[Arny Krueger]

"Audio Empire" wrote in message

On Fri, 11 Mar 2011 11:14:24 -0800, Doug McDonald wrote
(in article ):

On 3/7/2011 7:46 AM, Arny Krueger wrote:


I owned one of the first CDP 101 players sold in the SE
Michigan area. At one time I owned *every* CD title
that was being sold by the largest chain in town. I
scoured the largest record stores throughout the
midwest when I was building my CD collection in the
early days. I still have an operational CDP 101 at my
disposal, and know exactly how it sounds and performs
on the bench.



I too still have a CDP101 that plays disks, with a
little nudge to the drawer.

It still sounds fine.

Interesting. I refused to review one after listening to
it for several days when they first came out. I thought
it sounded awful. I remember telling a friend that if
this was the "promise" of CD, I wanted no part of it.

I am remined of my CDP 101 by my 60" Mitsubishi HDTV. Give it some good
video and it looks wonderful, but give it some video that lacks resolution
and it looks pretty sad. The CDP 101 was very impressive with the many
well-mastered discs that came out at the same time, but there were these
other discs that made you wonder why anybody ever bothered. I was prepared
to expect the best by some live recordings that I had heard on a PCM-F1. The
most questionable performance aspect of the CDP 101 was a very gentle
roll-off above 12 KHz, due to the use of analog brickwall filters. Compared
to what phono cartrdiges do, it was a nit.

The
first CD player that I thought sounded OK (and, in fact,
was the first one I owned) was the little 14-bit,
top-loading Philips/Magnavox CD-100 (I still think it was
one of the best built and the prettiest, by far). It
actually sounded very decent.

In reality the CD-100 was a true 16 bit player courtesy of 4X oversampling.
While I've done technical testing of several CDP 101s, I've never had an
operational CD-100 to work with. The extant technical tests of the day are
very skimpy, but they do suggest that it was capable of true 16 bit
performance.


Can't say the same for many
of the early CDs, though. I still remember a recording of
Strauss' "Alpine Symphony" on DGG with Von Karajan and
the Berlin Philharmonic. I still think that it is the
worst sounding recording I've ever heard. PERIOD!

This recording was made in 1981, and apparently released on CD several
times., the most recent Cd release being dated 1993.