Lately I've been seeing several articles (like this one) which help spread the myth of the original PlayStation as an audiophile's dream bargain. It's a tempting idea- and there's no doubt that the quality matches or beats most consumer CD players out there. However, that's not saying too much...
The facts are: Sony put some decent-quality RCA jacks on the back of the unit, and some good DACs (digital to analog converters) inside. These DACs are as good or better than those used in most consumer CD players, which on its own makes a $5-50 used PlayStation a great deal (if it's been kept in usable condition, of course).
For the non-nerds, here's a really brief (and necessarily imprecise) summary of digital and analog audio:
Analog means sounds reproduced by physicial (almost always electromagnetic) signals. Your turntable and tape deck are analog by nature. All speakers are analog. Electric guitars are analog. Anything that plugs in and makes sounds must be ultimately analog.
Digital means that the sound is represented by binary information. Imagine a picture of a song made up of either black or white dots...that's digital. Things like resolution and bitrate tell you about how accurately the picture matches the original. That's why something sounds better, or can sound better, if it has more dots to work with...compare "Warrior needs food badly" to your iTunes, for example.
Any real-world sound that is recorded and played back on digital equipment (whether it's an iPod, the PC that you're reading this on, a DVR or any number of other things) has to be transferred to digital format and back again. This process requires DAC's (remember? digital to analog converters). The quality of the DAC is the single most important factor in sound quality for any piece of digital equipment. Analog signals are put through the DACs on the way in (during the recording process, or when you hook up an analog source to your system) and then again on the way out (to whatever you use to actually hear them). Cheaper, poor-quality DACs are probably why anything you can buy at WalMart sounds like crap, but there are plenty of other reasons as well...
For instance, the quality of the hardware makes a big difference. Perhaps not as much as the idiots who buy or sell Monster Cables will tell you, but a 1/8" headphone jack made of chrome will never be able to match a set of gold-plated RCA jacks (BTW: be aware of the sensitivity of gold-plated jacks...if not completely shielded or covered, they're likely to pick up just about anything from 60 cycle hum to local radio broadcasts...the Best Buy salesman probably won't tell you that ).
On most console systems, there are proprietary A/V connections. Meaning that there's one plug that's a different shape than any other plug in the world, and it usually has all the audio and video combined into a bunch of tiny wires within. Sometimes you get a little extra: the PS2's, for instance, have an optical audio out; this is digital, so there's no quality issue at all- whatever you're plugging it into will determine how it sounds, because that's the component that has the DACs...get it?
By including discrete RCA jacks on the PlayStation, Sony gave us a nice option. And it seems like the jacks are pretty decent...better than my 1991 Fisher bookshelf system, anyway...but again, that isn't saying much. They're probably not as good as the ones on most high end consumer or "audiophile" systems, but I don't know this for sure...I don't have the data to compare quality-conscious hand-soldering to whatever the production process may have been at the Sony PlayStation factory.
All of this info is useless without a listening session to compare the results. My PlayStation does sound pretty darn good...but I don't have audiophile equipment for a real side-by-side. In fact, my best piece of audio gear is a pair of $60 Grado headphones (highly recommended, by the way). And it's true that I hardly ever play CD's anymore, unless I'm ripping them to my hard drive.
Let's qualify all this: my musical education came from scratchy LPs on Radio Shack turntables, and second generation cassette tapes. Still, I understand the power and detail that a clear and powerful audio system can add to the listening experience...I just don't think spending thousands of dollars per component is necessary, unless you're fond of showing off to the other snobbish and wastefully affluent audiophiles. If you really do love music, spend all that discretionary income on live music instead...
So I do recommend the PlayStation for anyone, whether you're an audiophile or an audio vile. I doubt you're 'saving' thousands of dollars (as most of the recent posts imply), but you're probably spending a few hundred less than you'd spend on anything comparable.
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