Do You Remember Your First CD Player?

Bought 3-4 CDs (supposedly good sounding ones) in 1984 and borrowed a Meridian CD player, first modded unit, at the same time. All discs (including one from Ref Recordings) sounded awful - not a musical note to be found. Went back to analog and the first player I actually bought was a 1987 Sony 555ES, cost about $500.00 as I remember. Was fine for background and house cleaning.

I now only own a CD system and am happy with DAC and transport and a lot of remastered jazz, rock, and classical CDs. I don't own a turntable even though I have 100s of LPs including Lyritas, EMIs, etc. I'm not considering SACD at this time; I refuse to buy Kind of Blue one more damn time!

I happened to be driving by an Audio/Video store in a near by town when an ad came on the radio saying this store had just received one of the first shipments of cd players in Canada. If you were one of the first 50 people to get to the store you could have one for the low,low,price of only $500.00(cdn).Regular price was supposedly $1500.00.
I wheeled around and got in line and purchased the unit (a Technics-model forgotten).I spent the next two hours trying to find a cd to play on it.
When it was finally fired up, I thought the thing was broken.Laser bright sound that was like a head drill.I spent the next year or two returning cds cause I thought they had to be defective they sounded so bad.
My next cd player was a Rotel RCD 855.A step in the right direction. My buddy has it and still enjoys it.

It was 1985, somewhere around that time, plusr or minus one year.
I was going to college and had little disposable income.
A local radio station had this promo where they'd read out a number combination that you needed to find in a dollar bill. I had a match, called in, and won. I think it was three 5's.

The prize station's frequency, $103.50. I went to a RS, and they had a discontinued model on sale for $99.

KP

my first cd player was a nad 5425 from 1990 , i sold it for loose change in 2001 and still sounded great and working well, i now have a teac p 700 transport and musical fidelity a324 dac combo.

Yes, I bought the first Philips @'83 '84 for $800, after selling my record collection to the Fresno State library for $600. There were maybe 4 Telarc CDs available locally for $24.99 each. (And SACDs are SO expensive at $18.99) I was the only one in the dormitories who had one. Within the next year, the local tower had a 4'/4' rack with about, oh 24 titles in that annoying plastic with the insert above the CD case. In '86, three years after the introduction, one could go to San Francisco and choose from @300 titles. Wow. Three years after the introduction as they say! All I remember was about '88 the whole Tower store seemed to go CD and records just disappeared. Still I rarely stumbled across someone with a CD player at college parties.