How I Listen To Physical Media in 2025
Advice on how to listen to physical music albums
Face it, there is no point in listening to physical music albums in 2025 when you have smartphones or Mac computers!
Just go on YouTube, crank up the volume on your MacBook Pro M1, and it’s just as good coming through a Bluetooth speaker. Or if you are getting up in the morning, surf the YouTube app on your Roku smart TV, and there is your favorite song blasting through the TV speakers.
You might not hear the low end, the tiny nuisances in the compositions, or the clarity of the leveling in these tiny speakers. But it’s whatever, because most of us don’t have professional studio audio monitors or care about music theory or mastering!
…But some of us do as musicians and music engineers!
Yeah, of course, we can open up Logic, Studio One, Reason, Pro Tools, Ozone, whatever you use, and mix it down from there. I don’t think any casual listener will care for that, so here I will recommend three major music players anyone should have in their library in 2025.
That is, if anyone still collects CDs, cassettes, or vinyl records and has the space to keep that said collection.
All three players have one thing in common:
They are all battery-operated.
They all have built-in speakers with good room quality.
And all can be taken on the go.
I am not saying these speakers are the best, but they are above-average with regard to casually listening to music on physical media. If you are just getting into the hobby of collecting music on CDs, cassettes, or vinyl records, then I would recommend the following players:
KM5 CD Player with Speaker CP2
I wish I had had this growing up in the late 90s. The speaker quality is just as good as a MacBook Pro M1. The running CD even stops midway through to show you that all it does is read the digital audio file and play it back for you. It makes the compact disc feel more intimate than the usual bias that it is just a mere excuse to store digital files that will be ripped later on a computer. The KM5 does remind me of Sega CD or Sega Saturn and gives the impression that CDs are just like video games with only audio on them (and that metaphor tells you a lot that we lost hope buying audio-only).
With Wi-Fi and an internet connection, the same quality digital audio can be streamed on a used Android smartphone mono speaker, and you could get a better sound from it. It’s the attempt to make the CD viable again with this design. It does a good job, and if you really need to listen to what is on this CD (and what is not on YouTube or Internet Archive), then yes, this is the best CD player right now in the market.
Ninm Lab “It's Real” Cassette Player
…And this is the best player cassette on the market right now! The wow and flutter, along with the mid-level tremble, is real, and it positively affects the listening experience. Listening to Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock or David Sylvian’s Alchemy: An Index Of Possibilities is intimate on tape. That’s how music albums should be. The listener should sacrifice their time and sit down or be cozy while listening to a 40 to 60-minute musical composition. Pop songs can be listened to in the car with the ease of a smartphone. But to dance to the surreal sound coming from this machine is a real delight. They say playing vinyl records in the dance club did influence the experience, and the culture of its surroundings. Cassettes are still my favorite medium of music listening. “Home Listening” used to be a term to describe changing the room and atmosphere. I’m glad this exists, and this is the premier platform to listen to cassette tapes on.
Korg Handytraxx Tube
This is a fantastic vinyl record player to have. The speaker, the needle, the belt, the plate, the tube sound, everything is fantastic about vinyl listening with this player. Keep in mind, this is $1000. Many do not want to buy this and would rather have an Audio-Technica or Denon turntable without buying a good needle or getting a plate. This is only good if you want to buy old records that have been worn out and used.
If you are planning on buying new records, then treat them with respect and use a good JICO needle on them to hear all the little morphs in sound.
Music is a linear art of time and space, and you don’t want to miss out on an experience where it feels like the band is playing in your living room. A vinyl record still has that “boom” that a 32-bit float cannot create on its own. That’s the point of listening to music on physical media, as both the medium AND the speakers paint the music into a different atmosphere. I love this record player, and I love throwing all my vinyl record albums on the floor like it’s the 1950s and looking at the cover and liner notes as the album spins.
The concept of a “Side A” or “Side B” is apparent in vinyl or cassette albums. Unlike CDs, which are just one “side.” There is an art to creating the best 22 minutes per side, like its own mini album of its own. Musicians and artists have lost that sense of meta-awareness of the medium. And these sides are accompanied by liner notes and album art to enrich the meaning of the composition! It’s not just a collection of “songs,” but an entire musical piece from start to finish (and with that interlude break when Side A is over).
Conclusion
Having a CD, cassette, and vinyl record player with a built-in speaker puts meaning back into physical media.
Books can’t play themselves! You have to learn how to read, write, speak, and think in English. The audience has to pick up a book and do their work to make the language stick in their mind. This solipsist affair is why the written word can’t be as powerful as music. Music objectively plays without any reading, writing, speaking, or thinking. This power of beauty is what the English language can see and think about, but can’t comprehend like the sublime creation of the universe. It is what it is.
It’s exactly what Dave Linnenbank wrote in the Bitwig Manual,1
“Unlike sculpture, painting, and architecture, music is an art form appreciated over a defined length of time. That is to say, when we listen to a piece of music, either at home or out at a venue, it unfolds over the same amount of time and at the same pace for everyone in the audience. While music can definitely be performed or created with improvisation, each performance has a rigidly defined structure to us listeners.”
We read, write, speak, and think about music as listeners concurrently or later. And as Friedrich Nietzsche would say, “Without music, life would be a mistake.”
This is why you should pick up any or all three of these music players and have MORE CDs, cassettes, or vinyl records in your room than books about applied Marxism or feel-good creative writing poetry nonsense.
And this is what the “alternative” / “subcultures” or “writers” cannot see.
-pe
8-17-2025
Version 4.1, November 2021.
When you get far enough into something, you start to pick up on things that others don't notice. Since starting video editing, jump cuts are much more obvious. I imagine it's the same with music, where physical has a certain type of tactileness to it.