44 years ago Sony released the world's first CD player, and adjusted for inflation it cost about $3,700
44 years ago, on October 1, 1982, Sony put the world's first consumer CD player on sale. The CDP-101 kicked off the era of digital audio on compact discs, and shoppers in Japan could pick one up for JPY 168,000.
That works out to roughly $1,060 at today's exchange rate. Adjusted for inflation, the price climbs to about $3,700, which made the first CD player more of a luxury item than a mass-market gadget.
Sony originally planned a global launch of the format on October 1, 1982. Partner Philips wasn't able to get its own CD100 player ready in time, so Sony agreed to limit the first launch to Japan. Buyers in the US and Europe had to wait six months, until March 1983.
The first Sony player wasn't flawless. Digital-to-analog converters (DACs) were expensive, so the CDP-101 used a single chip for both the left and right stereo channels. With no sample-and-hold circuitry, the channels played back about 11 μs out of sync.
Before compact discs, home hi-fi setups were built around vinyl records and audio cassettes. A full set of separates also included a radio tuner, an amplifier, and speakers. Owners of these systems had to put up with sound quality that degraded over time.
Vinyl meant a constant fight to preserve the sound, since records suffered from dust, scratches, warping, and wear. Cassettes had their own problems, and one of the biggest was the inconsistent quality of the tape used by distributors.
Against that backdrop, compact discs offered several attractive advantages:
digital music data read by a laser
no wear on the media during playback
near-instant track selection
fast skipping and replay of tracks
Most buyers still had to wait a few years. Player prices first needed to fall to an acceptable level, and then CD albums had to become the standard for both new releases and classic remasters.
For the Japanese launch of the CDP-101, Sony worked with CBS to have 50 albums on disc ready. You'd expect the catalog to have grown noticeably by the western launch six months later, when Philips joined in. Instead, the worldwide release was backed by just 16 albums.
Compact discs only became a firm hi-fi staple by the mid-1980s. That was when releases marked DDD arrived, with recording, mixing, and mastering all done digitally, and player prices dropped considerably.
Around the same time, the first computers with built-in CD-ROM drives appeared. They only became common in the early to mid 1990s, with the dawn of the multimedia PC era.
The CDP-101 can still be found on the secondhand market. At the time of the original report, eBay had several units from 1982 listed for between $600 and $800.
