January 1983!!!

A review of Sony's first CD player.... With reference to B&O (concerning the remote controle)...

http://www.stereophile.com/cdplayers/193

Karel.

Thanks for sharing! My dad bought our household's first CD player in the mid/late eighties, a Phillips model. I think it's still somewhere in the house. It has a cool "index" feature which allowed skipping to different sections within a track, if a CD is mastered with it. I never see that feature in any CD player these days, and besides very few CD's make use of it. We had one, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (published by Deutsche Grammophone if I remember correctly), with the "pictures" separated by indexes.

Leo

Yes, that was fun reading

I bought my first CD (a Sony CDP-30) in 1985, and it is still in use. Never needed any service, which is more than can be said for B&O players a third of its age...

If was rather difficult to get hold of any records those days though, living near a smaller city... I think I managed through the first year of ownership with only four CDs

leogenghis:

It has a cool "index" feature which allowed skipping to different sections within a track, if a CD is mastered with it. I never see that feature in any CD player these days, and besides very few CD's make use of it. We had one, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (published by Deutsche Grammophone if I remember correctly), with the "pictures" separated by indexes.

My B&O 5000 systems Beogram CD50 has the index function, and you are right apart from classical recordings (especially opera) in the early days it was a feature that was never exploited - I guess because the majority of players never implemented it.

Concerning the indexing on CD's... Jean-Michel Jarre 's original CD releases have indexing on "En concert Houston/Lyon" and "En attendant Cousteau".. Rather useful.. no need of pressing the fastforward to that specific part of the song...

Indexing on these specific was left out wen the came out as "remastered version".. Too bad.

Speaking of indexing, those buttons were there on my old Sony, just as prominently as the track back/forward buttons.

From those old days, I have at least one CD that has proper indices, but I just can't remember which one it is! Seems like my CD6500 would at least display the current index on the MCP, if not let me select it. For some reason, the index feature never took off properly, even the classical music records just reverted to using tracks instead of indices. Maybe the manufacturers tried to save the feature to the "better" models, shooting themselves in the foot in the process as the technology was so new. It's not like it would cost a dime to have indices on the record....

Yes, I wish indexes had stayed. On some CD's the tracks are so plentiful that they go up to the 20's and beyond. Say I bought a CD containing several string quartets - it would make a lot of sense to program a track to a whole quartet, and index the movements. With only tracks, I've no idea when a new quartet is playing without looking at the booklet, what with some quartets having three movements, others four or five!

Leo

Enigma's first album, MXMXC A.D, also had indexes on tracks 2 and 7