I was listening to Suzanne Vega on my CDX last night and a couple of things struck me. Firstly I wondered if the CDX was the first CD player that has the CD visibly on display like a record. After one or two more alcoholic drinks I was thinking just how much like a vinyl beogram the CDX looks. I got an LP and placed it on the CDX lid and sure enough if you put the record flush with the left hand side of the CDX then the central hole in the record is at the exact point about which the CD in the CDX rotates. Beautiful! I always thought the disk was slightly ofset in the machine for ease of production with the phillips components not because of great design.

Even though I have owned my CDX for a while, this drunken studying of it just makes me realise that B&O really is designed superbly and the more I look at some of the products, the more I find in them to appreciate.

By the end of the evening though you could have persuaded me that anything was the greatest piece of hi fi equipment in the world

beaker:

Even though I have owned my CDX for a while, this drunken studying of it just makes me realise that B&O really is designed superbly and the more I look at some of the products, the more I find in them to appreciate.

I know exactly what you mean.  I have had one now for about 6 months and love it both as a piece of aesthetic design and for its performance. 

As far as design and performance are concerned, I think the only comparable designers/manufacturers of CD players/transports is Meridian, where Bob Stuart and Alan Boothroyd have created some beautiful and great sounding CD players, including what was arguably the first audiophile CD player back in 1984, as well as being the only other major manufacturer pursuing truly active loudspeakers 

I'm a bit surprised more mention of Meridian isn't made on the "Beoworld" website, given the design credibility of their products and the possible interconnection of the two brands' products.  I've often wondered if, for example, people have hooked Beovisions up to the Meridian DVD/CD transports and active Digital Speakers, or have used Meridian transports as a source for Beolab 5s or 9s.

Cleve

I seem to remember that both the CDX and the earliest Meridian CD players used the same Philips 100/104 base. Most of the credit must go to Philips who actually built the CDX!

The CDX is so good I have two: a CDX and a CDX2. Must admit that I can't hear much of a difference between the two, despite their different architectures.

It does look great.

Mine is used with a Beomaster 8000 and sound/design follows each other greatly.

It reads cdr's and don't jump as much as my CD6500.

I don't miss remote link options on it.

It a brilliant piece of B&O/Phillips

In the early days of CD, there were a number of top loading and vertically front loading CD players that left the disc partly visible, Pioneer P-D1 as just one example. I think they may actually have been a majority during the first years! So B&O was far from being the first in this respect, but they may quite well have been the last for a while, since most other manufacturers gave up non-stackable equipment already in the early 80s.

I've never had the pleasure to see nor hear a CD-X(2) in action, but I do have the contemporary CD50. I used to hate it at first (both the looks and the quirky operation), but it has somehow grown on me. The loading mechanism is not silent, but the sound it makes is pleasant. It's fun to play with it even when it happens to have one of those days that it just won't play a record!