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Has Sony ever said why the PS4 doesn't play CDs?

Good old NeoGAF.

OMG It's current year and people are still using this ancient technology that is still being mass produced and sold globally and was a feature in the previous gen of consoles? WHY THE FUCK WOULD THEY DO THAT?!?!?!
 
"Pennies or less". Let's call it... what, 2 pennies?

PS4 has sold... what, ~60 million units?

Those pennies add up to $1,200,000. Do you think it's worth over a million dollars so that an extremely small % of people might play a cd in their PS4? More importantly, do you think the -lack- of CD cost them a single sale? Even more importantly, do you think if they spent this additional 1.2 million dollars, do you think anyone who hasn't already bought one would have bought one?

I realize there is some room for 'good will' type additions to a device. But remember, there's always something else people want. You have to draw the line somewhere, and cutting costs like this allowed them to keep a $400 price tag at launch, allow them to drop the price sooner, etc, all of which benefits the end consumer. Sure, they could have included this, and a built in PS3, and a better mic, and.... eventually, the price needs to go up. All in all? I think cutting the ability to play CDs is pretty darn inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

Good defense. I like it. Adding 2 cents to the BOM would definitely cause the system to cost over $400. They did me a favor at drawing the line. Thanks Sony!!
 

Freddo

Member
Just because Jack said that doesn't mean I'm wrong. I'm pretty sure he said that to keep third party publishers happy, many of which were flocking to 360 in 2007.
Yeah, let's not trust what Sony say about their own product, it's not like they have any clue what they are talking about. Conspiracy theories are so much more trustworthy!
 

MUnited83

For you.
"Pennies or less". Let's call it... what, 2 pennies?

PS4 has sold... what, ~60 million units?

Those pennies add up to $1,200,000. Do you think it's worth over a million dollars so that an extremely small % of people might play a cd in their PS4? More importantly, do you think the -lack- of CD cost them a single sale? Even more importantly, do you think if they spent this additional 1.2 million dollars, do you think anyone who hasn't already bought one would have bought one?

I realize there is some room for 'good will' type additions to a device. But remember, there's always something else people want. You have to draw the line somewhere, and cutting costs like this allowed them to keep a $400 price tag at launch, allow them to drop the price sooner, etc, all of which benefits the end consumer. Sure, they could have included this, and a built in PS3, and a better mic, and.... eventually, the price needs to go up. All in all? I think cutting the ability to play CDs is pretty darn inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.
Objectively false. All they ever had to fucking do was exactly what they already do with DVDs, require a initial online activation. Your 1 million becomes a lot, lot lesser than that.
 
Cheaping out on 3 cents per console makes less sense than they wanted to push people to their shit streaming service (that already got cancelled)

We'll just chalk it up to greed either way.
 
Adding pennies to an individual console is fine but when you're going to be making 100 million of them, those pennies add up and considering the marketplace even at the time the PS4 launched, who would even use it as an audio player? Of course there's always going to be a subset that do or want to, but it's not worth it.

"Pennies or less". Let's call it... what, 2 pennies?

PS4 has sold... what, ~60 million units?

Those pennies add up to $1,200,000. Do you think it's worth over a million dollars so that an extremely small % of people might play a cd in their PS4?

The pennies add up, but so does the overall amount you're spending. The percentages stay the same. Numbers are useless without a point of reference.

Put another way, 0.02/300 and 1,200,000/18,000,000,000 both equal nearly zero.
 

TGO

Hype Train conductor. Works harder than it steams.
They don't want to pay the licensing fees for something that a tiny proportion of users would use.
You don't pay licensing fees on stuff you own.

Philips still holds the patent IIRC so Sony probably thought the couple cents per unit license fee wasn't worth it.


Edit: oh yeah the physical laser is different too. That's a real manufacturing cost reason.
Philips and Sony are joint holders of Compact Disc, Sony really have no excuses.
 

Nosgotham

Junior Member
ripping cds to ps3 or 360 and playing in background was awesome. cant believe its not a thing now and youre subject to another subscription fee to do same damn tjing
 

joecanada

Member
Seriously... does everyone just listen to streamed sub-320kbps mp3s? Or even worse, youtube playlists?

No one cares about quality of audio?

a true audiophile would have backed up their valuable CD collection twice already. And you can play those backup files on a ps4.
 
I don't have CD Player but I have CDs. I rip them to FLAC though. I hate the shitty audio quality of Spotify and iTunes downloads. It might be fine for your latest shitty overly mastered pop tunes from Carly Rae Jepson, but for those of us l33t enough to appreciate quality music, we need a quality lossless audio format to hear it in perfect form.

CD was delivering this long, long ago.
this is one of the all time worst posts
 

test_account

XP-39C²
Good defense. I like it. Adding 2 cents to the BOM would definitely cause the system to cost over $400. They did me a favor at drawing the line. Thanks Sony!!
I doubt they were looking at two basically identical BD-drives, one costing 2 cents more than the other, and went for the cheaper model.


Yeah, let's not trust what Sony say about their own product, it's not like they have any clue what they are talking about. Conspiracy theories are so much more trustworthy!
Its a very safe bet to say that both things are true in this case. Sony needed to get the price of the PS3 down, so dropping extra hardware for PS2 emulation was one of the first thing to go. That also resulted in that people had to buy PS3 games for the system.


Objectively false. All they ever had to fucking do was exactly what they already do with DVDs, require a initial online activation. Your 1 million becomes a lot, lot lesser than that.
Any source to that?


Cheaping out on 3 cents per console makes less sense than they wanted to push people to their shit streaming service (that already got cancelled)

We'll just chalk it up to greed either way.
The reason to push the stream service doesnt make much sense to me either because even in 2014, "no one" was using CDs. I cant see that CDs were some obstacle to sell into a musical streaming service.

Also, to call it greed sounds strange to me. When operating a business that is based on profit, why would you use money on something that hardly anyone use? That doesnt sound like good business sense to me.


ripping cds to ps3 or 360 and playing in background was awesome. cant believe its not a thing now and youre subject to another subscription fee to do same damn tjing
You can do that with the newer systems as well. Maybe not Switch, but at least PS4 and Xbox One.
 
i got tons of devices that play music cds, but i'd support this if possible. love all my cds and add to my collection whenever i can.

bring it.
 

orborborb

Member
same reason apple got rid of the headphone jack, to get you to give them money for another way to do something that they make more money from, because they can get away with it because very few will buy their competitor's system over the missing feature
 
I don’t think PS1 games had anything to do with this. That’s a ridiculous notion b/c you can’t just play PS1 games b/c you have a CD-ROM laser. It requires the chip/emulation to actually play the game.

It’s definitely a save money reason. The amount of people still playing music via physical format on their console are probably <1% of the player base. They assume you’re either using a streaming service or a portable storage device.
(This was also their excuse for not including a 4K Blu Ray player in the Pro, though that was more odd considering they themselves are actively in the physical 4K movie business)

The Xbox including it shouldn’t surprise you, MS built that console to be the center of your living room. They didn’t want you to switch inputs for anything. So it playing *everything* is pretty par for the course of what they were going for when they built that system. The PS4 is a games console with streaming apps on it. If it couldn’t play DVDs I wouldn’t have even been shocked. Sony didn’t build the PS4 for people wanting a media center, they built it for gamers (yes I know that saying is tired but it’s true) unlike the PS3 which was basically an Xbox one without the tv input at the time it released. (Remember the front flap with all those memory stick inputs in it?)

So TD;LR it can’t play CDs because Sony doesn’t fathom anybody would be putting in an Audio CD-ROM to play music on their PS4. Not because they want an out for not having PS1 BC.

(BC isn’t coming to the PS4 because PSN classics exist. We already have 3 PS1 remasters on the PSN and more are coming. The same way we didn’t get PS2 support we won’t get PS1 support because they can re-sell is the games with cleaner visuals and trophies)
 

20cent

Banned
Because Spotify exist

Oh yeah, I completely forgot that Spotify will automatically scan and let me play for free - and ad-free all music I own on CD and from other digital platforms.

I don't think PS1 games had anything to do with this. That's a ridiculous notion b/c you can't just play PS1 games b/c you have a CD-ROM laser. It requires the chip/emulation to actually play the game.

Serious question, the PS4 can't play PS1 games bought from the PS store?
I mean the PSP, Vita, PS2 (not sure if hardware or software) and PS3 can...
 

Paragon

Member
Sony got with the times, now we just need to send the message to all the JRPG devs (and Nintendo) that include a fucking music CD but no MP3 download code with their Collector's Editions. I'm surprised that doesn't piss more people off. I don't think I even have a way to play CDs in my apartment.
MP3 and AAC audio is lossy compression. That means it is lower quality than CD audio delivered in 1982.
Then again, people are buying vinyl records in droves these days, which makes even less sense.

CDs typically cost less than MP3/AAC downloads, don't have any DRM, and are a physical good that is not tied into any online services which may disappear at any time.
Lossless downloads often cost twice that of a physical CD since the prices rarely drop, despite the significantly lower distribution costs/overheads, and most places selling lossless CD-quality audio will try upselling you on "high resolution audio" placebos.

(Don't even get me started on the headphone jack.)
It really bothers me that when Apple finally released an iPhone with enough capacity to replace an iPod, they removed the headphone jack.
Those adapters Apple sell are absolutely terrible - they last maybe 3 months or so before they start hanging up calls, pausing/playing music at random, crackling or cutting out, and I get buzzing when using any of the adapters which let you connect power + audio to the Lightning port at the same time.
So I bought a 256GB phone, loaded it up with music, and ended up rarely using it for that now.

Does iTunes disable CD ripping functionality in the UK?
You shouldn't be using iTunes to rip CDs anyway. It doesn't support secure ripping, so you cannot be guaranteed that the rip is a bit-perfect copy of the audio stored on the disc. It doesn't even have error correction enabled by default.
 
It's how it works on Xbox One - at least it requires an app you need to download, it won't play them out of the box, or DVD/blu ray for that matter either.

On this topic however Sony has been really anti consumer with things like this and the lack of PS1/PSP BC - features that would be easy to add but they really don't give a shit with the sales they make.

I've had an Xbox One since launch and because of this thread I stuck a CD into the drive and after downloading the 24MB CD playing app I'm now listening to 2 Unlimited's No Limits. This is your fault GAF... ;)

Yeah, I'm old... haha
 
The obvious reason is that a different laser assembly on the drive's read head is needed for CDs and Sony just didn't feel it was worth the cost to put one in the Blu-ray drive used in PS4's.

It's a cost-saving measure, nothing more. I haven't actually seen a CD in around 10 years now so I guess it's a reasonable one.
 
Honestly the PS4 is nearly useless for playing your own music anyway (vs using a streaming service). I have no idea why anyone ever thought this was a good idea, but the media player app sorts mp3s by the Title tag instead of Track Number and there is no way to change this. The only way to play an album in order on the PS4 is to ruin your ID3 tags.
 

FRS1987

Member
I haven't even thought about that. I have CDs but I haven't used a CD in like YEARS. Not even kidding I forgot they exist. Most music nowadays is used/played on a streaming service or digital. At least that's how I get/play my music and even though they still sell CDs in stores, they seem like a relic and just create clutter.
 

Bastables

Member
Cd: infrared light (780 nm)
DVD: “red laser” (650nm)
Blu Ray: blue/violet laser (450nm)

Removing the capability to read CD will of course mean cheaper manufacturing and consumer cost. Remember the PS4 was cheaper than the multimedia ps3 and xboxone at their release dates. Sony focused on cost cutting to manufacture a focused games console not a bloated entertainment system ala ps3 xboxone.
 

Lindsay

Dot Hacked
"whats a cd"

People like this never buy special/limited editions of games in which the soundtrack is included I guess? Cause guess what, those come on cds!

PS4 bites as a media player compared to the PS3 in every aspect I've noticed. Gotta keep my PS3 hooked up an running for years an years to come.
 

danm999

Member
I would say there’s a chart (or a spreadsheet or something) somewhere at Sony that has two axis.

They probably reference a term that means something in layman’s terms like “amount it costs us to implement this feature” and “amount of people who care about this feature enough to not buy our console”.

When they were designing the PS4 five years ago or whatever it was, the point that’s labelled “audio CDs” fell into a certain quadrant of those axis, that means, again in layman’s, don’t bother.

In 2017, audio CDs would have fallen even deeper into that bad quadrant.
 
Seriously... does everyone just listen to streamed sub-320kbps mp3s? Or even worse, youtube playlists?

No one cares about quality of audio?

#1 backed up my CDs to 320kbps mp3 like 10+ years ago and chucked almost all of them.

#2 There is very, very little evidence that people can identify the difference between a 320k mp3 and Redbook CD, and that isn't even touching AAC or FLAC. I'd stake a large sum of money everyone posting here would fail a double blind test between them - because every time they do a scientific study on it, almost no one can, and when they can (the downsampled hirez audio vs CD study), it is only at ridiculously high decibel levels.
 
Launch PS4s at least had all three lasers, despite the fact the CD frequency one isn't needed for pressed discs.

Frequency matters to make sure the point can be focused small enough to read individual pits, but shorter wavelength lasers can easily read the larger pits. The focusing elements required to read a dual-layered DVD should be able to handle the different layer thickness in a CD.

Not much of a license fee since all the relevant patents have long expired, the redbook logo is about the only thing that needs a license and no one cares if it's there any more, and Sony would get half the tiny fee anyway.

That would be weird if it had a drive capable of playing VHS tapes.



In short, yes. They would have had to go to some effort to make a drive that can't; early DVD drives with just one laser tuned for DVDs could still read pressed CDs. The only reason multiple lasers were added to optical drives was a specific frequency was required for CD-Rs.

The real answer was Sony was pushing their streaming service really hard in the beginning. Even the web browser doesn't support any audio-only codecs, even after Sony added support for ogg and FLAC for the media player. And it took a lot of hair pulling just to get the bare-bones media player.

Sony's audio support is so bad, the way Plex plays music on the PS4 is to transcode the audio into a blank video container and then ignore the video portion on the client.

The different colors aren't required for reading physical pits as long as the wavelength is shorter than the diffraction limit. In other words, a blu-ray laser can read DVD and CD pits perfectly fine, but a CD laser can only read CDs. The blu-ray laser does have the problem of having a much thinner layer on the actual discs so different optics are needed, but DVD and CD are much more similar.

The reason drives have all three lasers is the dyes in recordable discs do tend to be very frequency sensitive, so to read them all three are required. Obviously not a problem for pressed CDs and actual games.

And I'll mention again, the manual included with launch PS4s included a mention of a CD frequency laser.

Why is it I feel like androvsky is the only person not talking out their ass in here?

Example:

The obvious reason is that a different laser assembly on the drive's read head is needed for CDs and Sony just didn't feel it was worth the cost to put one in the Blu-ray drive used in PS4's.

It's a cost-saving measure, nothing more. I haven't actually seen a CD in around 10 years now so I guess it's a reasonable one.

And this was after all of androvsky's posts.
 

Opa-Pa

Member
The amount of people dismissing CDs as some ancient nonsense as if they weren't still sold in stores or had a notable quality over low bitrate streamed music and whatnot is absurd lmao.

I rarely buy any albums anymore but the ones I still own were nice to rip to my PS3 back in the day and I actually expected to do the same on my PS4 at some point but nope.
 

Gaogaogao

Member
they still sell vinyl records foh
I loved ripping cd's to my ps3's hard drive, it would be cool if I could do that to an external drive on the ps4.
 
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