High-end audio brands are ditching CD players because nobody makes disc drives anymore

[ActualViking]

ELP Laser Turntable | No Needle. No Wear.

The world's only turntable that plays vinyl records using laser beams. Zero friction, 100% analog path. Preserving history, one record at a time.

www.elpj.com

I am aware of such magical contraptions, but they are costly and I imagine it may also somehow just feel wrong.
This may sound strange but I am torn about the vinyl setup, as in the rather fragile records, the mechanical contraption that is the turn table and the very delicate and fragile arm and stylus. On the one hand it is sort of archaic, silly expensive and cumbersome to use - my turntable, as most of them, will only play one side of a record at a time and if left unattended it will happily "play" the inner grove of records till something wears out and self destroy.
All that does means, that I do not play vinyl when just wanting to have some music running. However all the fuss and theater also means, that it is very intentional when I do play vinyl - as in only doing so when there is time to enjoy and focus. There is sessions where one album takes the next and it become deep dives into a genre, a band, a period in time... and while listening I do also like the big covers found with vinyl - some are works of art.

 

[Axeia]

Tape deteriorate, that can also happen pretty fast and really nothing is safe. Close to safe is having multiple copies on different media and then keep copying the data to new media, making very sure to test the copies in the process to not risk useless copies.

The unreadable CD's you experienced, were they from factory mass production or copies made using office equipment?

Super market or office supplies store sourced.
Gave up on optical media after, never liked it anyway due to slow speeds, sensitivity to getting scratched and worst of all imo the noise of a spinning disc.
Preferred ripping things to .iso back in the day and then mounting them as a virtual disc. (Long live CloneDVD, my fellow old timers will be familiar with it)

The tape you use for backups for files (not many will for home use) lasts about 3 decades.
But yeah, you're not really backing anything up unless you've got backups of the backups (and preferably in a different location in case of a flood/fire etc).

 

[Axeia]

I've got music CDs, movie DVDs and PC game CDs that are pushing 25+ years in age and they still work without issue. Maybe these discs are close to the end of their life, maybe not. I've got them all digitally backed up and backed up again and again, just to be safe.

Some are a lot more durable than others, a Dutch site that's no longer around (RIP hardware.info ) ran a huge test on it at some point and at worst it could be a mere two years. Don't remember what the at the best case was, I guess outside the length they tested. If it's the originals for music CDs etc it's probably fine, it was just the ones you burn yourself that were a problem (different chemistry was used which deteriorates pretty fast - especially when exposed to UV-rays).

Folks try to justify the loss of disc storage by pointing to disc rot, like it's the worst thing out there and you're stupid because you use discs even though people are constantly pointing to disc rot. And that's the main reason these people think that the loss of discs as a storage medium won't be missed.....
I could just as easily point to data corruption/loss on SSDs or HDDs because of a power failure, or dropped drive or a mechanical part in a HDD failed or NAND failure or controller failure and so on. All mainstream methods for storing data have a finite duration before they will fail.

tbf if you use them as backup SSDs/HDDs tend to be a thing you just connect when you use them. HDDs that don't get many run hours (and you don't drop or shake around) in my experience last basically forever. I've plugged ancient disks from the 90s that basically just stopped getting used at some point and they all worked a-okay decades later. (Well, if you got an old enough motherboard to connect IDE drives that is, pre-SATA times)

I definitely trust optical disks the least (scratches, disc rot) with HDDs being a distant second (not exactly drop proof). Cheap SD-cards have a poor rep as well but I think that's just from frequently writing to them, my 2GB one that sees little use back from the early 2000s still works.

 

[captaincranky]

Flagship Model
ELP LT-Master
Plays 7", 10", 12" Records
33, 45, and 78 RPM Support
Remote Control Operation
High-Density Laser Pickup
Starting at $19,000

As I was saying, "if you have to ask............".

 

[captaincranky]

Beter off backing up basically any other form of storage. HDD, SSD, sd-card, usb stick, tape none of them deteriorate as fast as CDs/DVDs do. I've had some that became unreadable after only 4 years.

Well...., NO SSD, SD, and USB sticks all use >>flash memory<<, These are are the most likely to deteriorate over time.

Rumor, legend, popular wisdom, and published sources, hold that the individual cells in the memory may lose their charge in as little as 5 years.

SSDs are wonderful with their speed, but keep in mind that when used as an OS drive, they are constantly being written and overwritten. So there's no real opportunity for individual cells to discharge.

So a word to the wise, (I plan to take mu own advice), if you're going to clone an OS drive, use an HDD as the host.

 

[Hotlynx16]

Well...., NO SSD, SD, and USB sticks all use >>flash memory<<, These are are the most likely to deteriorate over time.

Rumor, legend, popular wisdom, and published sources, hold that the individual cells in the memory may lose their charge in as little as 5 years.

SSDs are wonderful with their speed, but keep in mind that when used as an OS drive, they are constantly being written and overwritten. So there's no real opportunity for individual cells to discharge.

So a word to the wise, (I plan to take mu own advice), if you're going to clone an OS drive, use an HDD as the host.

From what I read SSD's and flash drives need to be powered up once a year or so to keep the cells charged! As far as DVD/Blu-Ray burners go I was able to get the Pioneer's last internal Blu-ray burner listed is the BDR-213EBK made back in 2024, which supported BDXL and M-DISC formats and achieved up to 16x BD-R writing speed. For $95! Now Blu-Ray burners are selling for $250-799 on Ebay! It performs well and I was able to clone a damaged Blu-Ray that was unreadable on my old drive! Still have 50GB and 100GB blu-ray verbatim blank disks but they have gone sky high!

 

[captaincranky]

I am aware of such magical contraptions, but they are costly and I imagine it may also somehow just feel wrong.
This may sound strange but I am torn about the vinyl setup, as in the rather fragile records, the mechanical contraption that is the turn table and the very delicate and fragile arm and stylus. On the one hand it is sort of archaic, silly expensive and cumbersome to use - my turntable, as most of them, will only play one side of a record at a time and if left unattended it will happily "play" the inner grove of records till something wears out and self destroy.
All that does means, that I do not play vinyl when just wanting to have some music running. However all the fuss and theater also means, that it is very intentional when I do play vinyl - as in only doing so when there is time to enjoy and focus. There is sessions where one album takes the next and it become deep dives into a genre, a band, a period in time... and while listening I do also like the big covers found with vinyl - some are works of art.

Blondie does ELP?

Meh, it's probably just the headband...

Anyhoo, I believe the cover and other art for ELP's, "Brain Salad Surgery" were commissioned art. (Among many others too numerous to even try to remember.)

In other very old news, I'm the proud owner of a Technics SL-1401 (Quartz lock DD Semi-Auto). Say what you must, at least the tone arm does return after it finishes playing the record.

In a manner that I'm sure you would consider blasphemous and disrespectful, I use it as a stand for a couple of Lava Lamps.

Back to the topic of cover art, we go from the perverse and darkly sublime, to the disgustingly absurd:

OTOH, who needs CDs or vinyl, when we have YouTube?

This live performance of, "I can See for Miles", goes out of its way to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, not only that, "White Men Can't Jump", but not a Caucasian soul on the dance floor can find the jackhammer beat of this song.....Oy.vey.. Keith Moon and John Entwistle are both present and accounted for.

 

[Bob Olhsson]

Optical disk drives must be mass-produced in order to be remotely affordable. An additional factor is that even the best drives' lasers crap out after ten or fifteen years of constant use. As for disks going bad, manufactured disks hold up better than written disks but when they begin to not play, my experience has been that it was a case of the laser being on its way.

 

[captaincranky]

From what I read SSD's and flash drives need to be powered up once a year or so to keep the cells charged! As far as DVD/Blu-Ray burners go I was able to get the Pioneer's last internal Blu-ray burner listed is the BDR-213EBK made back in 2024, which supported BDXL and M-DISC formats and achieved up to 16x BD-R writing speed. For $95! Now Blu-Ray burners are selling for $250-799 on Ebay! It performs well and I was able to clone a damaged Blu-Ray that was unreadable on my old drive! Still have 50GB and 100GB blu-ray verbatim blank disks but they have gone sky high!

Yeah, one thing that's always a constant is human greed. I have a working Asus internal, but it's only a Blu-ray reader, not a burner.

Personally, I get a bit hinky and nervous over huge capacity discs of any kind. For example, how could anyone reconcile buying a 24TB HDD, if they weren't willing to buy another one to back it up with?

These days, that would be pushing almost $1,500.00. WD and Seagate couldn't help themselves but to get in on the price gouging fun. More greedy a**holes.

 

[lostinlodos]

ELP Laser Turntable | No Needle. No Wear.

The world's only turntable that plays vinyl records using laser beams. Zero friction, 100% analog path. Preserving history, one record at a time.

www.elpj.com

Laser phonograph players today start around 5-7k. A local AV store here sells them. Not much higher than a high end physical player.

 

[Superconductor]

Two small hifi companies halting their production of CD players and citing its because they can't get drives, that sounds to me like companies not wanting to confess their sales numbers are so small they do not want to adapt the products to using different drives. Not that CD-drives in general are no longer available.

Something like this has always been happening, like fx. Lotus, a English sports car brand ended production of one of their Esprit model because the gear box they used becoming unavailable, it was from a older far more humble French family car that went out of production years before. In reality they stopped making the car, not because gear boxes were no longer being made*, but because adapting their car to a different available gearbox was not financially viable.

*They stopped making the Esprit decades ago, while there is of course still gearboxes being made.

F n A Right! Two companies cease offering CD players... two that most haven't heard of and most don't buy from anyway.

 

[captaincranky]

F n A Right! Two companies cease offering CD players... two that most haven't heard of and most don't buy from anyway.

I'm not sure those two companies are the root of the problem. I believe that Sony is getting away from optical drives as well.. With Sony being the mega conglomerate that it is, I doubt that they were outsourcing for their optical drives. I don't think the PS-6 is going to have a BD, or any drive in it. Perhaps that's an article I should have read a bit closer.

Although, bear in mind that these are only guesses on my part.

 

[captaincranky]

Whoops, duplicate post.

 

[wiyosaya]

@wiyosaya I followed your link and ran smack into a "request price" hurdle.

I've always adhered to the old adage, "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it". Yes? No? Maybe?

@captaincranky Try this link https://www.elpj.com/#models

 

[captaincranky]

@wiyosaya Ya know, it was better when I only thought I couldn't afford it. Now, I'm absolutely certain I can't afford it.

 

[lostinlodos]

@wiyosaya Ya know, it was better when I only thought I couldn't afford it. Now, I'm absolutely certain I can't afford it.

lol, record players can get close to 6 digits. Yep I’m out. Way out.

https://www.whathifi.com/features/10-worlds-most-expensive-turntables

 

[captaincranky]

@lostinlodos Are you sure you didn't mean, "close to seven figures"? Anyway, I searched for "inexpensive turntables" and found this Technics SL-1500CS, at a mere $1,700..!

https://www.whathifi.com/features/10-worlds-most-expensive-turntables

In any case, I have a Technics SL-1401 which is pretty much the same thing, quartz lock, direct drive, yadda, yadda. I got it for about $140.00 dealer cost.

Now, google this exact search term, "Is the Technics SL-1401 a good turntable"

I don't care how much someone thinks they have to spend to get a good turntable, the raw facts are, they more than likely can't hear the difference from a spinner they'd buy for a nickel on the dollar less.

More importantly, I don't care how much someone pays for a turntable and cartridge, they simply can't extract anything from a record that isn't there to begin with.

 

[captaincranky]

@ "Everybody" I don't know if this belongs here or in the AI thread. but let's try it here first.
Earlier in this thread I casually, jokingly and sarcastically suggested that I was, "lusting after $1,000 speaker cables".

"And what to my poor wondering should appear". in my Gmail account, but this ad from the aptly names, "Snake River Audio":

{Dunno what happened to the ad image I posted]
[I expect it was pulled for good reason...............]
[ It showed speaker cables starting a $1,8K........]
[ And going up to more than $3K.........................]

[ The file is still is still attached below if anyone is curious]

Suffice it to say, there's no such thing as privacy on the web any more. I comfort myself with the idea that Google is taking these people's money for no reason whatsoever, as there is absolutely no chance of selling me this nonsense whatsoever. Still, it does cause one to wonder if AI is already running amok more than we realize.

 

[ActualViking]

The trouble is the current prices of internal CD burners.Once upon a time, internal CD burners were throwaways at $15 to $20.00 dollars a pop.So, you pretty much didn't care, it they lasted a week or 2 years. I used to order them in twos or threes

How things change.
The first CD burner I used was about the size of a VCR, it cost around $5.000 and required a PC costing something like double that. Most PC's could not deliver data uninterrupted enough to successfully burn a CD-R, especially if you wanted to do at 2x speed and really having a hard drive enough to hold the amount of data was a exception (700 MB). In fact if you made any type of product with data filling a disc, there was no reason to bother with copy protection as the scarcity of burners and the price of hard drives was copy protection enough.
Getting CD-R's was also a whole issue in itself, at times they were hard to get by. The normal price was around $20 for a disc, but the scarcity thing! I recall having a courier hand carry a box with 10 empty CD-R's, essentially flying them in from somewhere else in Europe - those 10 discs ended up cost about $150 a piece.

 

[captaincranky]

How things change.
The first CD burner I used was about the size of a VCR, it cost around $5.000 and required a PC costing something like double that. Most PC's could not deliver data uninterrupted enough to successfully burn a CD-R, especially if you wanted to do at 2x speed and really having a hard drive enough to hold the amount of data was a exception (700 MB). In fact if you made any type of product with data filling a disc, there was no reason to bother with copy protection as the scarcity of burners and the price of hard drives was copy protection enough.
Getting CD-R's was also a whole issue in itself, at times they were hard to get by. The normal price was around $20 for a disc, but the scarcity thing! I recall having a courier hand carry a box with 10 empty CD-R's, essentially flying them in from somewhere else in Europe - those 10 discs ended up cost about $150 a piece.

Wow...!!! Not being exposed to CD before they were offered to the public as vehicles for music in lieu of LPs, that's far, far, beyond outrageous.

Ostensibly, were those two "events" to be anywhere in time alignment, it would make a strong case for buying two of any music CDs available at the time. (Obviously, one to play, and one for backup.) As they were about $25.00 bucks a pop back then, your account would make them seem like an incredible bargain, even in a late 1970's economy. Fast forward maybe 10 years, (?) and you could buy 3 burners for less than the price of those 2 CDs. Time and progress do move on at blinding speed in the tech world. I can remember though how utterly incompetent PCs were at Photoshop going back 25 years. Now, adding a filter, happens in a heartbeat, not during the entirety your lunch break. I do remember the text only terminals a Philly Community at the turn of the century.

In would seem that compared to you, I'm a relative noob to computer crap, as I only bought my first box a little over 20 years ago.

In other tales of yore, I remember Sony's struggles in court against charges of "copyright infringement", when they introduced the (Beta) VCR.

After their VCR victory, I think Sony ended up in court later on the opposite side of the issue, due to adding malware to their music CDs to prevent, "copyright infringement". That has to be a legendary flop-flop in corporate hypocrisy .

As a lowly Hi-fi salesman in the 70's, I got to play with the new toys at the time of their first shipment to the store. My elusive search for high end retention ended at a Nakamichi 2 head deck. (Wages didn't reward or allow me enough to buy the three header)

A bit earlier, I remember being somewhat envious of my, "early adopter" friend's VCR, which was literally as big as a suitcase, and weighed on the order of 20+ pounds. What else could you do with something like that, other than using it to watch porn? It sure beat having to have an 8 mm projector in the house to the same end..

"Those were the good old days". As a "cheap date", I recall trying to eat a spaghetti dinner, while holding the plate perpendicular to the floor behind only one mere methaqualone tablet.

Just to show how fast time flies, this stupid spell checker can't spell either "Nakamichi", or, "Methaqualone".

I do run on. So sorry, and as always, Cheers...!

 

[captaincranky]

@ActualViking It's probably an imposition, but I'd consider it a personal favor if you'd try and wade through my posts #32 & #43, and tell me what you think.

 

[ChrisH1]

When you say 'nobody makes drives anymore', DVD drives and blu-ray are still being maufactured; those can be used. I know most game consoles won't play CDs, but DVD players typically will. I can see those coming to an end someday, but that day is not here yet.

 

[robertcarlos]

It’s surprising how quickly the decline of optical drives is starting to affect even high-end audio brands. I still think physical CDs have a place for people who value owning their music, so hopefully manufacturers find a way to keep dedicated CD players available.

 

[captaincranky]

When you say 'nobody makes drives anymore', DVD drives and blu-ray are still being maufactured; those can be used. I know most game consoles won't play CDs, but DVD players typically will. I can see those coming to an end someday, but that day is not here yet.

Here's the thing, PC ownership has shifted dramatically toward gamin. (AFAIK). Consequently, PC case designs have shifted favoring cooling solutions, and away from having 5 1/4" drive slots.

The absurd, (IMHO) vinyl revival, has drawn money away from prerecorded CD sales. Many people who are still invested in music, are turning spare PCs into media servers.

All of this obviously creates pressure on optical drive manufacturers, and those in already weakened positions will exit the market. The question this story raises, (but doesn't answer), is exactly what percentage of that market these two makers control?

Then there's Sony and other gaming studios no longer offering their games on disk. Of course everybody's railing against it, but unfortunately they are, in large part, too addicted to do anything about it. Like maybe boycotting new AAA releases?

Over the years, I've bought many, many, internal optical drives. Most of them have been crap. Weeks after you put them in, the drawers fail to open. Seriously, what's up with that? The manufacturers don't know how to make, or use substandard materials for the rubber bands that drive the drawers?

My CD ripping is all done in lossless WAV format. At the same time, I have "spare" PCs laying all over the house, along with a DAC sitting around doing nothing. So, I am seriously looking at creating a music source that doesn't require any moving parts, and which deliver hours and hours of uninterrupted playback.

Anyway, my position is, I have no intention to move away from purchasing CDs as my primary source of music.

Amazon is still showing quite a selection of external optical drives. In fact, I just bought one, that was supposedly on "sale", for $19.00. I guess we'll see how that turns out. These external drives are obviously plentiful, showing price pressure on their marketing. Is that because they're being sold off, or they're the only solution available for the massive laptop market? While internal drives are showing none, along with raising prices.

 

[lostinlodos]

@ActualViking It's probably an imposition, but I'd consider it a personal favor if you'd try and wade through my posts #32 & #43, and tell me what you think.

I’m in my 40s. So I’m old and young. I’ve been involved in tech as a volunteer and later working since I was a kid.

I also admit I was lucky as a kid and also earns where I got to.



Our first CD player was the same size as the amp and tuners. I think my father payed 8K for it. But that was a long time ago. My first computer burner cost $1000 or so in the early 90s. A bit less than the previous post.



I also had a video disc player, and laserdisc,

I still have and use SVCD, SVHS, DVHS/DTV.





But I actually own a $6000 air flat laser pickup phonograph player.

The laser pickups are interesting, but not any better than a quality head and needle. Other than they do not skip on most scratches. Where they do “skip” you get missing audio, not a bounce.

It’s the various lay-flat systems that make the difference.



Somewhere in a box we have a DVTR. Digital video tape recorder. You could save computer files on VHS tapes.