Help with portable CD player research!

I am Miriam, a student from Germany: I am currently doing research on portable CD Players (in particular the Panasonic SL-SX270) and their impact on music and daily life culture back in the 2000s.


The goal of my research is to capture the cultural memory of portable CD players in the 2000s. What kind of connection do users have with the technology of the CD player? What material significance does the CD player have? And what role (if any) did the CD player fulfill in the listening experience?

I will attach the general interview questions here, and you are welcome to answer them if you would like

General Usage



1. Memories: What memories do you have of using your CD Walkman?

2. Frequency: How often and in what situations did you use your CD Walkman?

3. Favorite CDs: Which CDs did you listen to most frequently with your Walkman?

4. Mobility: Did you primarily use your CD Walkman at home or on the go? If on the go, where did you use it most often (e.g., commuting, walking)?

5. Power Options: Did you mainly use the Walkman with batteries or with a power adapter?

Technical Aspects and Functions

6. Anti-Skip Protection: How important was anti-skip protection for your user experience?

7. Battery Efficiency: How did you find the battery life of the device? Were there situations where the batteries ran out, and how did you respond?

8. Controls: Which functions of the Walkman did you use most frequently (e.g., skip, repeat, bass boost)? Did you find the controls intuitive?

9. Connections: Did you use the line-out connection? If so, for what purpose (e.g., connecting to speakers)?

Social and Cultural Significance

10. Social Interactions: Did your CD Walkman play a role in your social interactions? For example, did you lend it to friends or listen to music together?

11. Musical Taste: Did the ability to listen to CDs anywhere influence or expand your musical taste?

12. Cultural Impact: How do you think the CD Walkman shaped music enjoyment in the 2000s? Do you think it had a particular cultural significance?

13. Comparison to Other Media: How would you compare the CD Walkman to other music media of the time, such as cassettes or MP3 players?

14. Retro Charm: Do you think the CD Walkman still has a certain retro charm or nostalgic significance for people of your generation?

Personal Stories

15. Special Experiences: Can you share a special story or experience related to your CD Walkman?

16. Collection: Do you still have CDs or even the CD Walkman itself? If so, why?

17. Advertising/Purchase: Did you buy the CD Walkman or receive it as a gift? To what extent did advertisements for portable CD players play a role?


If you know someone who owns or owned it, and who is down for an interview, please let me know!

 

A lot of good questions Miriam. First of all I would say CD walkman / Discman were more of a craze from 1985 up to 2000. By time we got to 2000 many of us had already transitioned to MP3 playback on PC, mp3 players, or, in my case by 2002 MiniDisc.

You ask: What material significance does the CD player have?
Answer: It is a tool to access higher states of consciousness through music playback!

You ask: And what role (if any) did the CD player fulfill in the listening experience?
Answer: Not much at the time, for me, because I only had low cost junk plastic CD player due to little money. But today, for me, the CD player itself, as a device, is somehow very relevant to the listening experience itself. Often one is drawn to admire the device as a work of industrial design, such as the Sony D-35, D-303, D-555 in particular, from the year 1990 - 1991 Golden era of the Personal CD Player.

1.) Memories of use: First Discman in 1996. Used primarily for workouts listening to Hi-NRG "bust up through the ceiling and break out" music.
2.) I just used it primarily for workouts every couple of days.
3.) Favourite CD's would be various euro dance, German / Italian, plus mix CD's grabbed in futile shoulder shrugging "I-don't-know-what-to-get-but-have-to-try-something" purchases at physical record stores.
4.) I never used my sony Discman on the go.
5.) Always on the 2 AA battery. I used NiCd rechargeable AA's made in Japan from Radio Shack. Capacity 700ma.

6.) Anti-skip was not important and I avoided it. Used batteries too fast.
7.) Battery life was good enough, a few hours, I had lots of AA standing by in case they went dead.
8.) I did not use any of the programming, repeat, shuffle etc,. features. I just manually selected the track on the CD that was worth hearing. Usually just a few tracks per CD any good.
9.) I never used the line out connection. Strangely. Now I use the line out connections 50% of the time due to better audio quality. For example, the D-555 line out sounds different and better to my ears. But back in the 90's I didn't even know these high end Sony players existed.

10.) No I just used it for personal playback at home. I never considered getting a CD deck because I felt they were too large and bulky and ugly. I did not see the reason when a Discman was lower cost and so small. Audio quality was not fully understood due to lack of information availability. No Internet discussions possible etc ,.

11.) Musical taste: I accidentally got into lengthy ambient electronic music through randomly buying CD's and picking up Delerium Semantic Spaces in 1997. But I would not say the Discman played any role in that.
12.) Cultural impact was felt in the 1980's and 1990's more than the 2000's. By the 2000's CD Discman was dying out. Having portable CD digital audio must have been a big deal in 1986 etc. ,
13.) I had cassette too and used that to record from FM radio. Could not do that with CD. So a CD player was to be able to buy and listen to CD's in "proper" audio quality.

14.) Retro charm of CD Discman or similar players today: For me CD is still desirable for total control over the music. I do not want to "pay per play" every time I listen or stream music. I want maximum audio quality and I want to own the music anonymously. And be able to rip it and copy it and edit it anytime all the time. I make my own CD's and play them back on CD players that I did not even know about back in the 1990's. And did not have the money to buy even if I did. The audio quality of high end CD player Discman like D-303 and D-555 is better than i-phone or the old i-pod.

15.) Share a special story or experience related to CD walkman. In school a lot of the others had Discman players and would be listening to music constantly. They used line-out to connect a friend's headphones too. A lot of crazy situations would arise out of this. Also having the volume so high that everyone could hear it so loud etc., constantly being told to turn the volume down. I think some girls had their Discman taken away for the day because of this. How this was allowed or tolerated was baffling. The general mayhem caused by CD swapping, sharing and running around was the cause of much amusement at the time. This was in the early 1990's.

16.) I do not have the particular Sony D-141 that I got for $79 used at "Super Pawn" shop in 1996 - my very first CD player of any kind. That Discman died around late 1997 when it it slid off the table and an inductor coil shorted out causing a small curl of smoke to come up from the Discman! I took apart and could see the scorched component on the board... but I was unable to find replacement inductor due to... no internet! No way to get info and having only a basic soldering setup at the time. The replacement Discman I got was from the same "Super Pawn" shops and cost around $100. It was a D-2??. I recall the Asian guy in the shop trying to get me to buy a better metal one "this one better sound" he said. I can't remember the model, maybe D-303? I did not have the money though. I just needed a replacement player to listen to music to get through the devastating workouts that I was into back then. Little did I know that years later I would be buying these models just for fun.

Oh yes I have CD's and buy them from discogs.com the last few years. Most expensive CD I bought was $70US just to get the high audio quality and rip .wav file since all I could find were MP3 at about 160 for PC playback in playlists. And I have even more CD Discman players than ever. Because the device quality is so high, work of art, plus the audio quality is so high when proper expensive headphones are used. See answer to question #14 for why. Maybe I will even get into CD decks in the future.

17.) Advertising did not play any role. I struggle to remember ever seeing any old Discman or other brand
"Personal CD Player" (PCDP) advertised on TV or in magazines. I saw the ads in print advertising media such as "flyers" from electronics stores like "A&B Sound" that were pumped through everyone's mailbox back then. So I had a basic understanding that they existed and liked their small form factor VS huge CD player decks.

 

Hi! Thank you so much for answering )

 

Yeah good luck getting anyone else to ever reply to that survey

 

I started with reel to reel. Then I transitioned to cassettes way back when I was 4th or 5th grade thereabouts. I stayed with analog until CDs came about and the music was no longer available in cassette. So I had to buy a CD player and I have a home unit a JVC six disc plus one player and then I bought a Sony d-303 in 1990 I believe. So I could play my CDs in my vehicle but also be able to take the CD player out of the vehicle and use it on batteries to play my CD music which was not available on cassette.
I never transitioned to digital music meaning mp3s never did that. Nope.
Present day I still play my cassettes I make my own mixtapes and I only play CDs when I don't have a cassette of that album or artist and that's the only reason why I have CDs. Hope that answers your question. Ps rarely have I taken a CD and recorded it back to a cassette because it sounds better to me because CDs sound harsh and cassettes with their analog sounds warmer to my ears.

 

Thanks for answering!