Do You Remember Your First CD Player?

In the early eighties I was the general manager of a chain of high end audio stores in Southern California (up until 1989). I had been reading about CDs for a few years and couldn't wait to get one in. When they finally became available we ordered a Micro Seiki unit (I think it was a model 101). It was a toaster style machine made by some other company and private labled for Micro. There were so few CDs available then that the machine actually came with five CDs in the box!

I hooked it up to our best system and was ready to be blown away! It sounded sooooo bad that we all thought that it must be broken! Unforunately, we were wrong - it wasn't broken, it just sounded like it was. I was so disappointed!!

All the machines we tried back then from the various comapanies (and we went through a lot of them) were so sad that we refused to sell any machine until the second generation units arrived. Even though they weren't that much better, at least you didn't have to go screaming from the room when they were playing!

The first pretty decent machine I liked was a Magnavox 560 that was heavilly modified me as far as vibration control was concerned and Walt Jung did significant mods to the electronics.

Barry

Like one post already above, I bought a Denon DCD-1500 in 1986. I still have it (in a secondary system), it still works well, and still sounds pretty good.

My first cd player was a Sony X202ES which I bought in 1994. I still have the player and it has not given me one once of trouble. Of course I've upgraded since then but it still is a great player.

I got my first CD player many, many years ago as part of (shudder!) a Fisher rack system. It was a changer that used a little tray (each which had an eject button) for each CD. I got a CD a few days later. I never liked this CD player. Either the player or the CD I had was bright, and needed the tone controls. In short order, I drifted away for varous reasons. I completely lost interest when I heard my first good system--based around a turntable. That, and the low cost of used records, made me decide to forget about CD.

I stayed record based for many years. Finally, in 2001, I decided to get a CD player (an old Rotel) so I could get CDs from the library. I have to say that, overall, if I had to choose one and only one source, it would still be the LP. But, I care more about what's on the recording than the format, and CD has come a long ways--a good CD can sound decent even on my antique Rotel.