Hello, Discman, my old friend: a Millennial love letter to portable music's black-sheep king

I have a pretty terrible memory for important things—for example, even though I tried to savor every second of proposing to my wife, most of that nuance has faded into the ether. (What was she wearing? No clue.) But music is some kind of portal into the minutiae of my past—the kind of charming, everyday details I probably could have accessed through journaling.

For whatever reason, I can vividly recall listening to specific albums on particular road trips or walks around town: One Saturday afternoon during college, I strolled from my childhood home over to a nearby neighborhood while playing Gentle Giant’s Medieval-tinged 1972 prog masterpiece, Octopus, for the first time. New sights, strange new sounds. Around that same time, I ambled around a local park while cranking The New Pornographers’ 2007 indie-rock classic Challengers—it was late August, and I felt that particularly bittersweet "back to school in the fall" feeling. When I listen to those songs today, I still feel it.

But none of it would have been possible without my trusted portable CD player, which rarely left my side from middle school through late undergrad. Though I grew up around my parents’ vinyl collection and found many a cassette floating around the floorboards of the family minivan, I’m truly a child of the CD age—I started collecting in elementary school, raking in tons of alt-rock discs through the BMG and Columbia House clubs. (Even then those business models seemed...suspicious. But it felt like Christmas morning when the packages arrived.)

Even as an adult, as I’ve amassed an equally giant collection of LPs, I can’t shake my CD addiction. If I want to truly experience (and feel connected to) an album, it needs to be on physical media, preferably through a pair of large headphones—much like the ones that accompanied my Discman back in the day.

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Quality over convenience

I lugged that thing everywhere, even when it wasn’t convenient: on school-bus rides to varsity basketball away games, sharing a pair of headphones with my buddy as we listened to Beastie Boys or Taking Back Sunday; in the backseat of every family road trip, soaking in Smashing Pumpkins or The Mars Volta; on my occasional runs around my small town with classic-rock best-of sets, hoping the "skip protection" feature would save me as I awkwardly clutched the thing to my hip. (It usually did.)

It wasn’t anything particular about Sony’s Discman—the brand, launched in 1984, went through a number of models over the decades, and I just picked whatever was cheap enough to buy with birthday money. (Later on, I transitioned over to a Philips/Nike player, which I loved because of its orange buttons. Based on some of the prices I see on eBay, it looks like I should have hung onto this audio relic.)

But I kept my CD player around for way longer than socially acceptable—through the age of Napster and Limewire and even the first iPods. And the reasons were simple and still applicable. First off, low-quality MP3s sound terrible, and CDs sound impeccable. Beyond that, I love the feeling of buying a work of art and putting in the effort to appreciate it. Streaming music, though inescapable today due to convenience, feels disposable in a way that’s hard to articulate. If I can’t touch it, look through the liner notes, and feel that sense of transaction with the artist, I’m more likely to skip tracks or zone out entirely.

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Simple nostalgia or something deeper?

During our peak years together, my CD player felt like a physical extension of my body—as essential to life as my lungs or liver. And as everything becomes more and more detached and digital, people are clearly feeling that same emotional tug to this outdated form of listening: The Discman recently made a quasi-comeback with the Discdream player, and CD sales have been growing in recent years.

Am I just nostalgic for the technology of my youth? Maybe. (I don’t feel the same warmth toward a PS5 as I do a Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo.) But I think there’s something deeper at play here, that there’s a direct connection between the permanence of the object and the staying power of the memory. For me, it even lingers to this day: In the early pandemic, stir-crazy and stressed to the max, my wife and I took a beautiful country drive soundtracked by the autumnal indie-pop of The Shins’ 2001 staple, Oh, Inverted World. At least for now, that memory is something I can still touch.

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