• rumba@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    Damn kid you had the high tech newfangled round clear gel looking shit.

    I had the original 6AA battery disc man where you can either listen to music for a couple of drives without skipping, or a week if you didn’t turn the anti skip buffer on.

    • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.org
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      18 hours ago

      More battery drain with anti-skip.
      The tables have turned later on. The anti-skip would extend battery life. It would get enough buffer allowing the CD to spin-down and then it would spin back up when needed. This time could be even longer if playing MP3.

      For example, my Panasonic SL-CT520 does 100 second “anti-skip” (at this point it’s not really just anti-skip), and with MP3 cites up to 155h of playback time. Unfortunately, the unit I have can’t play CD-RW (it is mentioned in the manual) which probably means a degraded laser.

      But even with CDDA, my Sony D-EJ000 cites 16 hours with anti-skip and only 11 hours without anti-skip. Unfortunately, in this case the anti-skip also reduces audio quality slightly since it uses lossy compression, so I keep it off.
      At least I think that’s what the manual is trying to say

      To enjoy high quality CD sound, select “G-off”.

      • rumba@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        Horribly, it read the disk into a memory buffer, then played from the buffer. Ram was expensive, tiny, and power hungry back then. It was pretty shock-sensitive too. Every time it detected a fail, it would have to seek/re-read the section. If you had some decent bass, the song itself could set it off :)

        • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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          24 hours ago

          It wasn’t the buffer itself that drew power. It was the need to physically spin the disc faster in order to read the data to build up a buffer. So it would draw more power even if you left it physically stable. And then, if it would actually skip in reading, it would need to seek back to where it was to build up the buffer again.

          • rumba@lemmy.zip
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            21 hours ago

            Sure didn’t seem like it was doing that, It took 6 seconds for it to start playing to fill that six second buffer. But I lacked the equipment to test its playback speed back then. So maybe you’re right.