DD CD players...

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cfz2882

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Time for a CD player thread :)...
For "HiFi"listening,i use analog tape or record,but for background music and
general listening a CD player is often pressed into service-my 3 DD machines:
-1998 philips;a $50 pawn shop buy some 10 yrs ago,it is supposed to be able to
record but i have not been able to get that feature to work-says "no disc"trying
to record...As a player it is excellent with great tracking and very good sonics
for the medium.Made in hungary.
-1989 magnavox/philips 6-disc magazine type changer;was given to me because it
"didn't work"-said right on the magazine discs must be loaded label down...
loaded discs label down and works fine...Instead of linear tracking with a motor
driven leadscrew like most players,the pickup is on a swinging arm that is moved
magneticly.Made in belgium.
-1989 JVC 6-disk magazine type changer with seperate single disc tray; this is
my garage player,very reliable operation except for one time i didn't get the
disc set in the well of the single disc tray quite right-when i tried to play
the disc the player jammed and i had to take the player partly apart to clear
the jam...
 
In recent times, I've mostly used an old Panasonic portable with good headphones. I'm not sure what vintage the Panasonic is--it's not one of the early players, but seems to predate skip protection. It has MASH decoding, which was once the hot thing. Technics players with MASH decoders always seemed to do well in British reviews I read ca. 1990.

This player is certainly not the best I've heard, but it has worked well for me. I'm surprised, actually, because I've used it more than I've used regular CD players in recent history.

Recently, I got an Onkyo on clearance at a thrift shop. It was made about 1990, and I'm guessing was bottom of the line new. I haven't played with it enough to form a judgment, but my sense is that it's worth playing with.
 
"it is supposed to be able to record but i have not been able to get that feature to work-says 'no disc' trying to record"

I briefly had a Phillips CD recorder pass through my hands. I can't remember the details--it's been many years, and it seems like it must have been some strange circumstances. I have had almost zero interest in recording CDs, so something odd must have happened--either this was bundled with something I needed, or else it was free.

In any case, I never got as far as trying to record anything. I thought about it, but I did research on the model. I discovered that not only did it require the "audio" recordable CDs (which included a "tax" that went to the recording industry, if I recall right, to make them feel better about possible piracy), but it also was apparently quite picky about the brand of CDs. I think that was what was the "this is it!" moment that caused me to decide "I'm not bothering with this--OFF TO GOODWILL WITH IT!"
 
interesting about philips CD recorder being picky about the discs-i'll have to try
different discs sometime.I have also heard that "recordable"CD use photo sensitive
ink that can degrade over a few years and render the disc unplayable...
 
Great Thread

As far as CD recorder decks, remember that you can't use a "computer" cd-r. You have to use a CD-R Music disc. It will actually say "CD-R Music" on them. I do find that CD's that are burned on these sound much better than CD's burned on a computer.
Has anyone had any experience with "Minidisc"? The sound is incredible! Sad that the format died. Now everyone is realizing how much better it is than MP3 players and ipods. Check them out on Ebay. The prices are way up. Glad I got into collecting them before this took place.
The best CD players for me as far as sound and disc readability is the vintage Philips / Magnavox players with the "Swing Laser". They are awesome decks!
Brent
 
Last February I got incredibly lucky on a routine Saturday visit to one of the local St. Vincent DePaul stores. I always breeze by the junk electronics section and noticed this Sony CD player sitting under some by-gone VHS players.

I noticed right away that it was early, so I did a quick Google search, and, after quickly dropping the 20 dollar finders fee, I was out of the door in 15 seconds. I couldn't believe how heavy it was, but my disbelief was quickly exhausted when I noticed the all metal construction and copper chassis. This was a serious CD player.

I won't go into the technical details of this player as there are technical writers out on the inter-webs who do this player justice - but it sounds absolutely fantastic. While the D/A converter is 100 percent Sony, the sound is so pure and non-compressed it is a toss-up on listening to an album digitally, or off the Pioneer PL-630 TT. And this is coming from a vinyl purist, too!

Back in the early 80's, Sony made some great stuff, but it wasn't cheep ($1000 retail in 1985). Just glad I was able to enjoy someone else's trash for an hour this evening.

Ben

http://www.thevintageknob.org/sony-CDP-502ES.html
swestoyz++2-7-2012-22-35-33.jpg
 
Rotel RCD-855 . . .

Bought about '90 or so. If I remember correctly, it uses a Philips transport with a Rotel designed MASH D/A converter. It's the only component CD player I've ever owned, and so long as it continues to work I have no plans to buy another. Most of my CD listening is in the car anyway, but the Rotel still sounds good to my ears. Matches my preamp/tuner and power amp too which is nice.
 
"swing laser" sound

i did notice my '89 magnavox/philips with the swing laser does sound slightly
different from my other CD players-i have seen very early,say Ca. 1982,philips
players on Ebay before,but the bidding always ran up high...In my area at least,
CDs were very rare and exotic until about fall,1985 when affordable players started
to appear in stores.The earlier discs,Ca.1985-87,were usually imported from japan
or germany-i have a few early discs from those countries.
 
"As far as CD recorder decks, remember that you can't use a 'computer' cd-r. You have to use a CD-R Music disc. It will actually say 'CD-R Music' on them."

Yes, and this is important to remember.

I've heard professional recorders didn't have this limitation.

With the Phillips I had years back, it was a case of both needing the "music" CR-R AND only certain brands would, if my research was right, work on that particular recorder.
 
mid '80s sony CD

nice score on that sony CD swestoys-looks like way stouter and better construction
than only slightly more recent CD players,seems japanese companies started to
really cheapen their products after about 1985,though a few created seperate
"high end" lines around that time-such as pioneer with their "elite"(i think that
is what pioneer called their "good"stuff in the late -'80s)
 
"The best CD players for me as far as sound and disc readability is the vintage Philips / Magnavox players with the 'Swing Laser'."

It's worth mentioning this: Phillips has had parts at the heart of many of the best CD players. Plus their players in the early years were often the starting point for audiophile company CD players. (Take a Phillips player, modify it heavily, slap a new name and higher price on.) And I remember Phillips getting good reviews in British magazines ca. 1990.

I don't think this is accidental. Phillips was (at the very least) an inventor of CD with Sony. It's said that they knew stuff about CD that they never told anyone else.
 
I have hundreds of CDs, but never listen to them any more.  The ones I like I rip to my computer at a high bit rate and play them from there.  Note I do not use crappy computer speakers.  On my main computer I have Polk bookshelf speakers and a powered 10" sub.  From my main media server computer I stream digitally throughout the house.  There might be a slight loss in quality, I'd be hard pressed to find it, but the convenience of having most of what I want a click away anywhere in the house far out weighs it.  Plus, if I want I do have the CDs around.
 
I know it may be a little off topic, but my first CD player that I ever owned was something I scrounged and saved up for. It was a 1990 Sony Discman that set me back an entire months pay of delivering papers. (About $250)

I'll never forget the first time I put a CD in it and listened to the first song on a CD I paid $20 for.

Compared to 33 RPM LP's and 45's, CD's certainly spoiled me.

No hiss of the cassette tape. No Clicks. No pops, just quiet. I'm sure some of the other audiophiles on here will flame me, but it was certainly a different experience.
 
I guess I should post what I use..

Well, I have a few actually..

My primary one is a Technics SL-MC7 50 disc changer. It's early 1990's. Was worth quite a bit in its time!

My secondary one which I use in the bedroom (Don't ask) is an early 2000's vintage RCA DVD player with the DVD laser burnt out. It still plays CD's fine so that's all I really use it for.

I have a crappy $20 portable CD player, the old Sony Discman is long gone now. (I traded it in for some vintage stereo equipment, I wish I hadn't.)

Realistically, I have a Nokia N900 with 32 GB of storage. If I want to, I'll just rip everything from my CD's and listen to it on my phone later.
 
There is room for the CD format in music reproduction, don't feel guilty about the Discman. We all have to start someplace, right?

I'm not fond of the MP3 format because it is so compressed that it just doesn't sound good to me. I have always been a fantatic about sound. It's good enough for in car music, etc.

My first CD player was a 1984 Sony that was a single disk player. Good enough for my music system at the time, an Onkyo TX4500 MkII receiver with JBL 4311 speakers.
My next CD player purchased around 1983 was a Nakamichi Music Box 2. Now that was a great CD player. But it had a very strange way of storing discs. It had a single play drawer and you'd put your CD in it and the drawer would close with the disc in it and then open again with no disc. You could load up to 5 discs in it at a time. It sounded much better than the Sony. It lasted up until 2009 when the drawer belt broke and I sent it in for a belt job. I got it home, used it for two days and it wouldn't go into play mode. Sent it back and it came back with the diagnosis, laser dead and no replacements available.

By this time I had upgraded to a Phase Linear DRS-250 integrated amp and AR-3a speakers. So after much agonizing over choices I bought a Yamaha CD-C600 CD changer. It sounds just as good as the Nakamichi did. And I upgraded my electronics to an SAE "01" system with a A301 amp. That really improved the sound.
Even though I don't have a MP3 player, the front of the Yamaha has a USB port for connecting such devices.

Recently, someone convinced me to try to upgrade the cables in my system. So I tried a pair of AudioQuest Sidewinders on the CD player and the turntable. I must admit there was a significant improvement to the depth of sound from my system.
But the cable chase thing can lead to diminishing returns if you are not careful.
 
Philips Laser History

It is my understanding that Philips still has the current patents for "Optical Laser" reading of any format. They invented the Optical Laser with the launch of the "DiscoVision" laser disc. Since then, anything that uses a laser pays Philips to do so. Although I am sure the percentage is small, it adds up quick.
 
From the "ES" in Ben's CD player name, I'm assuming that this player was part of the "ES" line Sony made. The ES line was the high performance Sony line of 80s. It was highly respected in the US for Japanese--only Denon seemed to get similar respect.

It's probably not surprising that Sony made good CD players...they get credited as co-inventors of the format.

I shopped at a small audio store ca. 1990, and one of the brands year after year was Sony ES--mainly, I think for the CD players.

What was sad was that this dealer later lost the franchise. If I recall the story right, Sony wanted to reduce the number of dealers--this was during the Bush #1 Recession--and the small stores like his were the ones who lost out. Large chain stores, like one less than a mile from that store, that also specialized in junk rack systems, were allowed to continue with the ES line. It may be coincidental, but it seems that period was about the time the ES line started to lose appeal for many quality conscious US buyers. Although part of that might also have been due to other circumstances, too.
 
"Recently, someone convinced me to try to upgrade the cables in my system. So I tried a pair of AudioQuest Sidewinders on the CD player and the turntable. I must admit there was a significant improvement to the depth of sound from my system.
But the cable chase thing can lead to diminishing returns if you are not careful."

Logically, the cables are the path the signal takes...sometimes for long distances. Thus the cable is important.

Although, at the same time, it's too easy to go too far. It's astounding the money people will spend on fancy cables (or various tweaks), when the same money might be better spent on a major component upgrade.

"Keeping it cheap" was a huge problem when I first got a good CD player ca. 2000. It was used, and I was not in the mood to buy a cable that cost as much as I'd spent on the CD player. I started that CD player with RadioShack (not the best, not the worst they had) just to get started. Eventually I started playing with making my own cables...which were cheap, but had a huge problem of taking lots of time to research and make. Plus arguments at RadioShack when I made the mistake of telling employees I casually knew what I was up to. They always "knew" the plans were "wrong." And yet, funny thing, the plans always seemed to work as well or better than promised by the person who invented the cable.

I think my favorite cable in the end was this plan...or something similar. I never used anything better than cheap magnet wire, and it is unshielded, and so it probably would be a bad idea in some applications. But it worked well for my CD player.

http://www.soundstage.com/synergize/synergize021998.htm
 
I have a Pioneer Elite PD-65 Reference CD Player with the Stable Platter Mechnaism. It's actually a platen like a turntable, the CD is placed face down. The theory, as explained before I smacked down $600 for it, was that the laser would not pass through the disc so there would be less disortion, etc. I bought my first one in 1994'ish I think, but that was taken out in '97 during an electrical storm. I bought another a few years ago on ebay - mint but missing the remote. I'm still impressed by the sound from this player, through a Marantz 2270 and a pair of 1975-76 Advent "Small Loudspeakers". Audio bliss :-)
 
2nd hand score

just scored a pioneer PD-M400 6-disc changer for $20 at a 2nd hand shop,made in
oct.1988 it passed it's shakedown run without a hiccup so will be stashed in
reserve.It just has the 6-disc magazine cartridge and no single disc tray-the
seperate single disc tray a feature i like on my JVC changer.
 

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