Ah yes, the Panasonic Discman, the prime successor to the Phillips Walkman.
Glad I’m not the only one who got a twitchy eye reading that.
I thought to myself for the briefest of moments: Am I being Mandela Effect’d?
I am really confused now. I know Discman is Sony’s name, but generally people refer to any such portable CD player as “discman”. At least where I live.
And it’s not just regular people, even shops refer to them as dicmans.
Here are some examples to back my claims:examples
https://www.alza.sk/discmany/18886534.htm
https://aukro.sk/discmany
https://www.mall.sk/discmany
https://discmany.heureka.sk/
https://www.okay.sk/collections/discmanyThe only exception seems to be Nay, referring to this category as “Portable CD players”.
That’s very interesting! Around me, we called them CD Players, it must be a regional thing. Many people called the portable cassette player a Walkman, even though that was a lineup of products from Sony.
Looking on US Amazon, there are several players that have Discman, Walkman, or both in the titles. Sony must not be enforcing their trademarks (wrong term?) for the first non-sponsored listing being called:
2000mAh Rechargeable Discman CD Player:Walkman CD Player…Yepp, we all called them Discman back in the day regardless of the brand.
I believe other brands have the same problem.
Velcro is a good example.
Yeah we called them all discman too. A Kleenex/tissue situation imo.
Edit: though I do concede an official label in some sort of display probably should use the generic form “portable CD player” or something similar.
generally people refer to any such portable CD player as “discman”. At least where I live.
Yeah, and there’s people that call them Kleenex, Velcro, and iPads. That doesn’t make them right.
There’s no confusion - Discman is the model of Sony’s portable CD players. People using the term incorrectly is simply that.
At least it’s not a sony ipod
Wasn’t the actual “Discman” a Sony product? In the same line as their Walkman cassette players, but for CDs?
I had a Walkman back in the day; but never an official Discman player. All my CD players were pieces of shit 😩
Yes. The pictured item is a portable cd player, not a Discman.
Apparently SL-SK420 or whatever that says didn’t have the same ring to it.
This is an interesting phenomenon called a proprietary eponym, where a brand name becomes synonymous with a product.
Just like walkman and disc man, in my language we call a car satnav a “TomTom” after the brand that popularised it here.
Here is the scene from the Clerks cartoon about adhesive strips.
Yeap, Discman was the name used by Sony up until around the year 2000, when they changed it to “CD Walkman”.
This thing is so recent it could play MP3s… The first Discman was released in 1984. I’m actually really confused why they picked such a recent version, the technology was almost phased out when this thing was released. FFS the original iPod came out a year before this thing…
Probably because they couldn’t purchase the other ones at reasonable prices anywhere.
Here is one for $44. https://www.ebay.com/itm/256220081101
Surely a museum can afford that? Right?
But that one doesn’t have an anti-skip system
Right and it also can’t rip the whole ass CD to a SD Card like a modern CD player.
But it’s a museum. It isn’t about having the newest shit
Most museums rely on donations. While they likely could afford it there’s 0 reason to buy one if a patreon is willing to gift one
My guess is that this is just one of a number of CD players they have, and they want to show how the technology progressed.
Is this your kid nephew’s “museum”?
“Old” is not 20 years and that is not a goddamn discman. Sorry, Ralphie. You can do better.
I think you’re missing the point. Museums collect this stuff not because it’s old, but because it was significant to people at the time and they want to collect it for prosperity. Imagine if they waited until 2050 and then said “Shit! Wasn’t there a cd player we all liked at some point? Does anyone have one?” They should have one, they’re a museum! Many museums will be maintaining an iPhone collection for example.
Regardless, most people under 30 likely do not have access to a cd player, and I’d guess many never owned one. It’s not strange for that to be in a museum even without what I’ve said above.
Sorry to be the one breaking the bad news, but you might be old yourself if you think like that. Don’t sweat it, happens to all of us.
I disagree with you. In the tech industry, 20 years is ancient. If you were born in 1985, 20 years prior that was 1965, and the tech of that decade was very different from the 80s tech.
Imagine someone living in a year where calculator watches were already a thing, and when in a museum displaying one of those radios in wooden cabinets and knobs with the style of the time they said “that’s not old!!!”
Man that one can play mp3 discs. That has to be newer than 2002. Burning CDs wasn’t super common yet.
I had a aftermarket head unit that played mp3 cds in 2002.
I had a mp3 player in 1999.
We were definitely burning cds back then, this woulda come at a premium but the tech was there.
I remember downloading mp3s from usenet in 1999 on my Windows 95 computer. I’d start the download, go to work, then retrieve the file when I got home.
I felt so fancy buying a CD burner at Best Buy so I could burn them onto CDs. It was the first PC component I ever installed by myself.
We share pretty similar experiences with this. Only that in 1999 both our ISDN lines were in use during the day. That robbed me of the possibility of continuously downloading files, getting home and start enjoying the downloads.
I remember being bummed by this back in the day.
My brother had an mp3 player in 1999. I think it had 16MB of storage space. I didn’t see the point of it when you could only put like 5 songs on the thing.
I could fit roughly 1 hour of music on mine, longer if I dropped the bitrate to 96kbps instead of 128.
The biggest benefit of the mp3 player was that the anti-skip protection didn’t drain the battery twice as fast, no moving parts so it never skipped. This seemed super cool to me because I skateboarded and stuff and generally liked the idea of no skips.
The biggest benefit of the mp3 player was that the anti-skip protection didn’t drain the battery twice as fast
I strongly disagree. In those days, mp3 players that fit single CDs that were slightly larger than a modern day thumb drive. And you could get 128mb ones for slightly more money. But that was much smaller and more portable than something that had to fit an entire CD.
The biggest benefit for me
BMWs in 2002 used Alpine head units. I knew their aftermarket units could play MP3 CDs so I thought “why not test it out?” Turns out it could play it just fine. It mapped the folder buttons to the seek/scan buttons if you held it and played them just fine. I was floored it did that but wasn’t anywhere in the manual.
I had that very device right about 2002. Put my whole CD collection on a few mp3 disks. Replaced it a few years later with a 6GB mp3 player.
Me too! I think it was around 2007 that i got an iRiver H10. My only other standalone music player I ever bought with my own money.
That’s awesome, I had an iRiver as well. Ended up putting custom firmware on it after a bit as the original firmware was buggy at times and lacked features. The device itself was surprisingly capable and could even play video.
Rockbox? I remember missing features on my H10 as well. I remember playing with rockbox themes and UI setting all the time, just for fun
Yeah, I think that was it. I also played a heck of a lot of sudoku on it.
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Sure it was, in America at least. I think I got my first PC that could burn disks in like 1998 and it was a mass marketed Compaq from Circuit City. Napster showed up the next year and CD burning exploded. Napster was dead by 2001.
My car around 03 had a shit cassette deck that ate tapes. The mp3 discman with a cassette adapter was a game changer.
I had the entire Atari Teenage Riot and Mindless self Influence discography on one disk.
I’m sure the bit rate was abysmal, but with that kind of music it is kind of a feature.
I like your taste in music hahaha
I had this exact model in 2002. It was a revelation and possibly one of the best portable CD players ever released. You could sit there and tap it all day and it wouldn’t skip.
I remember getting a MP3 player in 2000 that had 16Mb of space. If I compressed the shit out of the songs, I could fit almost a whole album on there!
MP3 was released in 1992 so MP3 cds were likely in the works long before that
Does it belong in a museum if the essential same device is still sold? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MDY28Q1/ I mean sure you can get a 200 year old coffee grinder… but that’s 200 years not 22.
Even bicycles are still sold =:-)
If I had a 22 year old bicycle nobody would want it in a museum 🥲
If I bought one today, I’d spend the extra $10 for a rechargeable unit. The one bad memory I have of these was having to replace the batteries so frequently.
You can use rechargeable batteries in it… Built in rechargeable batteries suck. The entire lifespan of the device is tied to that battery. Give me something that runs on AAs any day.
It doesn’t have to be that way? Just because they’re built-in doesn’t mean they can’t be easily replaced. Cars’ headlights are built-in. They’re not soldered to the chasis.
It doesn’t have to be but it is. Other than some laptops I don’t think I’ve ever been able to get a replacement battery for something after it stopped holding a charge. Things aren’t made to be repairable anymore.
True. Sucks.
Good point. I should invest in some rechargeable batteries and a unit. I think I even have my old CD player around here somewhere…
Eneloop is a great brand for them.
Thanks for the recommendation! My God, they’re expensive, but I imagine it’s worth it to get some good ones.
I have some from like 10 years ago that are still going. The Amazon ones I bought in the mean time are all dead.
This is great information to have, thanks. I’ll save up a bit, but after searching a bit I definitely plan to get some.
Does anyone make batteries that aren’t shitty NiCd or NiMh? Basically Lion rechargeables?
I’ve never seen it where I am
Just did a quick search and found some on Amazon but I can’t speak to the quality. I’ve never seen them in a store.
You want NiMH for such a device.
Or LiPo if you know what you’re doing :-)
Whoa…they have a USB-C rechargeable one.
You know, if they sold an audiophile one, with clean electronics, a good built in amp, and the ability to play FLAC files (microSD port), I’d buy one.
Check carefully. That might exist.
Museum ≠ old.
I’m sure there are mp3 players in museums as well.
The Colorado Railroad Museum has railroad crossing signals donated by BNSF that are only a few years old. Museums will gladly accept both old and new.
Yup. I’m pretty sure the Computer Museum out in Mountain View has stuff on display that’s less than 5 years old in some of their “progress of technology” type displays. I think when I last went there a couple years ago, for gaming history they had all the latest (at the time) consoles as well. It was pretty funny seeing something like a PS4 in a history museum though.
Wasn’t Discman a Sony brand?
Correct. This isn’t labeled correctly.
I’m pretty sure that’s walkman.
Both Walkman and Discman were Sony brands.
You are correct
Yes. Just like Walkman is.
Kinda off-topic, but I honestly miss the in-line remotes high-end Discman & portable Minidisc players used to have…
Really wish they would make a come-back in some way, maybe as a supplemental Bluetooth device?
Laughs/Cries in cassette based Walkman.
Hold onto that. The cassette mechanisms that are produced now are absolute trash. There’s literally no manufacturer on earth who makes a good one anymore.
I had that exact model. Only CD player I ever bought new, portable or otherwise.
I still have working cassette player!
I had the exact same model !
Couldn’t they have picked one from the 90s at least
I mean it was over twenty one years ago. Technology ages fast. You can also say it had historical significance so it can end up in a museum earlier than you might expect.
