Going, Going, Gone -- CD players in new cars -- am I the only one missing them?

Marnet
My Gerard turntable bit the dust several years ago when it could no longer be repaired.[Oct '15]
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litesong wrote:
Bought an LP record that was meant to play at 45rpms, instead of 33rpms. The sound was spectacular. I still have the record somewhere in the attic… or garage…or somewhere… maybe?

Seconded. I find the vinyl arguments silly. Better frequency response? We can’t hear frequences outside of what a CD can reproduce. That’s like saying “old lightbulbs are better because they emit more infrared.” Yeah, that’s great, if you’re a pit viper.

A lot of the high-end audio world is a lot like the car mod world. “I bought a $20,000 receiver with discrete amps and a $15,000 turntable and it’s the best sound you can buy!” is a lot like the college kid saying “I bought a K&N air filter and now my Civic outruns Corvettes!”

I’ve NEVER EVER heard anyone who prefers vinyl say it has better frequency response. I’d like to see the audiophile who said that.

There are reasons for vinyl. CD’s (digital in general) is an approximation of the actual sound. It takes snapshots of the actual frequency. This can be extremely accurate, but not 100% accurate. Most of us can’t hear the difference, especially with the type of music we listen to. CD’s are recorded to digital from analog and then converted from digital and played back to the listener in analog. Vinyl is analog through out the whole listening process. With current AD and DA convertors the argument for vinyl is almost moot. HOWEVER…the one argument that isn’t going away are the old vinyl recordings of some very classic music that has never been properly converted to CD. And because of the low volume they never will be. Some recordings of certain years of The Boston Symphony will remain as some of the best classical music recordings ever…but still low volume and very difficult to re-master to a CD. So people who have those vinyl records will never give up their turn table.

Yeah, wrong word. Range, is the word I was looking for.

A lot of the negatives on digital recordings are really about MP-3s, especially highly-compressed ones. Some folks mistakenly lump CDs in with them.

Even Range. Vinyl has a much wider range then tape…but CD has over 10 times the dynamic range of vinyl. I don’t know any audiophile who would ever say that. As I said there are legitimate reasons for vinyl, but they are facing fast. I use to work with a guy at Digital Equipment that left to start his own company designing and building extreme high-end turn-tables. $50,000 each. Now that’s NUTS.

Yeah its a PIA to have to go thru and RIP all your cd’s and then copy them to a thumb drive . Not sure how this is an easier idea than just inserting a cd and playing it. Yes you have more songs in wonderful MP3 sound if you want to spend hours ripping this stuff .Some have gotten rid of them , FCA still seems to supply cd players if wanted . May have to order the car with it . Search around some cars still have them .

Agreed and it is a noticeable difference in higher end equipment , maybe not on the junk that todays kids use to listen to music .

A CD player has moving parts, can skip, and doesn’t last forever. IT professionals used to think CDRs were good for archiving, but they’ve discovered the disc deteriorates with time.

By ripping all my CDs to digital, I can back up the files, and my cell phone and car’s audio system are solid state, making them more reliable without the moving parts.

The only downside is that there is compression with bluetooth transmission, but if I’m not worried about wearing out the audio jack on my phone, can connect my phone and car radio physically.

And lots of new cars have usb ports, plug in a thumb drive, all your songs are now available.

A lot of these smart radios still use harddrives so it’s not any more reliable than a cd player which I have never had an issue with .

Which vehicles?

If they’re solid state hard drives, they wouldn’t have moving parts.

Be careful about letting your flash media just sit there collecting dust. Flash memory store info by trapping electrons in an insulating layer at the gate of field effect transistors. I’ve read articles about the electrons would eventually tunnel through the thin insulating layer that is storing your data. You need to power up your flash media to replenish the lost electrons

Here’s an engineering perspective on thre difference of analog vs digital

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