I am rather surprised and happy my old but pristine Panasonic SL-CT800 Discman still works. This very slim portable CD player was the bee’s knees back in the day, circa 2003. Even the remote still works. I powered the Panasonic with an old Sony Discman 4.5V power supply I found in another box.
I connected the SL-CT800 to the pair of Sonos Play:5 Gen 2 speakers in my living room via a 3.5mm line cable and boom, music in the home.
The reason I dug this old tech out of the drawer was because I had this CD by The College Fund Street Band, made up of the Fong siblings. I bought their CD after watching them perform at San Francisco Ferry Building some years ago. And I wanted to listen to it.
I know. Who still uses CD players anymore, right? But I have CDs that don’t exist in Apple Music or Spotify (I know, that’s hard to imagine), so this Discman will be nice to have around.
Here are some CDs I dug out of the box to try. I have to say, CDs and their uncompressed songs still sound better than streaming tracks.