I’m a little bit of a klutz. I had a Panasonic CD-Boombox with a top loading spindle drawer. I think I scratched one disc bad enough where I had to buy my brother a replacement of one CD. when I was young. I believe it was trying to find the center of the cd tray.

Recently, I had to replace my Dreamcast lens. I should be getting it back in the mail in a week or less.

The one thing they have in common: they are caused by "top loaders".

Unfortunately, LDs, CD, and later formats are almost edge to edge data.

It wasn’t a problem for records. I remember handling a couple vinyl LPs when young.

Thankfully there was a "data fee" portion of the LP that’s thick enough where you won’t distort the music by trying to "feel for the center".

I think Pioneer wisely saw that the old Philips kind of Laser Disc Player, mainly the top loaders, were a pain to avoid scratching either the lens or the media by having both come in contact then trying to "feel for the center"

I don’t know if Pioneer saw this the moment they became the "stepfather of the format" or it took a little trial and error.

I have a theory, that most of the LD machines I see are tray-loading. The only place I’ve seen a top-loading laser disc player on LDDB pictures of old Discovisions and Philips branded stuff, maybe an old Sony or 2. Maybe Pioneer, when they licensed the Laser DIsc players for other manufacturers, made it a requirement to have a tray-loading system instead of a pop top. I have never seen a top-loader with Dolby AC3 RF or even S-Video (Correct me if I’m wrong.)

I say that’s a smart move, coming from a guy who scratches laser lenses.

If I had a hard time with CDs and GDs even today with top loaders, imagine trying to deal with an LD Top Loader. The span between the thumb and index finger outstretched is barely enough to grab, edge to donut hole, a Laser Disc between those 2 fingers. Imagine fiddling around with a locking spindle hub while doing that. It’s impossible to one-hand it without risking scratching either the media or the laser lens. And 2 handing is worse because you have no tactile response of feeling for the center, therefore you risk pushing it down off center, causing worse problems.

I’m glad I have a tray loading LD player. I’m also glad I got a Sega CD Model 1, where it’s tray loaded. I’d hate to ruin Sega CD Games by feeling for the center. Unfortunately, of the systems I have, the Saturn, Dreamcast, Game Cube, the PS1, and the Goldstar 3DO have that problem. (As does the jaguar CD and Turbo Grafx CD, but that’s not an issue yet since I don’t have one of either) (By the way, anyone got a Panasonic front loader 3DO they don’t want? Want a Goldstar one? Maybe we can arrange a trade of console with a little money flowing one way of the other.) Thankfully, the PS2, Xbox Prime, Xbox 360, Wii, PS3, Wii U, and Xbox One (as well as a PS4 once I decide to buy one) all have either tray loaders or slot loaders.

(By the way, is cd-i a front or top loader I don’t know, I’ve never seen one. All I have of it is a light gun called a "peacekeeper" I had a CD-I but with no controller. couldn’t functionally play anything. My memory of it was ho-hum. I took it back and absent-mindedly forgot the Peacekeeper, so I have a Peacekeeper and no machine by mistake. The only other system is Laser Active with Turbo LDs and Mega LDs with the appropriate adapters, which I HOPE is front-loader. There’s no way I’m going to buy a LaserActive for that much money AND a Turbo adapter AND a Genesis adapter, and risk scratching the media.)

Perhaps people placed these players on top of their huge console tvs in the early days and equipment cabinets and racks became popular later. You can’t effectively use a top loader in a cabinet or rack. Otherwise, top loader is less complex and cheaper to produce. Perhaps better in many ways too.

PIONEER marketed several models of top-loader LDPs, from the VP-1000, their first model of consumer LDP, around 1980 or so,
right on up until they shifted to tray-loading designs around 1984, IIRC.

that said, for my own part, i never did have any problems with top-loading optical-disc-based devices,
not even with my very first, the SEGA SATURN, as an otherwise fairly careless teen back around 1995 or thereabouts.

while i was quite the glad-handed little boy growing up, i always did somehow perceive optical-disc-base media,
such as the SEGA SATURN CD-ROMs i cut my teeth on, as inherently delicate, and thus treated them,
as well as virtually all media to come, with all due ginger care...

This is the explanation. I’ve never broken the lens on any piece of gear I’ve ever owned. The door is only open for a second or two and the only thing I’m doing at that time is loading the disc. It’s not that hard to keep my focus for that long while doing such a simple task.

Top loading is generally either low end (because it’s cheaper) or in some cases super high end like a Forsell Air Reference CD transport. In situations like Discmans it’s the only practical choice.

If you look at consoles they would sometimes start out front loading when they debuted but then as they tried to lower the price they ended up top loading. That drawer costs money, money people would rather spend on the electronics or not at all.

I agree totally. It’s all about how much you understand and respect the format’s fragility.

When CDs first came out many of them had info about the format in the liner notes. It said the user should treat CDs as if they were a photographic negative. When people do that their CDs %99.999 of the time outlive the owner. (Because in fact they are much more durable than a chemical negative for the most part.)

I suppose there were people who treated their negatives like %*&# back in the day and wondered why prints looked massively worse every time they had them made but from my memory that was extremely rare. Everyone knew to keep them in their envelope unless using them for something. I personally never once saw a single scratched LD back in the day. At $40-150 per movie what kind of hedonistic slob would treat them so poorly? I guess everyone has younger relatives...

No it's not, I have two of these bad boys myself, much more practical:



Too bad the sound isn't great but that's because of undefeatable ESP buffering and the compression that goes with it.

There's also the fact that if you actually bought a Laserdisc player back then, you would probably want to hook it up to your hi-fi gear to make use of that sweet, sweet stereo sound, and probably wanted to even put it in the same rack with the rest of your audio gear.

Only that same rack would probably already have a record player, which, barring few exceptions, are always top loaders - and you obviously can't have two top loaders in the same rack.

I’d assume that was even less reliable than a top loading Discman. I think you’re confusing practicality with convenience. It’s obviously more streamlined to use. I’m not the kind of person to sacrifice audio quality for ESP and slot loading. I have one of those later Discmans with G Shock and all that and it’s the single worst sounding CD player I’ve ever heard from any era at any price. It has a mini TOSLINK and of course that sounds fine but even then it inserts gaps in MD recordings I made with it.

I prefer Sony for portable CD but I like the earlier units.

My point is this.

With tray load, assuming you keep the media relatively flat, if you accidentally miss center you could slide the media until it seats inside the tray, locked in. and there’s no spindle in the center which could scratch the media. If you miss center on a top loader, you could scratch the disc. If you put your finger in the hole and miss center you could touch the lens, and temporarily or permanently ruin the lens

And trust, my, I’m almost always careful about finding not fingering the disc surface. The only time i may take slight less care is if it’s a tray or sot loader.

So only permanently ruining one disc, and maybe one lens in the 35 years we had optical media is a fairly good track record. And knowing the faults all come with top loaders, I know to take extra care with top loaders.

By the way, how does one handle an LD with a top-loader without risking scratching the inner data.? My finger span barely fits the ring to donut hole partial radius. With CDs and top loaders, I don’t know whether it’s better to do 2 opposite edges or to do center and edge handling to avoid spindle scratching.

No, they're more reliable than my best sounding discman, my D777. They're surprisingly robust.



Well it still kicked the s**t out of a DAP playing MP3s back in the day.



Yeah DE/J-01 is not great sounding but not terrible at all.



This is my ultimate plan with DE/J-01s, hook up one of these with optical to bypass the ESP and earphones from that.

Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but all top loaders use the older helium-neon laser and are thus better at reading rotten discs and others that might otherwise be unreadable on newer machines?

Possible that they used the gas laser but not always the case that they are best for rot from my experience and knowledge.
Others will have more info on that.

I think the real reason first gen top loaders were made was due to it being close to what an LP was so consumers could relate to it in some
way that was familiar to them.

In the pr7820 the whole disk was moved (so I guess *that* one could have become a front loader), but with the other gas tube players the very large pickup assembly moved, so it probably made a lot more sense to make it a top loader.

And yup, until CD's people were used to them.

There really is no such thing as a foolproof player, because I had a Panasonic LD player where the tray was moving so fast that (I believe) it shook the disc off-center and the spindle failed to grab the center. All the problems I had with it were it failing to grab the disc, but once the disc grabbed, it worked fine. One time, when trying to load the Laser Disc, the laser disc shattered because it was going so fast.

I could find no place to replace it. The repairer I hired supposedly fixed he problem, but it didn’t address the elephant in the room, so I got a discount on my current Laser DIsc player, with AC3 port, Toslink, and S-Video.

There's also the complete lack of anything tray-loaded back then as far as I can think of. Remember that CD-players only became a thing a few years later. The only disc based format then was vinyl which was exclusively a top loading format, tray loading turntables also only became a thing in the 80's, no doubt inspired by the CD player.

I think formats where the spindle can’t touch the disc are the thing of the future. The last roprietary format that was exclusively "pop tops" were the Nintendo Game Cube and Sega Dreamcast. PS2 was a tray loader, Xbox Prime was a tray loader. Xbox 360 was a tray loader. Then afeter that, everyone moved to "slot loaders" but still the basic front loading mechanism, except rollers pull the disc in and push the disc out instead of a Tray.

Apple always had slot loaders in their computers since they removed the floppy. (P.S. Why is a 3 inch floppy called a floppy when t doesn’t "flop" when you wiggler it, hence the origin of the term floppy disc. I honestly thought they were called hard discs because they were harder than floppies in texture.) Now you have to buy the BD burner externally.

A 3” floppy flops just as much as any other floppy. It’s the stuff inside the case that gave it the name “floppy”, with the alternative “hard” discs being made of glass.

Advantages of front loader over top loader:

1) Extremely less likely to scratch the disc on a push-on spindle.
2) Extremely less likely to touch the lens feeling for the center.


Advantages of top loader over front loader:

1) An extra component that can break, the roller’s/tray movemenbt belt.
2) If tray moves too fast, harder for machine to find center, more likely to shatter media internally.
3) Only way to be guaranteed to play non-circulars. (Like the Stat Trek Nemesis "Bird of Prey" extras DVD disc.)

so much of this post is non sequitur

So a typical tripletopper post then?