It was grey plastic, about as big as a small dinner plate. It had a place to put in the funky headphones right in the side, making it portable. You opened it up by pressing a button latch thing, until it resembled a flat grey clam. Then you slipped the CD in, being careful not to scratch the surfaces.
Well, it's a flat round disk with a hole in the middle, like a flattened, shiny doughnut. One side is encrypted with music, which somehow plays when you put it in your car, computer, or CD player.
Usually CD albums come with a max of twenty songs; they have limited space. So when I had my CD player, it was just me and one album for as long as I wanted, until I decided to switch out the disk.
The CD player was important to me because it narrowed my focus. There wasn't a million and ten songs from a million and ten artists I didn't recognize, like on the smartphones and MP3 devices you see these days. Nope, my CD player allowed me to connect deeply with each album I listened to, wherever I was. I may have not had the myriad choices you all have today, but I enjoyed quality over quantity. I could listen to an album over and over again and never get sick of it, because that's all I'd known.
I'm not saying it was easier or better than what we have today, I just know you will never experience anything as simple and almost intimate as listening to one artist's entire album repeatedly. You all have so many choices, you could listen to one album these days; but why? There's no point when you can skip through artists with the press of a button.
Good choice. Is remember how much of a hassle it was trying to use the CD player where I wanted without scratching the disks. We continue to store information in more compact ways. How micro can we get? We actually just stopped using a CD player at work, but now we have an iPod Dock.
ReplyDeleteI love that you talked about the portable CD player and it’s importance because I think it has great cultural meaning for our generation. The portable CD player was the best invention of the time because we could listen to music without having to put it in a cd player. The fun part of being limited to one CD at a time was that you could be so into that one artist and listen to the whole album on repeat. Rather than like an iTunes playlist listening to a plethora of music and not really getting the feel and true appreciation for the artists hard work assembling a whole album. As you said in your letter, the CD was important to you because it narrowed your focus, which is so true. The portable CD player was constraining and bulky no doubt about that but I loved it!
ReplyDeleteJosie,
ReplyDeleteYou go into really good detail in your post about the limitations of CDs and how these affected your music choice! Talking about how the disks have limited space (enough for about 20 songs) and that once you choose one you are stuck with that album until you switch out the CD made it really clear how this technology is different from what we have today (and what will be available in the future). You made a really good observation about connecting to an album. This is something that isn't as common any more, because it is so easy to mix and match songs from different artists and albums. We have become editors in that way - a neat concept!
Ali