CD players WITHOUT gapless playback (Part 2 of 2)

This video is a follow up to the video I released in mid December 2023 relating to newer CD players that do not play gapless. In this video I have added to the information I provided in that first video as well as going through and explaining my reasons for a few edits I made to that first video which were made on 31st December 2023. I also talk about some other things in relation to CDs and CD players which I felt to be relevant to this subject.
If you haven't watched part 1 though, I would advise that you watch that before watching this video otherwise a lot of what I am talking about in this video might not make sense...
00:00 First section including new information and some thank yous
03:04 I start talking about the edits made to part 1 here among other things
11:32 Demonstrations about other things followed by outro

[@johynnelseth2211]

The Philips Micro Music System M4205 is gapless. It's a mini stereo, and it's perfect for my needs.

[@Tasman_Tea]

I recently purchased a 1994 Marantz CD-53 at a very reasonable price. It works a treat and is gapless, so am very happy!

[@alansteadreviews]

Good old 90s cd players!

[@MohsinWadee]

The Arcam CD5 now plays gapless after a firmware update that's done via USB. An owner confirmed this on the What Hifi forum.

[@Synthematix]

Thats why i love minidisc, all the sony portables have gapless random playback depends how the cd is mastered, all cd players should be gapless even going back to 1985, but i know of none that are gapless on random playback, simply because they dont have a buffer like minidiscs does. But just playing a disc from start to finish like for example a ministry of sound mix cd has to be gapless on all players for obvious reasons. the sony cd players have autospace feature that you can turn off.

[@JelloPotate]

I find it very strange that there would be people denying or ignoring this as an issue. CDs are a great technology and while I love my records, I cannot deny the reliability and ease of use of CDs. Their biggest advantage at the time apart from sound quality was that you didn't need to flip the record/tape. There were no longer sides to an album, just a straight shot from beginning to end. Artists didn't need to worry about spacing their songs out in any way and could present them in the way they or the record label wanted while albums that already existed could be released in their exact form without any changes needed.

[@alansteadreviews]

Couldn't agree more 👍

[@tomleader7054]

The very odd thing is that the audio file on a CD is continuous. The table of contents with the track information is a seperate thing from the audio. When I master a CD a fair bit of time is spent deciding with the artist on the gaps between tracks. Between tracks you should see a count down, as you demonstrate, from the end marker of one track to the start marker of the next. During the count down the player should be outputting digital silence if that is what is recorded in the audio file. Also, many live albums run as a continuous piece if you stsrt from the beginning with the track i.d.s carefully placed to avoid any jarring when you start a track from within the running order that does not start from silence. I can only assume that manufaturers are cutting costs by using players without the firmware needed for full Red Book playback.

[@alansteadreviews]

In fact you've reminded me that on at least one live album I've listened to (I forget which one), the bits where there was talking to the audience in between the songs existed within the countdown tracks. The song would be introduced by the singer or whatever and then at zero the song would begin.

[@alansteadreviews]

But you're right, most of the time it is digital silence.

[@TLang-el6sk]

I can only imagine that this has to do ith the way the data is processed. In the olden days that data was basically streamed into a very small buffer and just decoded on the fly. You may remember the early Philips players with their voice coil driven laser pickup on a rotary arm. You could simply move that manually to any spot on the CD and as soon as the control circuit locked onto the track again the player simply continued playing. So the metadata was also decoded on the fly as a side product. So the implementation was more like a record player. You would have to do quite same extra work for such a crappy non-seamless playback implementation.

[@alansteadreviews]

A couple of people mentioned in the comments on the last video that the cd players affected by this issue haven't bothered with the buffer. I was going to mention some of these more technical things in this video based on the comments but not everyone described the issue in exactly the same way, so I kept it simple.