Compact Discs are dead. Second-hand store 2nd & Charles sells a Mystery Box of 100 CDs for $30.00 or less with coupons. Thrift stores have CDs in jewel cases piled up to act as bookends, if organized, or more typically jumbled in a laundry basket marked “$1” in permanent marker on a dogeared piece of paper Scotch-taped to the basket.
Well, your CD collection
Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle – Cake (1994)
Looks shiny and costly
The CD changer in the Lexus started to work about a week after I bought the car, despite the seller telling me that it didn’t work. I found four disks in the system, each part of a series of prosperity gospel self-help sermons. When the first disc unexpectedly started to play when I was attempting to eject or load discs to see if I could get the machine to cooperate with me, I smiled. The pastor said that god wants strong families because strong families make wealthy families. No scientific evidence to support that hypotheses was provided, but the audience clapped anyway. Apparently, believing in god can make people rich, it certainly seems to do so for those who preach that concept. I remain skeptical of the claim, since most of the people believing in god are giving money to those who preach it, instead of receiving money from, well, unknown sources of wealth, such as the strength of their family, I suppose. The CD changer now surprisingly was able to eject all four of these discs… something had gotten unstuck and allowed the CD changer to work. Relieving me of the gospel of ‘giving-away-my-money-to-rich-preachers’ is surely a miracle. To prevent that audio poison from infecting any more of the universe, I gave my shredder a nice lunch of whatever these sanctified discs were. A CD is something my shredder hadn’t had for a long time, as rare as such aluminized polycarbonate plastic discs are today.
I found a handful of CDs in my DVD/Blu-Ray box – a plastic crate mausoleum of media awaiting the heat death of the universe. I had a few discs that I collected from concerts where I was foolish enough to buy the album but not get it signed, and two discs that I had signed by the artists. I put these into the Lexus and found I really liked the sound of CD music. It’s better quality than the Bluetooth tape adapter, because the dynamic range and frequency response of cassette tapes is just not at CD quality. In my mind CD sounds better than streaming in general, but I bet that’s bias. Even worse than being a hipster though, the statement, “CD sounds better than streaming” is something an audiophile would say. We all know that audiophiles have no common sense and far too much money. Case in point: a five-foot-long gold-plated standard power cord for $20,000.00 is sufficient proof that no one should a) trust what an audiophile says they need to make their stereo sound better and b) walk away from them without taking their money. The CDs sound good in the car, they are easy to play.
Not long after loading the CD changer in the Lexus with my cadre of CDs, it refused to eject any of the discs. Shortly after that, it refused to move any of the discs to play them, so it seems the brief resurrection was short… aren’t they all?
I tried to fix the CD changer. As you can tell from the word “tried” it was a failure. CD changers are like watches or clocks; full of finicky little parts and springs that all have to slide together and interlock. Once inside the cd player box, I also found it was attached to the top of the head unit with a ribbon cable that I couldn’t cut or apparently remove or replace; it seemed glued into place.
YouTube to the rescue! I looked up how to unplug these weird little ribbon/trace copper-on-mylar ribbon cables and unless the connector is gobbed with adhesive to prevent it popping off, the cable should be replaceable. I will give it a shot!
I found on Facebook marketplace a $50, 2005 model head unit that was not the Mark Levinson Sound System type like mine in my 2002 LS430, but it looked to have the same exact CD changer. It seemed to me that swapping the CD changer would be easy if I could get the ribbon cable to connect. I could get it to connect, it was easier than I thought.
Now I have a new CD changer that works perfectly in my 2002 LS430.
At this point, I figured why not round out my sound system at home with a Rotel CD player? That was something I always wanted to go along with my Rotel pre-amp “control” amplifier and power amp. Now that it’s 22 years old, I reckon I could find a now-vintage Rotel CD player for not much money, and indeed I could. About a 3 hour drive away I found some guy selling a 5 disc Rotel CD changer for $50 on Facebook marketplace. He noted it “skipped on some CDs” and “might need a cleaning” but was too afraid to take the thing apart. We met in a Food Lion parking lot during a long Sunday drive around the region.
$100 later I have two CD changers, including a Rotel. My old original Rotel remote even works with it, I finally have a use for the CD player buttons on my Rotel remote! The Rotel amp sounds as good as ever through my Paradigm Studio speakers, and the Mark Levinson Sound System in the LS430 sounds almost as good as it ever did. Now, I just need to re-foam the subwoofer (or replace it if it’s truly blown – Focal anyone?). Folks, don’t let your teenage sons drive your LS430, as the previous owner did, because speakers are too easy to blow!
Some of my musical collection once again requires mechanical interfaces to make them play. It’s nice in some ways, but I can see why, once we had streaming and digital music storage even before that, we killed off the CD. I’m assured by the video below that compact discs will “rule the roost […] at least until someone perfects a method of putting Beethoven’s Ninth on a silicon chip.”
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