Oh no, I didn’t have one myself. I just heard about Laserdisc talked about so much but I don’t know anyone who owned one.
LD had the best available versions of Star Wars until the DVD bonus discs, and excellent CD quality audio. Of course now there is 4K77 (etc). After DVD came out you could pick up LD players and discs for cheap on eBay. I had a decent collection, but it was all eventually replaced with DVD and then Blu-ray.
What was the experience like placing those massive discs onto the tray? Do the discs feel heavy and unwieldy?
You could grip it between the center hole and outside edge. A little heavy, but wasn’t too bad. It was basically like an oversized CD or DVD player. One advantage of the large disc size is that they had basically record-sized sleeves, so you could get some great art, especially if it required two discs and folded open. You could hear the player spin up the disc which sounded almost dangerous sometimes (kinda exciting!). At the end of the first side, the laser would physically move to “flip” to the other side of the disc.
