Learned that the PS1 was, apparently, a very high quality CD player for its price point, allegedly rivaling dedicated players that cost hundreds of dollars more. This led to some people integrating them into their hi-fi systems, leading to some of the most buck fucking wild case mods I have ever seen in order to make them blend in.
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in reply to @tercel-enby's post:
"allegedly" is right lmao, audiophiles will believe anything.
by the time the PSX came out, every CD player sounded just about exactly the same; basically perfect. good audio DACs are so cheap to make that it's not even worth manufacturing shitty ones. output amplification is where it gets hairy, but that's not (usually) the CD player's problem.
these case mods absolutely fuck though, I can get behind that.
Yeah, I remember this rumor at the time and thinking "that's definitely bullshit" and within a few years yeah absolutely bullshit.
Hahah I came here to ask the same thing, like, does the player really matter? Isn't it all down to the speakers??
speakers/headphones are definitely the most important, and also a good amplifier.
<s>you also can't forget your magic CD markers, crystals, and wood blocks to really add to the warmth of the sound or whatever</s>
(all of these are real audiophile scams, google em)
you don't want the cheapest garbage they sell at the drug store for $15, but once you hit decent you're just looking at different features in the CD player like having a disc changer and stuff and beyond that you'd invest in good speakers/receiver.
The logic of the audiophile in this specific case is that the DAC chip in the original playstation (The chip that takes an audio cd's 1's and 0's and converts it to analog waveforms) was a "high quality" DAC normally found in more expensive (at the time) CD players and that the playstation was therefore a secret high end CD player.
Audiophiles have a real love hate relationship with digital music. In the analog audio days, where the entire chain from recording studio to bedroom stereo was all analog, a lot of the woo shit did matter in bringing out clarity and sound stage in a given recording. With digital, it matters far less, but the audiophile mind still needs something to tweak, so they're obsessed with "jitter"; micro vibrations causing misreads on digital music that cause "distortion" in playback.
Of course, as you see with these mods, the fact that the PS had a good dac only sustained them for so long before they started looking for other things to tweak. Aside from visual changes (Your high end CD player cannot look like a game console for children, especially if it's on top of your $10,000 Amplifier), they start doing things like separating the power supply from the case (and likely replacing it with something that causes less "distortions" for an extra $1500 please). Occasionally you'll come across Mac Mini's that have had the same thing done to them for equally dumb audiophile reasons.
So no, in the end the player doesn't really matter and your average consumer would get far better return just buying slightly larger speakers. But the audiophile already has those, and the hobby is about the chase to find the perfect component to fill in gaps you imagine you have.
Did they also have to make their Hi-Fi setups balance at ~30° for them to read CDs after a few years ? 🤣
Pretty cool stuff anyway.
This joke is particularly accurate because the rumors were that the good sounding ones were only the ones with the direct RCA connections on the back, which were the ones made before they relocated the optical mech to not be on top of the PSU. Which were the ones that had issues reading discs when they got hot.
there was a minute where people had figured out the pin traces and wired in their own output lines (hence the rca out mods in pic 3)
Honestly 50/50 as to if they did that to a later model or were still doing it to models that had RCA outputs on the back
(because you know, can use higher quality RCA jacks for better sound, natch)
I'm 99% sure that rumor of the PS1 being a great CD player is total nonsense, but it is super funny just how gullible a lot of wealthy audiophiles can be XD
At least a better DAC is something that could theoretically make a difference
I have seen super high quality gold ethernet cables and switches marketed to audiophools for their digital audio server or whatever, which is just
lol
lmao
People love to go "haha stupid audiophiles" (me included) but it seems that noone here was around in 1995 and renembers that the PS1 retailed at 299 and a comparable CD player for your Hifi ran you 499-999 bucks
this is a very similar situation to the PS3 and a lesser degree the PS2, where the ability to playback the media itself (Blueray for the PS3 and DVD for the PS2) was still something worth alot of money
true, but I should also note most of the articles I can find about the PS1 as an audiophile device date to the mid-late 2000s (06-09), when obsolete PS1s were thick on the ground for $10-$20 if not less.
atleast in my parents household the console was used as a CD player around the time the console was fairly new (think 96-98, i was fairly young back then) as it was always hooked up to the TV and thus to the Hifi System wich lacked a dedicated CD player.
and i would assume that this is how it was used in a handful of households, but i have to agree that i did not see any of the modded ones until much later when the consoles retailed for pennies on the used market, maybe that was the appeal to mod them? a solid CD player w/ alleged good sound for the price of a lunch?
looking at some old electronics catalogues, it looks like you could get a dedicated CD player for as little as $150 around then, which would have sounded exactly as good… but a CD player can't run Ape Escape so what's the fucking point
I was around in 1995 and listening to CDs and you could absolutely get a comparable if not better CD player for your stereo system for around $200.
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