Richard,…Totally outrageously good information,…Very interesting thanks.
I get some nostalgic feelings when we talk about CDM9 PRO,…I loved that mechanic.
I still have my Audiomeca Mephisto,…but I haven’t used it since 2004.
Philips ended up producing CDM9 PRO,…it was because of that Naim had to stop manufacturing some models.
Am I right about it Richard.?
I know I tried to buy a CDM9 PRO from Naim,to have in reserve…
But it went less well ,they must have spare parts for their own players.
OK, so I admit that CD playback did improve! Still, I like to keep things simple, and I was happy to be that weird guy who still has a turntable when everybody else had moved to CD. I continued to run an LP12 until a couple of years ago, when it had to go, to make room for my NDX.
Here in sunny Perth the first CD player we got to sell was the Sony CDP 101. The Phillips hit our shop very shortly after.
The release of the Sony was the one and only time I have ever had clients queuing for a piece of equipment. We simply couldn’t get enough in the early weeks post launch. And honestly as pretty die hard Flat Eathers we sold out despite not enjoying the sound.
We didn’t stock Philips, but as we stocked Marantz, and as here in Perth the wholesaler was affiliated with Philips they offered us 100 Philips CD100s.
They sold like hot cakes. Whilst still not my cup of tea, the sound was better than the Sony unit. But the failure rate was unbelievable. So within a few weeks we had almost half of our stock returned by clients as DOA, (dead on arrival), as our policy was to simply swap faulty newly sold items.
As a retailer it hurt. More so because Philips were not at all responsive to our dissatisfaction with the service back-up, (almost none was provided).
Sadly over the years that followed the reliability of Marantz also fell as the Philips/Marantz almagamation became more entrenched.
My first CD player was the Meridian, which was a tricked up Philips. Even that failed…
Ahh… interesting player… my first player was a Marantz CD45 around 1987 and was based on the Phillips CD 150 which had internal similarities to the CD100.
What is interesting all these players used 14 bit DAC, because at the time 16 bit DACs were very expensive and not so plentiful.
The other possibly more interesting thing is that these players first adopted what Naim still do to this day 30 plus years later (albeit Naim use an AD SHARC processor for the task now). Philips developed with the TDA1540 the digital pre DAC 4x oversampler and low pass filter (what we now generically refer to as ‘DSP’)… which allowed a more natural sound by noise shaping many of the reconstruction artefacts out of the audioband whilst being able to use less resonant analogue low pass filters.These players sounded smoother and more natural than some other players at the time… despite being only 14 bit.
The next gen DAC, the TDA1541 was 16 bit 4x oversampler DAC, and some claim it is one of the most musical DACs ever made… but Philips and Marantz has to deploy some clever product marketing techniques to shift the 1540 based players first… in consumer land bigger numbers means ‘obviously’ better… so 16 bit was always going to be better than 14 bit irrespective of the sound… one reason why in the specification blurb of these early players you will be hard pushed to see that they are 14 bits.
Peder, whenever there was a hint that Philips was going to end production of a particular mech then Naim would make a “lifetime buy” in the hope that as many as possible would be fulfilled. It didn’t always happen that way though. Of course Naim would then also have to rush back to the drawing board and redesign their players. It did though provide an opportunity to make improvements along the way, but arguably the move from the CDM9/CDM9Pro was a backward step, and many will recall some of the issues Philips had with their first VAM12xx linear tracking mechs, luckily fixed by the time Naim adopted the VAM1205.
Thanks to the policy of a lifetime buy, Naim famously held good stocks of replacement mechs, particularly of CDM4 and CDM9 mechs, whereas many brands were caught short. When I began as Naim’s customer service manager I regularly received requests from high end CD player owners desperate to locate a replacement mech for their expensive machine. I had to tell them that any spare mechs held by Naim were reserved for Naim owners. It was a bitter pill to swallow, I could understand, but I also know that it persuaded some of those owners to switch to Naim CD players, all thanks to Naim’s support policy.
I have a Philips 150 CD player, it has a very similar technical spec to the 100 including the dual mono DAC chips, but as it was designed as a budget machine it uses the plastic CDM1 galvonometer drive.
I recapped mine then set about modifying it so that now it operates as Philips first intended in proper 14 bit mode and no oversampling. I was spurred on by Peter Qvortrup of Audio Note who mentioned that he was testing a 12 Bit converter which he rather liked. Mine sounds surprisingly good complete with its up dated valve analogue output stage.
Interesting Richard , I had a CD104 from 1985 I think, I used it for about 10 years and it was the drawer that failed in the end . I loved that CD player and I just wish I could keep a source component for 10 years these days …
It’s nice to see these old pics , I wonder how they’d sound through our current systems ?
I had a Phillips CD102… I bought it as a package with 3free CD’s. Eric Clapton, Phil Collins And Dire Straits. I still have the CD’s but sadly not the player.
My Dad came with me to buy the CD104 from Dixons and got them to knock £20 off . I spent it straight away at WHSmith on 2 classics , Simple Minds ‘Once upon a time’ and Peter Gabriel ‘So’ .
Are you sure, the CD150 uses the TDA1540 DAC which is a 4 x oversampling 14 bit DAC. The digital filter and oversampler (DSP) SAA7030 device is incorporated into the 1540 DAC chip.
Have you somehow done surgery on the CD player to replace the digital filter and DAC?
As the TDA1540 was a well regarded Philips DAC that at the time sounded better than much of its competition (more smooth and musical) due to then newish implementation method of oversampling, and compensated to some extent for the SQ limitations of 14 bit and allowed the input and output filter to me more apodising (to use current vernacular) , I can’t imagine Philips wouldnot want their CD150 player not to use it…
Philips later developed the TDA1541, which was a 16 bit version of the TDA1540, again with 4x oversampling, and some consider this to this day one of the most musical DACs ever made for 44.1/16
I don’t claim any credit for my exploits, except for being brave enough to take a soldering iron to my CD players. The article (which I would have to seek out again) discusses modifications to many of the early Philips based machines including some very nice Grundig and Revox CD players.
In my machine the SAA7030 chip is separate and can be removed and linked out (4 No. wire links).
There is another pin which needs lifting or grounding (cant remember which) on one of the controller chips which sets the configuration to 14 bit. I just wanted to see how 14 bit CD sounded. :0)
I wasn’t suggesting that Philips didn’t intend the over sampling chip to be there in the CD150 only that Philips did intend the CD format to be ‘14 Bit’, but that in agreement and pressure from Sony with whom they developed the CD standard, they went with 16 bit. Obviously having now standardised on 16 bit they needed to find a way of using their already produced 14 bit chip set, hence the oversampling chip. So as I say, I just wanted to hear how Philips originally intended CD to sound.
B&O made machines which used the same TDA1540 chips, (as did others), these are equally modifiable and look quite pretty too if you can find one with the top lid still in one piece! All of my mods are reversible so I don’t feel any great guilt of desecration. Plus many of the machines are quite cheap on ebay and thought of as junk, (the shame of it).
My Sony 227 ES has two TDA 1541 16 bit DACs operating in parallel, a configuration which was popular at the time. Sony installed oversampling and referred to this machine as 18 Bit. Looking at the circuit, (they published them in those days!) the sighting of the power supplies and caps around the DACs is well thought out and nicely implemented, less so in the budget CD150.
Thanks, interesting… without oversampling I would have thought would need to have a higher order analogue low pass filter… to remove some of the grunge…
Yes you are right of course the SAA7030 was physically separate to the actual converter(s).it was incorporated into their TDA5040 implementation design pattern not the actual chip as I implied
Simon
I find all this a bit of cheap fun and i have learnt a little about the early CD players including some I have bought and previously considered sacrosanct.
Chatting to the chaps at Audio Note, i discovered that my DAC one is an early model, like some of the other converters in their range it uses the AN 1865 DAC chip. Mine incorporates a filter, later units dropped the filter, in the name of sound quality, they say.
I read this thread with interest especially comments on reliability, so here is my Philips CD303 bought for Christmas 1983 still working fine and on display sitting along side a similar period Luxman turntable both linked to my SuperUniti which is out of sight.
Richard,…Totally outrageously good information,…Very interesting thanks.
,they must have spare parts for their own players.
.
