I find it quite impressive that the thing is still working. Most modern CD players break after a few years. Also, awesome choice for the Colors In Motion CD :)
That is amazing. That that cheap machine plays homemade CDR discs. I had a high-end Sony CD player that cost several hundred dollars back in 1990. That couldn't play anything but commercially made CDs.
Let us be honest: this budget $100 CD player is totally awful in respect to design, operation, features and overall finesse. After three months or so, the shortsighted purchaser would had realised they were better off purchasing a Sony CD player at even double the price. The user experience and satisfaction is 100 times better, which means the Sony would had still been viable and relevant in the early 1990s. So, in the end, the Sony is more economical as there is no need to replace it so quickly. The LP turntable closing comment is apt and accurate. What is the point investing in a new LP hobby when playing music with a rubbish turntable?
Wow - they were cheap. I think I bought my first CD player (Philips) around 1986 and cost about £400 ($512) so this must have been extremely cheap or the price dropped massively dropped within a few years.
19:00 Makes me want to go get some tacos, chips and salsa, no Corona, I'll take a Mt. Dew instead. Though I do wonder how that compares to the Soundesign "Laser Audio" CD player that you used to have (IIRC, uxwbill has it now.) Thing is, 5 years later in 1993, I bought my first CD player for $130, a Sony, which is still working (albeit sometimes a little cantankerous) to this day. While it was my first Sony, it's not a "My First Sony."
Yes, but the first vertical cassette players were an innovation. I think i was afraid to buy a vertical cassette player when they first arrived. All the original cassette tape players and recorders were of a drop in configuration. My first drop in was a hissy Magnavox made by Matsushita. The second was a Dolby model from Harmon Kardon made by Nakamichi before they marketed models in the US. My third was a 2 head Nakamichi 600. The transport was slanted!
The bottom model shown at 1:23 was my first CD player. I remember telling people I would buy a CD player when they dropped below $200, thinking they would never get there. It took about a year.
My brother had a similar model, the Magnavox CDB-460. I used it in the garage to the mid 2000's, then Roku Soundbridge, finally built a computer for the garage streaming music.
@@tookitogo Agreed, not always, take LCD monitors for example, in the early 2000's I had a 15in 1024x768 KDS LCD monitor with built in speakers, and t was like $300 at the time, and that was considered a cheap low end model, and just a few years ago I bought 3 Sceptre 24in 1080p 16:9 60hz displays with VGA, DVI, HDMI, 3.5mm in put, and built in speakers(i don't use them they are crap), 2 are on my main gaming machine at home, and one on my work machine at work, all 3 have served me well, and cost me a total of $310 USD shipped to my door from Newegg, and are miles better then the old KDS display.
I read comments, so I found this. Some commenters blast away without looking. It might help minimize addition folks offering "corrections" if this one was pinned to the top.
The sound quality is surprising, as your title says. I appreciate when a manufacturer designs a device that puts out an unadulterated signal. I was really, really, really interested in getting a standalone CD Player at Caldor when they had a Soundesign for $99.99 (I'm guessing 1991-92?) and that is what I asked for as my 8th grade graduation present - it was destined to sit on top of my Channel Master AM/FM/8-track stereo. Instead, my father bought me a Sony CFD-470 bookshelf system, the speakers for which I still use daily (connected to the receiver that my PC is connected to). My first CD? Phil Collins' "Face Value." Not quite as amazing as "No Jacket Required," but still a great album. Thank goodness CDs don't wear out from repeated plays, I was constantly playing "In The Air Tonight" and "I Missed Again."
You are dead on correct about why CDs took over. The cheapest CD player sounded great while the record players were sounding worse and worse (for what people could afford.) Plus CDs were smaller, less prone to damage and all that. It just got a lot better a lot faster. It was the cost of the discs that made converting over expensive in my family.
I never got the “converting over” concept. Always kept playing my records on a good turntable while playing my CDs on a CD player. Back then car and portable CD players were expensive and skipped constantly, so music on the go had to be recorded to a cassette anyway if you bought it on vinyl or a CD.
My moms Sony CDP-M27 is on it's 3rd KSS-150A/210A laser and it started getting incredibly shock sensitive again... whereas this one is probably still on the original late 80s laser because... well who would want to buy a replacement laser at likely half the original cost of the player (not even including labor). And it still works...
@@Jimmyhaflingero say that all CD players sound the same to you is like to say that all singers sound the same also. Impossible! Just because you might be tone deaf doesn’t make it true!
This was surprisingly more common in those days than people might expect! Those 70s/80s tv's just kept on working but over time a lot of them developed bad solder joints from heat, or from gravitational force as they'd cram some boards in vertically. Nothing a good whack wouldn't 'fix' for a little while..
Interesting that CD players could be that cheap that quickly into their life-cycle. First ones were released in 1982~ish so in just 6 years or so they went from $700+ to $100~. For modern day manufacturing turn around time's that's not very shocking but given the generally slower pace of development and iteration back then It's pretty darn quick that CD players became so commodified.
One of my professors at university used to work at Philips (from 1985 to 1994) and he always spent his first class of his course in mechatronics to demonstrate how the mechanisms in CD players were miniaturized year after year, allowing the cost to decrease. Interesting stuff! But it's been over 10 years and I don't remember the details.
Me in first sight:LOL,What a cheap CD Toaster design. VWestlife show the mainbard part: Holy mother,That's Toaster Sleeper af from SONY CD decoder and 1Bit D/A converter.
Somehow, with the design, I imagine some people got a bad impression of audio CDs from that cheap player, or upgraded to higher end players and were wowed by the features they offered.
Same here, I live in the southern US, my house was build in the 1950's, is a single story ranch house, and it was common then to build homes with front sittings rooms to entertain guest, and I would love to have something like this in that room right in the corner between my 2 couches with a pair of matching black floor, or larger book shelf speakers for a late 80's/early 90's stack setup.
Even the chepeast CD player sounds amazing, I think that's the great thing about CD format... you have to spend lots of money to have a turntable with equivalent sound quality.... way above $1000 and maybe more.
As I own a very large collection of CDs, I've noticed subtle differences in sound quality between players. Your testing demonstrates one cause of those differences, the D/A conversion and design for frequency filtering characteristics. Visually, the Yorx and JCPenney players are appealing on the shelf. If I see one in good working condition at a yard sale or thrift store, I am likely to buy it. Thanks!
According to some tech in the early 90's he said, There is no difference in sound quality, the cheapest CD player sounds the same as an expensive one..digital is digital and the laser produce same outcome..you're only paying more for extra features and brand recognition.
@@lobsterwhisperer7932 Designs of DACs and filters vary widely and result in audible differences - apparently, I'm not an expert. But I read lots of reports in the hi-fi press around the introduction of the CD that showed clear variations between Philips, Sony and other machines, and how CDs were mastered.
Cheapest cd player I ever bought was from Richer Sounds in the UK. £29 for an Eclipse cd player. About twice a year they printed vouchers and you could even get £10 off. What hi-fi magazine raved how unbelievably good these players were, mine lasted years and I sold it for more than I paid 👍
Cheapest CD player I ever bought new here in the US was a portable job being an RCA $28 USD with 10 sec anti-skip back in the mid 90's, unless you want to count DVD-RW drives for computers I've picked up new over the years for builds for $18 USD(I still build all my desktops with 1 DVD-RW drive as you never know when you might need it). however today at a local Goodwill I was able to snag a like new SONY CFD-S50 portable AM/FM radio with CD/CD-R/CD-RW/MP3 CD player, tape deck, as well as 3.5 line in/head phone jacks for $11.91 USD thus making it the cheapest CD player I've bought to date.
@@adejupe8308 them's the boys 😀 bullet proof, used to play everything, never skipped. Took it on mobile DJ duties, used to recommend it to all the bars I worked, unbelievable bit of kit.
That Colors in Motion CD sounds like 1987 even though it's from 1997. Funny how even low end Japanese stuff was quite fine back then. They were just well made, I always seek the stuff.
I believe players like these are why CDs actually took over, and especially why cassettes got the bad rep they still carry: anything that can play a CD is already working with a crystal clear, noiseless, 100% perfect signal. That, audiophiles will argue, is something cassette players could never have reached, and while true, that’s not the real problem to the budget consumer: the real problem is cassette players needed some modicum of effort to get close. Sure, CD was winning at the highest end, but really, CD didn’t have much on DAT, DCC, or even VHS Hi-Fi, if anything at all (if you want proof, listen to Whitney’s I Will Always Love You, anywhere you wish. That track’s master was a DAT.). The common folk couldn’t tell a mid-range tape in a mid-range deck from a CD: the CD’s actual achievement was to be affordable for people who never experienced equipment good enough to know that. The same goes for “reliability”: cassettes were reliable too, given occasional deck cleaning, but the CD could reach folks who were too casual (or stupid) to know.
People who don't know better use absolutely terrible turntables because they somehow 'think' that's 'how records are supposed to sound.' They likely have never heard a record played on a good turntable. It's the same as Techmoan's explanation about why the unenlightened think cassettes can't sound good: they likely never had a good tape deck growing up
The history of most people owning cheap, low-end turntables goes even further back than the 1980s -- in the '70s most people had cheap BSR record changers with a ceramic cartridge which also sounded pretty bad.
Me either considering how many brand names they have bought up over the years, I've had several Funi rebranded TV's both CRT, and LCD over the years, and they have all worked just fine for the amount of money paid, same for the bottom end DVD player I bought with direct Funi branding i use to have in my RV before switching it out to an LG Blu-Ray I lucked up finding at Goodwill for $22 with the remote, about a year 1/2 ago.
I had one of these! Loved that you could see the CD spinning. However there was always a very slight noise (possibly from the motor) that came through the RCA outputs that was usually audible between tracks. Otherwise, the sound was great. I ended up giving it to my cousin and bought a Technics.
It was motor interference, probably due to cheap circuit design, those cheap record players have the same issue, hum audible from the motor via the outputs.
I can be more minimalist via connect an old PC CD drive to a PC power supply and connect some speakers to the drive. 😉 That would be only "play", "skip forward" and "stop". That's it. No display, no anything else, just only a flat volume knob and a stereo "headphone" equivalent output. 😊
One more unit that was just below $100 from the late 1980s was the Crown CD-70. It is a top loader similar to the Sears one you mention. The CD-70 lacked the ability to scan through a track, you could just skip forward and backward, and it would mis-track way too often. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find an advertised price for this unit in an old magazine or catalog.
@@FIXTREME A lightning strike took out my Pioneer CD player in 1988. I saved up my after school job money at $3.45 per hour to purchase the cheapest CD player I could find to replace it, and it was a Crown Japan CD-70. Within a year I replaced it with a much better Teac.
amazing the optical pickup still works. Maybe it used a sony KSS pickup which were very robust. Its normally the laser pickup that fails in a CD player
Reminds me of an AIWA boombox i had around the time this was made, front loading cd player didn't skip much at all for an early boombox player. Still regret getting rid of it years ago though.
There was also the Philips CD207 (1986/1987), a cheap and basic featured top loader (available in many vivid colors) with outstanding specs. I can remember it had similar price range. A hifi magazine takes this model to the test to find out it was of any quality because of the extremely low price. The magazine did a durability test with 10 or more units of this model, playing for weeks and none of these models failed the test. This model became very populair and Philips sold many, many units of this model. You can find some detailed pictures of this model and packaging on dutchaudioclassics, hower not present the most exciting color: Grey. Google "dutchaudioclassics Philips CD207" or search for "Philips CD207" on google pictures. I have a later Panasonic RX-FD80 boombox that uses the same simple front loader idea of loading a disc. Simple is good and durable.
Remembers me of my top loader CROWN CD Player. I had to open it after sone months of use, because it doesn’t find the last tracks of my CDs anymore. A little twist on those yellow potentiometers solved that.
I used to love the old '80s cheap stereo thing where they used to plaster the front of devices with redundant wordage like "Advanced Graphic Equalizer System", and fancy, meaningless graphics and even fake buttons or a "spectrum analyzer system" which was just some fixed LEDs, or maybe a LED VU meter if you were really lucky.
Ah yes, this brings back some memories, when I was about age 12 and staring in the shop window of our local Philips store (a chain of stores all around the country that only sold Philips and sub-brands Aristona and Erres). The Erres-branded midi system that came closest to what I could afford had a front-loading CD player just like this one, 2 7-segment displays for track and (I think) 2 LEDs for play and pause. Even by this time (about 1989) front-loading was associated with cheap and therefore it didn't seem like a good buy to me at the time. If you wanted a cd-player, this was your cheapest option, although CD was still a bit "a thing of the future" at that time, I certainly didn't own any CDs in 1989.
@@danielknepper6884 It's crazy most 80's, and 90's boomboxes in decent shape are bringing on eBay these days, and a shame what some ghetto people do to after buying them doing custom paint jobs that totally ruin them, as they don't even bother to take them apart to do the paint jobs 1/2 the time.
My parents could only afford Philips and Citizen players. Those also had a side loading mechanism. At least our Citizens CD player had a disc sensor though. Some of those early models had a limitation on the number of tracks read on a CD.
I bought one by Crown in the UK on my 15th birthday (1993) for my first CD player, cost around £70 from a shop called Richer Sounds which still exists. It connected to my Hitachi Boom Box (the one with 4 speakers along the front).
Your shadow "YORX" player must have a Sony optical drive if it can read a CD-R. Notable: in the late eighties Circuit City sold a MultiTech branded cd player for $88.
Audiophiles on reddit: Alright, we talked enough trash about cheap record players, lets check VWestlife's channel for more ideas! *VWestlife uploads this video* Audiophiles: AH HA! Cheap CD players will ruin your CDs. people: but why? Audiophiles: this will spin .0000000000000000000000000001 RPM faster than a good CD player! That will cause the CD to stretch over time and render it unusable!!!!!! He is Ripping You off!!!!!!
Cheap for its day, but certainly not the cheapest CD player ever made. I mean, you can buy portable CD players for $20 today. And the $100 of the Yorx is in 1988 dollars, meaning about $220 in today’s dollars. The video would be perfectly interesting without the dishonest clickbait title.
This reminds me of my first cd player I got for Christmas in 1985. Mine was branded ' Electrosonic ' and I believe came from Caldor. Very similar except it didn't have a see through cd holder. When I was 20 and had a decent job, I treated myself to a top of the line JVC component system. The cd player I got was the 2nd in line model with all the bells and whistles available at that time ( 1989 ). I was VERY disappointed in it's sound quality which was rather tinny and it skipped with moderate bass. The cheap Electrosonic sounded better and hardly ever skipped except at very high volumes.
I had one that was very similar. It was a tray loading Sharp I purchased at Pacific Stereo in Reseda, CA around 1987. It was on clearance for about $100 and I was happy to get it. At one point I had to open it up to get out a disc that got stuck. The component arrangement on the PCB was very similar.
I guess other than features, I don't see how using a very cheap CD player is ever going to be bad. The nature of playing a CD doesn't change depending on price unlike a record or cassette. Also, interesting you brought up the tray window. I remember when I was a kid my dad thought I was crazy for wanting a CD player where I could watch the disk spin as the unit played it. Of course that was back in the early 2000's when there were all sorts of different portable CD players. I remember finally getting one for Christmas with BOTH the window and even the ability to play MP3 CD's and absolutely having a ball with it lol. CD's might be obsolete, but I still enjoy using them even now. - And you can't tell me their any less useful or obsolete than a record or cassette.
@@tarstarkusz I suppose that might be true if one is picky about having the absolute best sound. But I guess I have yet to fully experience this. With sound quality I more meant that with something like a record or cassette, quality of the medium can significantly reduce or improve sound quality, with a CD this is far less likely. I've seen crappy DAC's in smartphones far before I've experienced them in a CD player.
@@markrowe8824 I would agree, however most get their music online these days. CD sales are suffering. And the technology by itself doesn't hold nearly as much as an microSD card would. That being said for what I use CD's for, I still find them very useful.
@@TechMaxWare my issue with downloads is the varying volumes.. at least almost every CD tape or record will be mastered using the same levels so i can change albums without having to adjust the players volume.
Probably the frequency cutoff is so soft because a filter with a softer decline needs less stages and is therefore a few cents cheaper... (especially coils cost a little bit and are relatively big, therefore engineers try to avoid them when possible)
Another fascinating piece of audio archeology, vwestlife. I'm stunned at all the Sony chips in this and the fact that it still works. Many CD players start to stutter after 20 years due to lubrication along the transport rails drying up.
This one might not have been used as much, plus the fact it's CD drive is vertical could have also helped the grease on the rails of the laser last longer with it all not being right on top of the heat generating components which is what can dry out the grease on horizontally setup CD players.
We all do, but by the mid 90's you could get a lower end RCA portable CD player with 10 second Anti-skip for about $28 - $30 USD that included headphones.
Imagine what if the PS5 game console and a complete set of utility to make it playable like 4K screen and etc. comes in the 80's. What is the people impression? And would it sell for 100 million dollars due to its technology?
18:21 Such a reflection many of us have made, summed up in so few words, it's a shame it's buried at the end of this video, I would gladly welcome a whole video inspired by that idea!
yeah, in the 90s you could buy CD players quite for cheap, my boombox had a CDplayer, althouhough it was not very good, it kept skipping (f*ing Roadstar).
That player reminds me a lot of the similarly cheap Soundesign model you once demonstrated. I am somewhat amazed that the transport belts are still good.
We were selling these! The brand was Sherton (99% sure) You are right, these were never sold separately, only as part of the system. I believe that was in 1987.
The thing about the lowpass filter (aka Legato Link filter as you mentioned it here) now makes me wonder... if Software players like VLC allow you to tinker around with it as well or if it actually all depends on how the DAC of your soundcard (Sound Blaster X-Fi Extreme Audio 1040 in my case) and how it's handled at the end of the signal chain. I never saw any option for Audio CDs where you could change that.
It is a mix of both. The DAC itself has an antialiasing filter at around half its sampling rate. So you don't have any control over ~20kHz filtering in a 44.1kHz DAC. But if you have a newer DAC running at 96 or even 192kHz its built in filtering won't be active until around 40 or 80 kHz, so you could control the filtering below that point.
@@eDoc2020 it's depressing most player software leaves you no control over it… Not even VLC which allows you to do a lot more than most other audio players…
I like the front loading style! I've seen a few CD players from the '80s with that mechanism. Another style you never see anymore are the top-loading changers with a plastic dust cover, probably to fill in the newly-vacant space where the turntable would normally go.
I remember those, and yeah, that’s totally what they were used for. Fisher actually made one like that which also doubled as a turntable. Great concept, but it was a terrible turntable as well as a mediocre CD changer. I wish a more reputable company like Sony or Teac would’ve ran with that concept and made a good one.
I want to hear more of the Maura Glynn song, I can't find anyting online about that album except for a link on amazon costing $148 :( Where can I find the cd? (I actually kind of like the agent biscuit track too)
I really like the front loading system. The closest thing i can find on ebay is a Denon player that's like 850$ and a really weird one called a Yaqin that has TUBES on it... TUBES...
Excellence of content always in this channel. Greetings from Seoul. The CD loaded by tray was very common, I recently bought an INKEL tape deck with tray loading. Researching I discovered that this was not so rare in the past but the question remained: Was the design of loading CD by tray inspired by tape decks? Thanks for the video and on the other hand, it is the first CD player I see using tape decks inspired loading.
7:14 If more players had that window feature, possibly discs would come up with stop motion animation similar to how Walt Disney made his cartoons in the beginning. Something simple like a man jumping up and down as there is only so much space on the disc. Perhaps two rows which would leave enough room for a title and other short information. 9:47 I hope Agent Biscuit got permission from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to use their song Sikamikanico (used in the Wayne's World soundtrack).
That sounds better than my Discman from 1995 does, and certainly better than Apple Music’s streaming. I’d buy this in a heartbeat if given the chance to see it in person.
Least they included a DAC chip. There's some cheap old CD players (such as Yoko F-92 and a couple Fisher models) which have a discrete-logic DAC purely for cost reasons.
Was it actually any cheaper? Or was it just another of the many “marketing wank” (to paraphrase Dave Jones) descriptors used back in the day on every CD player?
Hmm.. I wonder if that's why a lot of CD players with Sanyo mechanisms (based around Sanyo SF-88/90/91 laser and the like) would actually play data CDs and put out that ear rape to the speakers, instead of muting it like 99% of the other CD players out there
Knaeckebrotsaege I don’t think so. The vast majority of CD players will play that burst of deafeningly loud noise. It’s only very recent players (mostly the kind capable of playing MP3 discs, i.e. players that actually can read a data disc) that mute it. Or are you saying that those Sanyo players will actually play noise continuously from a data disc, not just the initial burst??
@@tookitogo Yup, those players based around Sanyo lasers (also commonly found in cheap store-brand all-in-one and microtower systems) will continuously play that ear rape data sound, even from multiple tracks if the disk contains them. And I've never heard even a burst of it from any other CD players I've gotten my hands on over the years. Even the cheapest and nastiest CD player I've got (a Goldstar GCD-626R from 1987) doesn't output anything with a CD-ROM in it, and neither does my moms 1990 Sony CDP-M27 I currently have here for repair (worn laser + slipping tray belt)
Incredible quality on all of those solder joints on the bottom of the circuit board. Also the drive mechanism looks all solid and well made. If I compare this to the crap you get now in china-made devices costing 10 times as much, I come to the conclusion 30 year old "made in japan" stuff wins. BTW: I haven´t seen *one* bad cap.
I have seen the quality of builds decline from the 1990s on for CD players and audio equipment in general. I don't know if it is the made in China effect or it is not worth it to make standard audio playing equipment of the same quality as in the past with digital audio dominating.
Yorx was basicly the cheapest of the cheap budget fi components you could buy. They were popular because the price was low. Some were slightly better then others but for the most part, their products, especially from the mid 1970s onward were very very low quality. You see them everywhere in various states of working order because they were sold by the hundreds of thousands. Ironicly, due to the overall simplicity of their products, they often still work for the most part. Many MANY higher end CD players made around this time, I have a few myself don't work properly anymore, their complicated features eventually start to malfunction over time and are complicated if not almost possible to fix (my Onkyo DX-2500 has some weird memory read issue that for the life of me, I can't figure out what's causing it). These Yorx CD players, being so simple only need the basic laser and the spinning motor and whatever output signal chip it has to work and little else. Fewer things to worry about breaking down, the less chance it's going to break down.
Very soon after it was introduced, the CD format became mainstream, and CD players became common, even in equipment made by low-end manufacturers. Because, unlike analog formats, CD players deliver a uniform signal which varies little from the cheapest units to the most expensive, old, inexpensive players like this one still sound pretty good. The problems with early cheap equipment were more likely to lie with programming problems, reading of discs by the laser, etc., rather than poor signal quality to the analog outputs.
In a few years, when all of the other fancy programmable CD players with their fancy detection of loaded disks and new fangled indicator displays have died, these will be treasured.
Maybe this player hadn’t been used much, such that its laser isn’t worn out, and its RF adjustments happened to stay in-spec, all combining to let it play CD-R. (As a reminder to readers who don’t know this, a CD-R is intended to mimic the optical characteristics of a pressed CD, such that in theory, any CD player should be able to play a CD-R, as it appears to the player as a slightly dirty (less contrasty) disc. But if a player has aged such that its laser pickup is weak, then the reduced optical quality of the CD-R can result in a signal too weak to detect reliably. In contrast, CD-RW has radically different optical characteristics from pressed CDs and CD-Rs, and thus requires explicit support in the player.)
LOL my parents tried to buy me that JC penny stereo as a gift. It got returned because.....THE CD PLAYER DIDN'T WORK! They ended up getting me a Technics receiver and later a Sharp CD player. These were made with Sony chips and Sanyo Laser Pickups, which were actually pretty good. Sanyo pickups tend to outlast all the others. Yes, large lens Sanyo pickups will play CD-R. RW Discs require the laser to be put out of focus. Don't! If you adjust the laser current pot (increase) it will read RW discs, But then you have to switch it back to play back normal discs. Increasing the laser current will reduce the life of the laser. Sounds good for a cheap cd player!
I am trying to find something - anything - about the artist "Agent Biscuit", but google comes up short. I also googled for "Specimen 53" and "Volume 5", and neither brings anything music-related. Can you point me to this artist? I think I love their music.
Some precisions.... Despite its age and cheap plastic fascia.. No erased buttons. Is it a similar plaver as the vertical loading one on an Alf episode? Around 1985 more affordable Cd players were marketed, such as the 3 in 1 Samsung digital tuner, mechanical dual cassette wells and a Cd player with similar display. Just one lcd for track number and LEDs for functions. No program featurws, no remote no frills. Can't remember model.. just showed Easy Control system for simplified operation and sliding volume control. I remember buying a whole system without Cd player costed the same that buy the player alone.
Just thinking.. It's really sad how the audio industry shifted for a long while towards "128 kbps mp3" as "quality audio." I remember this super crystal clear CD sound and how great it sounded on a good sound system. But plug in your portable mp3 player and do the same thing, and it was garbage. You couldn't avoid it for a long time even if not on a portable player (see: iTunes and 128 kbps AAC for purchased music). It was a pity we had to live through that.
RU-vid =supposedly= does not compress it unless you go over a certain audio level/threshold. I imagine both of us should research that further for a definitive answer and also back it up with actual testing. :) Might make for a good video in itself.
