The Compact Disc was quite a revolution when it came out. With a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz and a 16 bit rate, CDs marked the shift to digital music. Unfortunately, it seems to have fallen from being the playback medium of choice. These days, people either buy vinyl records because “they sound better” (especially when played on your vintage hipster record player you bought from Urban Outfitters) or MP3s online for the convenience. And noone even thinks about cassette tapes anymore.
27 years ago, today, marks when the first commercial CD players hit the market. Sure it was in Japan, but they always get the good tech first. The CDP-101 was hardly affordable either: $2,200 if you wanted one, so that you could listen to any one of the mere 113 albums available at release. Then those were another $40 a piece, don’t forget. But that didn’t stop Sony from moving 20,000 of these units in a single year.
So today, we can set aside the hate of the music industry (might be hard, considering there isn’t one anymore) and say Happy Birthday to one of the greatest data mediums of all time.
I still have my CDP-101 with the original box and the remote. The drawer mechanism needs some work, but if that were fixed, I believe it would still play. They weighed a ton, but I don’t remember a price of $2,200. I got mine from Read Brothers in South Carolina for $699, and it came with a coupon for five free CDs. I guess that was the US deal (list price of $999).
The price of $2,200 is the modern equivalent in “today’s dollars” of what the price was at the time of it’s release.
I too had a CDP-101. I bought it when in Europe through the military exchange. ISTR it was around $500. Great machine a kept going up until I upgraded it about 10 years later.
I remember being invited in late ‘80/early ‘81 to a Phillips dealers pre-release demo of the CD. The applause when he first showed the disk and played it was akin to the Apple fan-boys when Jobs revealed the MacBook Air.
Anyway, the rep then drilled a small hole (probably 1/32 or 1/64th I’m guessing) in the CD and played it again — error free and no skips. Very impressive at the time.
And Blu-Ray is following in that same fine tradition: charge a high price for a new, compelling format and then keep the prices artificially high as the cost of production drops to pennies a unit. Reject all corporate media.