1983 review of Sony's first-ever CD player unearthed: hindsight's a beautiful thing

This is interesting. I remember the first CD player I saw, back in 1984. I was a "On-Air Personality", i.e. DJ, and assistant station engineer, at a small, community broadcasting station in Machias, Maine. I was in Ellsworth Maine with the station's engineer Craig Zurhorst, (my friend who got me the job) and we went into Radio Shack for some supplies. There it was; a shiny, black, device with VU meters on the right side and a sliding drawer on the left. We played with it for a while, and tried to figure out how we would que up a song on this, since we used 2 analog turntables at the time.

How times have changed. I'm guessing (because I haven't been in a radio station since 1985) that most stations are now using MP3 files, driven off a computer generated random list of songs from the library. Cool info, none the less.

1983 review of Sony's first-ever CD player unearthed: hindsight's a beautiful thing: "Here's a little bit of color for you. The gang at Retro Thing have brought our attention to a republished 1983 Stereophile review of the Sony CDP-101, the first-ever CD player. The results were that the audio quality was promising but not stellar, and the $1,000 (!) cost of entry for the device made it even less alluring. Knowing how history unfolded, we can't help but chuckle a bit at the worry that CDs would in the near-term become obsolete by another physical disc medium, but hey, we can't blame them for not being psychic. Just think, one day our own reviews will be discovered for the future to laugh about -- paying over $500 for a device that doesn't do multitouch on its native apps? What's up with that? Find yourself 15 to 30 minutes of quiet time and hit up the source link for a blast from the past.

1983 review of Sony's first-ever CD player unearthed: hindsight's a beautiful thing originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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