Sony released the first CD audio player on this day in 1982

Sony launched the world’s first CD player on this day in 1982, kickstarting the compact disc digital audio era. The Sony CDP-101 was released to consumers in Japan, priced at JPY 168,000. That converts to $1,060 at today’s exchange rate, and is about $3,700 adjusted for inflation. CD players were meant to be a worldwide launch on October 1, 1982, but tech partner Philips didn’t have its CD100 ready, so Sony agreed to limit this initial event launch to Japan. Six months later, U.S. and European consumers would get their chance to buy a CD player, starting March 1983.

As for this first CD player hardware release for consumers from Sony. It wasn’t perfect, of course, and Wikipedia points out one particular limitation of the CDP-101: It had just one DAC for both left and right audio channels due to the high cost of these converters. Without sample-and-hold circuitry, this meant the stereo channels were approximately 11 μs out of sync.

Before CDs, home hi-fi setups of the era were typically built around vinyl records and compact audio cassette tapes. For a full set of separates, an enthusiast would also add a radio tuner, an amplifier, plus speakers - of course. Users of these older established pre-recorded audio media would have to cope with music affected by various imperfections over time. Vinyl sound quality would be a battle to maintain against the challenges of dust, scratches, warping, and wear. I remember pre-recorded cassettes had other problems, the major one for me being the variable quality of the tapes used by the distributors.

So, CDs came with many attractive promises, most importantly in the context of the early 1980s – providing digital music data that was read by a laser and wouldn’t wear. CDs also offered near-instant track selection, skipping, and replay. But most consumers would have to wait a few years: firstly for the price of player hardware to approach an acceptable level, and secondly for CD albums to become the norm for new releases and classic remasters.

Sony worked with CBS to have 50 CD albums on the shelves when the CDP-101 debuted in Japan. You’d think that six months later, when Philips joined in, and we saw the worldwide launch, that the catalog would have grown. Surprisingly, the ‘western’ launch was backed by just 16 titles.

It wouldn’t be until the mid-1980s when landmark DDD releases arrived and player prices dipped to much more acceptable levels that CDs would become established as a hi-fi staple. At around the same time, we started to get computers with built-in CD-ROM drives, but these would only start to become common from the early to mid 1990s and the dawn of the multimedia PC era.

If you are a retro tech fan who would be interested in buying a Sony CDP-101 before they all end up in museums, we noticed that you can buy them on eBay. At the time of writing, there were several of these 1982-vintage CD players for between $600 and $800.

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