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top ten iconic CD players

Which technologies revolutionised CD playback?
Upsampling?
What else?
Not a lot. CD pretty hit the market well developed. Sony had the ergonomics/user interface and Philips had the oversampling and great sounding DAC chips. By the time second generation players came out CD players were fully sorted and to a large extent it has just been reinventing the wheel and things getting cheaper since then.
 
I love the look of all the 47 Labs gear. I'd have one of their CD players if I could afford one.

I had the Shigaraki, beautiful but rubbish.
You have to press a button for a few seconds to get the table of contents and in my copy it had to be a precise amount of time, otherwise it wouldn't work...
Built with cheap parts (mine used the laser assembly of a Sharp boombox) and no particular care.
Keep away if possible.
 
A friend of mine bought a CDP-101 about 10 nanoseconds after CD was introduced. Of course I was gobsmacked, but a little disquieted by the fact I kept wanting to turn it down. Soon after, another friend bought the Mission DAD whatever-their-first-one-was. I kept wanting to turn that one up. So that gets my vote.

If we get to ‘top ten iconic settings on a Khozmo 64-step display’ my current faves are 38 (while reading) and 56 (for air guitar sessions.)
 
Meridian MCD or MCD Pro.
Cambridge cd1
California Audio labs Tempest
Wadia 16
Philips CD850
Meridian 200/203
Marantz CD7
Krell KPS 20i
Musical Fidelity Nuvista
Mission PCM 7000
Sony cdp101
 
For design and interface, B&O Beogram CD 4500. It's the one in the middle.
318272-64d16aa4-beosystem_4500_bang__olufsen_.jpg
 
Roksan ROK-DP1 CD transport with ROK-DA1 DAC and ROK-DS1 PSU, a mate got one when they came out, I remember it being a hulk of a player in the flesh.
B7-A01-B1-C-1297-4196-BB26-64-BBD9-CA3-ABE.png
 
1. Sony CDP 101, well yeah, but now I'm stuck


For the sake of this thread, the strictly enforced rules, which everyone is free to disregard because that's what we do, is to interpret iconic as "widely recognized as being important" as opposed to the best.

Choosing the best CD player will no doubt end up in some sort of subjectivist / objectivist punch up about which player has the lowest inaudible levels of THD or most analogue-like mids or whether a 0.112db dip at 20 Khz matters given that most of us are old farts who haven't heard a tone at 20 kHz since 1969.

Which 10 CD players changed audio history? I think we can all agree on number one, unless you don't agree.

After this thread we'll do the top ten Star Trek episodes.

Joe
CDP-101 and CD100 have to be the first that come to mind. And most of them still work and frankly sound alright.
 
I love the look of all the 47 Labs gear. I'd have one of their CD players if I could afford one.

Really? Thin sheet tin, Casio calculator 1980s lcd screen, coarse perspex, secondary school soldering, cheap as chips Chinese sweatshop components and Maplin-style amateur circuit boards. They look like they were put together in a shed by Fanny Crocker Arkwright Wainwright Bigglesworth for two groat in Wesley Pegden’s shed with some Japanese mumbo jumbo Zen marketing twaddle.

2e5478f0c3b9714193e36a46ef8cbd6b.jpg
 
Really? Thin sheet tin, Casio calculator 1980s lcd screen, coarse perspex, secondary school soldering, cheap as chips Chinese sweatshop components and Maplin-style amateur circuit boards. They look like they were put together in a shed by Fanny Crocker Arkwright Wainwright Bigglesworth for two groat in Wesley Pegden’s shed with some Japanese mumbo jumbo Zen marketing twaddle.
Are you done?
 


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