basically all cutting edge tech from my teen years:
When I was a little kid my dad’s old retired police cruiser still had an 8-track player in it. Y’all ain’t that old. I was there for that thing’s entire lifecycle, then portable mp3 players’ too. Streaming on mobile will probably last a while though.
WTF is this nonsense, Discman was a specific Sony product ala Walkman.
IIRC that one doesn’t have skip protection
It says it has it on the front.
i never claimed to be able to read
Ain’t no way that’s a Discman. I have a Sony one from the 90s on my desk, for one. Two, I thought Sony had the trademark on Discman? And three, that’s Panasonic and doesn’t have Discman anywhere on it.
So unless Discman wasn’t trademarked and became synonymous with CD players, I refuse to accept that’s a discman!
I was gonna say the same thing, but I’m glad you did. Makes me feel old anyway.
It’s Sony, y’all. If there’s infringement to be imposed upon you know they’ll be right there swingin’ their Sony balogna.
Yet Wikipedia says Sony launched it in 1984 but changed the name to Walkman at some point
Let me think, when did I last use a CD player like that?
Oh, I remember. Today morning. Oh, it’s been a while.
It’s not even the oldest one. I had to wait like three Christmases until I could play mp3s on a disk without converting them first.
Feels like this would fit in as some background piece in Doctor Who.
Then I guess you must have overlooked the first cell phone models you used (or even later ones) in that same museum…
You’ve never been older in your life than you are now
I guess that panasonic one I had in 1986 would be over next to the dinosaurs.
Mine was like the first one shown in this commercial. What they don’t show you was the huge battery pack you had put the portable in.
I saw a Genesis console displayed behind glass in a library. I took photos like I haven’t seen one before… 😭
Damn kid you had the high tech newfangled round clear gel looking shit.
I had the original 6AA battery disc man where you can either listen to music for a couple of drives without skipping, or a week if you didn’t turn the anti skip buffer on.
More battery drain with anti-skip.
The tables have turned later on. The anti-skip would extend battery life. It would get enough buffer allowing the CD to spin-down and then it would spin back up when needed. This time could be even longer if playing MP3.For example, my Panasonic SL-CT520 does 100 second “anti-skip” (at this point it’s not really just anti-skip), and with MP3 cites up to 155h of playback time. Unfortunately, the unit I have can’t play CD-RW (it is mentioned in the manual) which probably means a degraded laser.
But even with CDDA, my Sony D-EJ000 cites 16 hours with anti-skip and only 11 hours without anti-skip. Unfortunately, in this case the anti-skip also reduces audio quality slightly since it uses lossy compression, so I keep it off.
At least I think that’s what the manual is trying to sayTo enjoy high quality CD sound, select “G-off”.
The anti-skip sucked battery?
Horribly, it read the disk into a memory buffer, then played from the buffer. Ram was expensive, tiny, and power hungry back then. It was pretty shock-sensitive too. Every time it detected a fail, it would have to seek/re-read the section. If you had some decent bass, the song itself could set it off :)
It wasn’t the buffer itself that drew power. It was the need to physically spin the disc faster in order to read the data to build up a buffer. So it would draw more power even if you left it physically stable. And then, if it would actually skip in reading, it would need to seek back to where it was to build up the buffer again.
I had this exact model ! Burned a CD with all the Linkin Park, Sum 41, Blink 182, Rage against the machine, System of a Down, Red hot chili peppers, and more !
Those were simpler times…
Papercuts is a jam
You have an exquisite taste in music.
Discman was a Sony trademarked name only. That in the museum was a portable MP3 compact disc player with remote.
I had a diskman when they were dying to pure MP3 players.
It was an ATRAK3 plus (a proprietary compression format) and CD player combo that came with software to burn whole libraries on standard CDs, complete with folders and everything.
It was cool as hell, a built-in an/fm tuner, and I used it for work for years along with a single rewritable cd. I had different folders for different languages and genres and shit.
You can buy them on eBay now for like $30, which ironically is more than I paid for it in 2002-4 or whatever it was, however the software to convert to the ATRAK3 plus format was super super hard to find even in the early naughties, unless you have the installer disc.
They should have put one of those into the museum. Would have been way cooler and more informative and shit
You confirmed my suspicions. I immediately looked at the tag and knew it probably wasn’t a Discman because there ain’t no way Sony wouldn’t have trademarked that name.
And it’s not even the first of its type. I had a 1st gen Phillips Expanium that I got back in 2000.
Yeah this gives the vibe of some poorly-researched hipster pop up “museum”
Perhaps a problem in museum, but at least where I live any highly portable CD player like this gets called “discman” same as with portable cassette players being called “walkman”.
Yeah what is that called when a product name becomes a common noun? Nintendo fought this so that “Nintendo” didn’t become synonymous with “videogame console.”
Trademark erosion?
