"vintage" CD players? (1 Viewer)

Not sure if this is the right place to post this one!

Do any of you have opinions on "vintage" cd players? When I say vintage I mean something made in the mid to late 80's or possibly early 90's.

My grandparents have a stero system that they bought in 84 or 85. It's a Sansui and at the time it was pretty much top of the line. It has all seperates....turtabe, tape deck, equilizer, amp/receiver, and cd player. Not to mention some very hefty speakers. Anyway, she doesn't need most of it anymore and it's rarely used. I took the CD player home last night and hooked it up in my small 2-channel system in my home office. It sounds pretty darn good for being so old! It's solid as a rock and heavy! And, made in Japan! It will even play CD-R's......of course it doesn't have digital out but I'm using a vintage Marantz anyway so that's not a concern.

So....do any of you have or use vintage CD players????

I have a Sony 5 disc carousel player I bought back in 1989 or 1990. I still use it and it works great. I lost the remote a couple of years back but it operates manually just fine.

I thought CD players were supposed to have improved with each generation, what with "over sampling" "1 bit MASH", "18 bit resolution", and a half dozen other marketing slogans...

There was a thread at Steve Hoffman's on this subject. Most of the replies said it was all rubbish, a few said that there were some good players to be had at thrift stores.

Just to do my part, I pulled my Sony CDP-30 (Build Date July 1985) out of mothballs and hooked it up to my systems.

I have not been able to get the levels matched to allow a proper A/B with my other disc players, but I will say that if I did not know that it was playing, I would not have thought I was hearing a 20 year old machine. And the build quality slays most any similarly priced contemoary machine....just pressing the Open/Close button to feel how solid the disc tray is built is a kick.

I burned a copy of the remaster of Dire Straits "Love Over Gold" for my testing, but even with the levels off a bit, I am not hearing anything from the vintage player that would cause me to toss it.

No, at times I do not have a life

BGL

My first was a Magnavox from 1989. Pretty basic player that I paid $136 for. I remember they had one for $118, but I never liked buying the cheapest thing on the shelf so I opted for the next one up. Still have it, somewhere(?). I'm sure it still works. Also sure it weighs a ton compared to the $39 ones at the discount stores. We used to call them "dime stores" back then.

my sony d5 portable still works fine. 300 bux in '84. thousands of miles in my car. many hours hooked up to 2 stereo rigs in the house.

ag.