Don’t be fooled by the “Digital Audio Laser Disc” label on the CD 120. It’s just a CD player, but an unusual CD player it is. It loads like a cassette deck. Hit the Open/Close button and the door tilts out and ejects your CD. Push another one into the slot, hit Open/Close again, and it sucks the CD down and closes the door. The CD 120 has useful but now-rare features like variable-level output (so you can connect it straight to an amp or powered speakers) and a headphone jack — but oddly enough, there’s no track skip button. According to Sauck, this is a first-generation CD player from 1983 or 1984.
I thought the mechanism would be trouble-prone, but according to Innovative Audio repair technician Brian Street, the early CD players were pretty bulletproof.
“The first-gen players had long-life lasers and long-life sealed optics, so they last quite well,” he said. “Some are beginning to reach the end of their life. Often the motors are failing but the optics are still running.”
There are so many great products from the past that either perform better, look better, or do both better than their current counterparts. You don't even have to even make subjective comparisons to arrive to this conclusion, either. The attention to detail many of the engineers had was outstanding.
The importance is that both modern designers and consumers should make comparisons between past and present to decide both how to design (what to focus) and what to buy (between 2nd hand in good condition or new).
The audio oscilloscope on the Marantz 2150 Tuner was for observing and correcting multipath in the FM Signal. By rotating your antenna (you did have a yagi antenna on a rotator, didn't you?) you would see the multipath change on the display. If you were in a metropollitan area with many high buildings, sometimes the best signal was a reflection off of a building. The scope gave you a visual indication of the strength of the multipath (noise) and allowed you an weasy way to minimize it. Also available in that time period was the Technics SH-3433, a standalone scope that provided FM Multipath viewing as well as 4 channel audio viewing.
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There are so many great products from the past that either perform better, look better, or do both better than their current counterparts. You don't even have to even make subjective comparisons to arrive to this conclusion, either. The attention to detail many of the engineers had was outstanding.
The importance is that both modern designers and consumers should make comparisons between past and present to decide both how to design (what to focus) and what to buy (between 2nd hand in good condition or new).
The audio oscilloscope on the Marantz 2150 Tuner was for observing and correcting multipath in the FM Signal. By rotating your antenna (you did have a yagi antenna on a rotator, didn't you?) you would see the multipath change on the display. If you were in a metropollitan area with many high buildings, sometimes the best signal was a reflection off of a building. The scope gave you a visual indication of the strength of the multipath (noise) and allowed you an weasy way to minimize it. Also available in that time period was the Technics SH-3433, a standalone scope that provided FM Multipath viewing as well as 4 channel audio viewing.