interested. Squashed beneath it is the Sony: a CD player. Hmm. Spidey senses tingling. But both devices are smeared with muddy traces, the sort you get from cleaning with water that was long overdue for a change and left to dry.
"Does the CD player work?", I ask. There's a lot of people around and I'm not exactly sure who I'm asking. A woman turns and shouts.
"Does the CD player work?"
"Absolutely, it works!", a man replies.
From the tone I'm thinking her husband. Hard to tell. But he's pretty jovial and I'm not quite sure if he's serious or just having too much of a good time. There's a definite party vibe to the affair.
"Tell you what," he says, "give me a dollar and you can test it out."
The woman looks at me and sighs the sigh of someone who's been here a thousand times before.
"He means you get to test it for a dollar, not buy it."
"I figured." I'm smiling too. It's all very lighthearted. "So, how much then?"
She turns again.
"How much?"
"For what?"
Her husband (or friend or neighbour) is fiddling with a tent at this point and the wind's picking up. He's clearly struggling not to fly away. Another man is helping—or trying to.
"For the CD PLAYER!!"
I can tell she's mildly exasperated by now.
"Oh... ONE DOLLAR!"
And that's how, last weekend, I got my hands on a Sony CDP-XE300—an entry/mid-range player from the 1990s. The only other dedicated CD player I ever owned was my first: a Sony. Funny world. But it's the one bit of kit I didn't bother holding on to. The loading tray stopped working and I never tried fixing it. It eventually disappeared, probably sent to the dumpster during a move. We weren't very eco-conscious in those days.
I honestly didn't expect the unit to turn on at all, but I lucked out: not only is it in perfect working condition, it also sounds pretty nice. The XE300 is an analog-only model (which means I can't outboard conversion to my Yamaha's DAC), but it has a certain character that, so far, I'm enjoying. (1)
Back in October I wrote about bringing my CDs back with a cheap DVD-as-transport solution. I wasn't at all planning on changing, but this is definitely a much more enjoyable experience. And strangely, in my tortured mind, it also makes CDs less about data and more about music again. (2)
Anyway, not bad for a single loonie on a weekend walk.
Fun fact: the user manual dedicates 4 pages to setting up "programs" on the player, and recording them to cassettes. The venerable mix tape did not go gentle into that good night...!
1: Something that always depends on music choice, volume, room size, preferences, etc. Of course, I found the usual over the top online comments you get for every piece of gear ever made: everything from "stellar performer" to "piece of junk". I call this The Bokeh Syndrome ;)
2: Vinyl records never left the turntable, never became recordable, and never expanded beyond music playback. The CD "disk", meanwhile, came to mean anything: music, computer backups, interactive titles, presentations, movies... that silver coaster on your desk could be a CD, CD-R, CD-RW, CD-Rom, or any of those formats with DVD as prefix. And it could always be played back on your computer, regardless. The music CD, as object and medium, quickly lost all sense of ritual.
