[Vintage-Audio] Turnabout?

[Robert Nickels]

I find myself looking, so to speak, at a problem from a perspective I'm 
not accustomed to, but one I know Duane will get a kick out of.    Like 
many of you I suppose, I figured the CD was probably the last media ever 
to be produced by mankind, so I ended up buying a lot of 'em, including 
many replacements for my old vinyl LPs.   Now I realize I could rip 'em 
all and store 'em on a hard drive but there's still something about 
putting a disc of some kind into a player and selecting the track that I 
want to hear.  So I bought a couple of TEAC brand single-play CD players 
a number of years ago that have served until now as an audio source for 
my various vintage setups.

The other night one died.  It's unrepairable by me at least, as it's 
half surface-mount and it's probably a driver or something that's 
causing the 6 volt regulator to run hot.   So I thought maybe it's time 
to buy a new CD player.   Wrong!   With few exceptions, consumer-grade 
CD players have become as obsolete as 8 tracks!

So what's a guy to do when he likes to select tracks rather than just 
play the entire disk?   I know DVD players will play audio CDs, but 
when's the last time you've seen one of them with a display on the 
machine rather than just on-screen?  Of course the ironic part is  - 
this is the world Duane knows well, and here I am fussing because I 
can't buy a player that tells me which track I've selected!     The 
simplest and cheapest answer is just to use a low-end DVD player and 
count button-presses I suppose - or use the abysmally-designed remote 
control.    I'd really rather have a nice component type CD player than 
a portable - and don't want to have to have a TV nearby just for the 
on-screen display - but evidently I'm in the minority.

Anyone else run into this dilemma?

73 Bob W9RAN