Too hip for CDs? Give me a break.

A breathless Gizmodo post announces that CDs are dead, thanks to a Blaupunkt car receiver that has a Secure Digital memory card slot, but doesn’t play CDs. The “sweet little player” sells for $180.
Apparently I’m supposed to be impressed by this, but my reaction is “Big deal.” My car has had a receiver with an SD slot for the better part of a year. It’s a VR3 unit (from Virtual Reality Sound Labs) that I bought at Wal-Mart for $80, and it has a USB port and a CD player in addition to the memory card slot. (Gizmodo’s claim that the Blaupunkt receiver “accepts USB devices” appears to be just plain wrong; there’s no USB port in the picture, and the Technical Details on the Blaupunkt site do not even mention USB. It’s SD or nothing, unless you want to plug an external player into the AUX jack on the front panel.)
I don’t see what’s so “sweet” about a car receiver that costs more than twice what I paid for mine, but has fewer features. Perhaps the “hipness” of this unit is worth an extra $100 to some people, but I didn’t buy my car receiver to impress people. I bought it so I could listen to audio recordings in my car. As for Gizmodo’s suggestion that I take a shovel and bury my CD collection: sure thing, guys. Just as soon as you provide, at your own expense, MP3 replacements for every CD track I own. My CDs are DRM-free, so of course I’ll only accept DRM-free digital files to replace them. Good luck finding those.
Source: Instapundit

One thought on “Too hip for CDs? Give me a break.

  1. With the prevalence of MP3 players and other portable audio hardware, I’m personally only interested in a device that will take an eighth-inch input from my audio device. It doesn’t need any brains of its own.
    (Full disclosure: That’s exactly what I currently have. A 14-year old stereo that only takes tapes. But a tape-to-headphone adapter has turned it into a player of anything I plug into it. Like MP3s)

Leave a Reply to Ben Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *