If you have an old Sony Playstation 1, especially the first variant (there were several iterations ) they do make pretty good stand alone CD players. Sony incorporated the ability for the Playstation to play normal audio CD's into the device and it turns out it does it rather well.
Talking to people, it seems lots of them have aged Playstations either gathering dust or that they "gave to their young cousin" but they really do have a new lease of life. Now that we are on the PS3, the aged PS1 is considered by many to be virtually worthless, despite costing around �300 when they first came out.
The early model (SCPH-1002) already has red & white RCA sockets on the back, and you can use a regular controller for play/skip/stop functions or you can buy a separate remote (around �5 on ebay)
There are some tweaks you can do to them, and especially in Germany , people mod them even adding valve output sections. The best site for modifications is dogbreath.de
However they sound pretty good in standard form. Later iterations dispensed with the RCA sockets, but you can buy an AV adapter pretty cheap on ebay, which provides the necessary RCA sockets
Update 22/12/2010
I have a Tivoli Model 1 FM Radio in my kitchen, which is very good. I had previously hooked a discman up to it via it's AUX input, but the discman eventually died. I managed to get a PSone - the tiny brother of the PS1 which was introduced toward the end. This makes a great small form-factor CD player. It doesn't have RCA sockets on the back, so you have to use the special cable that comes with the device.
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