National CD Player Day is celebrated on October 1. Music collections have encountered some pretty severe changes throughout history, from Vinyl to 8-Track to Tape Recorder Cassette to CD, to MP3 Players, and onto our mobile phones. Arguably one of the biggest changes to occur in the music world was the CD, and an icon of this move was the CD Player. As soon as it joined the scene, cassette tapes were on their way to being a thing of the past, with CDs soon replacing all the clunky cartridges and coming packed full of unique features and more music than a cassette could hold!
More here: “On October 1st, 1982 the first ever commercially available compact disk player was released in Japan. The Sony CDP-101 was released for around 168,000 yen, or what would translate to over $1750 in today’s US dollars! That unit resembled a VCR. Later, the laser-based music storage medium would become cheaper and more mainstream and CD boomboxes and portable CD players became more common. By the turn of the century, the CD had mostly replaced the dying audio cassette format. However, CDs were soon overtaken by digital music and the MP3 player, although CDs still sell to a certain extent.”
CDs get a bum rap these days, in part because many early CDs were badly mastered, using the same narrow EQ frequencies previously necessary to avoid the needle from skipping out of an LP’s grooves. But the transition from scratchy, easily damageable LPs, and hissy, lo-fi cassettes to a portable digital audio medium was quite remarkable for those of us who lived through that period.