Sony CDP-101
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The Sony CDP-101 is the world's first commercially released
compact disc player A CD player is an electronic device that plays audio compact discs, which are a digital optical disc data storage format. CD players were first sold to consumers in 1982. CDs typically contain recordings of audio material such as music or audio ...
. The system was launched in Japan on October 1, 1982 at a list price of 168,000 yen (approx US$730).Sony History: A Great Invention 100 Years On
/ref> The Japan-only launch was partially because Philips, Sony's partner in the development of the CD format, was unable to meet the original agreed launch date. Rather than agree to a full postponement, Sony agreed to delay the launch of the format outside Japan by six months. The Philips CD100 launched in November 1982, although early Philips players contained some Sony components. In line with the agreement, the system was launched worldwide in March 1983.


Design

Demonstration CD players from Sony had the disc placed vertically in the machine allowing the CD face to be visible through a transparent front whilst playing. The CDP-101 instead opted for a horizontal tray-loading system. The case and front panel of the system were manufactured from plastics. The front of the unit featured a vacuum fluorescent display panel to provide information such as track number and playing time, an infrared receiver for the included remote control, and buttons to control playback, open and close the tray and toggle the display between showing elapsed and remaining playing time. The only dial was for adjusting the volume level of a 1/4" headphone jack. At the back of the unit there are two on/off switches, one labeled Auto Pause and the other Anti Shock. There are two RCA jacks to carry left and right channels of audio; a 26-pin accessory connector is included, presumably for future developments that did not materialize. There is also a heatsink on the back.Sony CDP-101
/ref> The remote control unit, RM-101, has most of the same buttons as the main system. It omits the open/close button and display toggle, but has numbered buttons unlike the main unit, that allow a particular track number to be selected. The model name CDP-101 was chosen by
Nobuyuki Idei Nobuyuki Idei (出井 伸之, ''Idei Nobuyuki''; 22 November 1937 – 2 June 2022) was a Japanese businessman. He was chairman and group chief executive officer of Sony Corporation until 7 March 2005. He was a director of General Motors, Baidu, ...
, who headed Sony's Audio Division. "101" represents the number 5 in binary notation and was chosen because Idei considered the model to be of "medium class".


Technical

Because of the high cost of
digital-to-analogue converter In electronics, a digital-to-analog converter (DAC, D/A, D2A, or D-to-A) is a system that converts a digital signal into an analog signal. An analog-to-digital converter (ADC) performs the reverse function. There are several DAC archite ...
s ("DACs") at the time, the CDP-101 has only one DAC for both the left and right audio channels. There is no sample-and-hold circuitry to delay the first channel until the other is ready, so the left and right channels are out of sync by approximately 11  µs.Sony CDP-101 CD Player
/ref> The output voltage is 2V RMS. Unlike the Philips CD100 which uses
oversampling In signal processing, oversampling is the process of sampling a signal at a sampling frequency significantly higher than the Nyquist rate. Theoretically, a bandwidth-limited signal can be perfectly reconstructed if sampled at the Nyquist rate o ...
to enable the use of a 14-bit DAC, the CDP-101 features a 16-bit DAC that was designed and manufactured in-house by Sony. The decision to use 16-bit CD encoding was made at Sony's insistence, because Philips had already developed a 14-bit DAC, and Sony was worried that would allow Philips to get their product to market first if 14-bit encoding had been chosen.


Legacy

Sony continued to produce CD players, with models such as the CDP-30 following soon after.


References


External links

{{Commonscat
Stereophile.com - Sony CDP-101 Compact Disc Player review
Compact disc Audio players Sony hardware Sony product codes Products introduced in 1982