A lot of sony’s design work still holds up. I love their hi fi / portable electronics from around the mid 80s, the later walkmen were a bit shite though. Their design was that good that steve jobs himself was such a fan he actually gave permission for sony to run mac os on their laptops around 2008 ish, although they never did.
Hey Colin, im not into retro audio equipment but as of lately I really enjoyed this series of videos on the subject, the history and story behind it along with your great narration is truly truly top tier! Thank you for posting! Love your work
I remember how much they would skip if you bumped them. I was so excited when I could actually buy a CD player with that like 10 second buffer to prevent skips. People like me who kept them in our jacket pockets, it was like a miracle to be able to now worry about it moving around inside our pockets.
So many generations of anti skip, the first ones with only a few seconds would skip like crazy after a bit. Once you got anti skip of a minute or more could bring them anywhere. My favourite was a Panasonic shockwave, such a great player with rugged good looks.
@@Angultra Yup, I have a few with good anti-skip. My Philips Magnavox one (AZ 7781/17) from 1999 has 25-second anti-skip, which is enough for just walking around or riding the bus. I took it to school a lot too, often listened to music when working quietly in the library or in my architectural drafting classes. And I have a Sony CD Walkman (D-E226CK; unknown mfg date, the bottom label got peeled off) that I used in the car with a tape adapter. I think my dad or my brother might've had it first; it has velcro strips on the bottom which I don't recall using. (In my cars, it stayed put well enough without velcroing it down.)
Our local Chinese restaurant is still using it as long I can remember. It's on top of an even older Sony receiver/tape deck they use since their opening in the 70's. TLDR: Quite reliable equipment since it runs all those years almost every day.
This was my first CD player. My wife bought it for me when it went on sale. I used it with my home system and several years later, when I purchased a component CD player, it moved to my car, a Honda Accord where it was powered via the cigarette lighter port and fed the system via a cassette adaptor. It served me well for a number of years in the Accord, until I bought a new Accord with a built in CD player. It was a great piece of kit, that D5. Great video.
This was also my very first CD player. Sony and Philips introduced the compact disc digital audio format in 1982. Sony also had the world's first car CD player released in 1984.
This is truly one of those CD players that's "portable" and that means Luggable. you can take it with you, but you're not expected to use it on the go, you're meant to use it on a desk or on a plane
fun fact...my dad had this exact player when i was growing up and it had a shoulder strap case with it and we both used it on the go all the time. Worked great.
I like this design for that reason, it looks good sitting on a desk or shelf in a minimalist style. The actual portable ones to run with looked horrible, especially velcroed to car dashboards in the 90s.
No, it definitely skipped. There was no buffer whatsoever, which made startup nice and fast. I'm not sure if I had the very first one in the US but it was apparently from the earliest shipment in 1984. No one who saw it had ever seen another before.
incorrect I walked around with it playing ac/dc, gary moore and queen all over the place. the portable case had a strap like a camera case strap and you just walked kinda like you had a stick up your ass to cut down on the skipping.
Kudos for the video. Sony D-5 was also sold by Pioneer tagged as Pioneer PD-C7. Except for cosmetic changes of the body, they are identical. Pioneer released the very first portable Boomboxes with CD player using detachable PD-C7 player docked in a slot on the top - Pioneer Boomboxes CK-R500 (single cassette) and CK-W700 (double cassette). A slider panel at the back end of the dock has two protruding pins for Power and Audio, which exactly engages with the Power input and Line-Out sockets of the cd player. In fact the Sony D-5 can be readily docked on Pioneer CK-R500 and CK-W700 and will play seamlessly. I had a Pioneer CK-R500 in the 80's during my childhood, but with a blank CD player bay. But now, I have both D-5 and PD-C7 and a NIB Pioneer CK-W700.
I have a very recent Sony that looks great but is the biggest piece of crap I’ve ever used literally my grandma immediately hated the sound! Sony is so big they make amazing and they make crap!
I graduated from DeVry/Chicago during 1985, with an Associate Degree in Electronics Technology and began my Electronics Technician career that same year. I have been into technology since early childhood.
I got a D50 (as it was here in NZ) new in the mid 80s, and it still works fine. As you said it was/is mostly used as a home player but did take in the car with the lighter socket power adaptor. Pretty amazing it still plays as well as ever, or perhaps not. 'It's a Sony' from an era when that really meant something.
I also purchased the large battery case for the Sony D-5 which required 6 C size or 4 D size batteries. I purchased it from an audiophile store in Chicago during 1985.
It was probably cheaper for manufactures to make discs without the case so CDR's won the race. Even DVD RAM dropped the caddy case after it's short success. DVD RAM cart discs looked like a big MiniDisc and worked very similar to MiniDisc's. I could use them in my PC or DVD Recorder.
@@marekvrbka You're right, I just tried encoding a CD rip to vorbis and opus at 64 and 96k with ffmpeg and 64k vorbis sounds much better than opus 96... Don't know why that is, opus is _supposed_ to be better at everything, not just speech.
I still got tons of self recorded minidiscs from 1995, unfortunately many of them are not playable anymore, they disintegrate and they are genuine sony md's, very expensive back then. :-(
My Nana brought one these back for me as a gift from Hong Kong in early 1984, prior to international release. It came with the portable speakers. Super cool product.
I still have this player with the battery pack and the slide on power jack. Still working great. Just don’t shake it while it’s playing. There’s no memory buffer to keep it from skipping.
I still have a D70 from 1986 which here in Australia was called the D50-MKII. It's a slicker looking version of the D50 and has a thin special battery the same size as the player but about 10mm thick that clips to the bottom as standard. I don't remember how long it worked but I remember it getting to a certain point on any disc then skipping backwards, like the worm gear had a flaw at that point. It was by no means old at that point, maybe a couple of years only. But by that time it was out of warranty so it got tossed in a drawer and stayed there for 35+ years. Now I have advanced electronics skills and equipment so one of these days I'll find it, open it and figure out what's wrong and hopefully fix it.
bought mine in 85. d-50 bought at us military base in UK. Came with the portable case and the wall connector with rca outputs.... played this a lot with my technics sa1010 receiver. with kenwood 350 watt speakers.,..
I had the first Sony with CD boombox, in 1985, which I purchased for $500.00 It cost $600.00 at Neiman Marcus. Talk about markup. A couple of years later I had a portable Sony CD Player, but with an attached Ni-Cad battery pack for over $300.00. Like it was stated, before Apple with the iPod, Sony was a leader in their innovations and packaged their products well as a friend so stated to me.
The D5 was my entry into the World of CD Music -- I had rented an apartment in Tokyo for the summer of 1985 so my family could be with me (got tired of flying from USA every 2 weeks for a year), and space was at a premium. I had bought the D5 with the integrated a.c. adapter base and a pair of little Sony powered speakers, fit perfectly on a little shelf. Then I started dreaming about a really portable Walkman CD player to replace my tiniest Sony Walkman, but I think that the MiniDisc probably came next to replace my Walkman for my frequent flying. Thanks for the memory, Colin!
I owned this player when it came out, i also purchased the portable battery pack. I really enjoyed it but the big caveat is that it skipped so easily since it had no buffer. I had to put it in the portable battery pack and hang it by its strap to the back of my passenger seat, swaying from side to side, it did not skip. I used it as a cd source for my Concorde cassete receiver in my car, one of the first to have an aux input. Thanks for the great video, brought me back to when i was 19....
Awesome vid! Love seeing old Discmans! At the bottom of the price comparison chart was the Yamaha CD-2 (built in 1984), which I own. Still works, but the laser gets out of allignement occasinally and needs a good whack to get it back on track. It has the best remote transmit I've ever seen. Keep up the awesome vids!
I already owned 5 CDs when I bought my Sony D5 with the D50 back in the 80s. I loved that machine! I lent it to a friend who returned it broken. I hope to find one in great condition again someday.
Man, seeing the Sony Walkman cassette player brought back memories. I wish I still had it. Can't even remember what happened to it. I think mine was a different color. I remember more of how it felt with the strap around me, and the satisfying sound of putting in the cassette. I loved that thing!
I owned the original Sony D-5 when first released in 1985! Good times! The world's first consumer compact sized compact disc digital audio player. I purchased it new for $300 in 1985, which was affordable. About $1,200 in 2024 dollars. I also purchased Sony's service manual for the D-5.
I was the first DJ in Cleveland to use CD's and the D5. I still have over 1500 original cd's that I used. I made cases to fit and it took up half the space of records and I never had skipping issues like the other DJ's... I could play anywhere and the sound was Fantastic.
I used to have a JVC boombox thing that had a removable CD player that looked a lot like this, I said to be manufactured in '86, you could take it out of the main body and used as an independent unit (with a power brick), can't remember the model...
I bought one when I was 19 and stationed in Germany, it didn’t dawn on me that it was the first portable CD player, it just fit well with my Sony FH-7 Mk II stereo system I bought a couple months before. Yes, it was prone to skipping if bumped. And it had a lot of power as mentioned but back then, most stereos and players had a lot of power which was something each company increased year to year to gain a market advantage. And the price was pretty strong at just over $200 when I bought mine and back then a young Army Private made just $650 a month so it was steep. If you had a full time job near minimum wage, you’d be getting around $460 a month so you can see how strong the price was to the average person in my age demographic back then.
The D-50 / D-5 took the EBP-300 Battery Case, which attached underneath and into the back and allowed you to go portable with it. I used to work for Sony. :D
I bought one new in early 86 at Price Club (Costco now). It came with 2 docks. One with batteries and one for home with a real power cord coming out of the back. It was my jump from cassettes to CDs. If I remember correctly, it was about $250. It got broken in a car accident that year, and I replaced it with a dedicated car CD unit from Yamaha.
II bought one in 1985. It cost 900 gulden in the Netherlands. I had to work for it for 8 weeks plus graduation money from my parents. It worked well for 2 years, but then the laser got wrong or misaligned. I carried it around with a 6V lead-acid battery on a belt. Worked fine, for a while. I still have it, non-working.
2:51 Such an early CD player being able to do CDR's just shows that CDR's are a good test for poorly designed machines of any age. If your player can't handle CDR's, quite probably it is also picky with factory pressed CDs, and won't have much tolerance to compensate for discs with not so pristine a bottom surface.
I've had that thing back then, it was impossible to listen to a CD while walking since this player had no buffer, the CD would skip all the time. Later I had the Sony MZ1 Minidisc recorder, it was about the same size, but was playing the MD's perfectly also while walking or even running. Battery life was bad tough, I think it was approx. 60 Minutes, or one minidsic (60 or 74 minutes)
being the first one the skipping sucked but we didnt have anything better, you just learned to walk stiff with them. I was barely 18 when i got mine in 85
I had one of these. I bought it in 1995 when I started my first job while still at uni. From memory, it was around AU$500, with the AC adapter that connected to the back of it. I also had some Sony headphones to go with it. Later I had it connected to a twin cassette boom box. I was using it until I moved to London 1993. I didn't bring it with me, nor any of my CDs. When I left Australia I sure how long I would be away. In London I bought a new Sony Discman, which I used to listed on the train to and from work.
With Sony, I only owned a CDP-200 CD player back then and never a Discman. The only two remaining ones I still have are a Panasonic with built-in speakers and another off brand that included FM transmitter (for the car radio).
This was my first player, bought on clearance as a showroom demo unit with the battery pack.Still have it, and last time I checked still works. Never used it with the battery pack though, just too ridiculously huge.
they probably were, technics, sony all the big guyd used to have their HI-FI stuff follow a similar design so that the components would match, i have an older technics mini component system that looks very similar to that CD player, kinda makes me want to find it, since the CD player i currently have is also a technics, but it was a larger unit made for the larger component systems and just the CD player is larger than the rest of the components.
Can you imagine how cool you would have felt, walking down the street with this thing in a backpack listening to CD music in 1984. Hmmm Considering i was only 2 years old at the time, I think its going to be a struggle.
(Resuming here since apparently TH-cam just removed the edit feature?) Anyway, I fashioned my own battery pack and used it on a bus in California where I was in college. Other students refused to believe it was real. The only other time I had similar reactions was with the original Tesla Model 3, and people on the road reacted for months on end since it was also the first one they had ever seen.
I recall some of the later models, compared to the contemporary cassette players, they were really expensive in the UK. Didn't this also have a kit to fit to your car stereo?
I couldn’t find any mention of such a car audio kit for the Sony D-5a though I maybe there were cassette adaptors on the market during the lifetime of the D-5a that would allow you use with a car cassette player. You’d still need a battery pack or 12v cigarette lighter plug power plug of which I not aware existing though maybe it did but just is rare these days on the vintage/used market. You’d still have the issue of skipping a lot with any even slightly ruff driving as these models predated by a decade the electronic anti-skip feature introduced in 1995 for portable and car CD players. Some early portable CD and Car CD players (pre-1995) solved this somewhat by including heavy rubber shock absorbers into the case making them much bulkier then skip-prone models. Given the D-5a doesn’t even have rubber shock absorbers due to it small size (for the time period) and the fact that it’s not really intended as a battery operated portable walk-around with/Drive around CD player despite offering an external battery pack as an option. Now if you had one of these units at the time and where handy with tools you could probably rig up some sort of shock absorber cradle for it so you could plug it into to your stereo with a cassette adaptor (if they existed then) or otherwise add somehow an aux audio in jack to your car stereo system. You;d also Cig lighter DC power adaptor that would work with this unit. Without some sort of shock absorber you’d only be able to use it in your car for use on well maintained roads and even with one off-road or use on very poorly maintained roads use would likely still be a problem. Did such a car kit exists back then in the mid-80’s, I don’t see anything mentioning it in my Google searches but maybe it just wasn’t common enough accessory to show up on Google these days.
my thinking with the D-5 D-50 is there is no car adapter cause you can kinda see by its design and even its accessories its meant for home use, and in 84 im pretty sure sony and philips were still intending CD to be a home format... the main reason i think that is because of A no form of shock protection... B the DAT and DCC formats coming out not long after... I think that Cd was meant to be the next big thing to replace the record, as far as i know, and i only know based off history as i was born in 87 and can only recall the 90s, was that in the 80s the cassette was seen as a portable format more than home quality stuff, yes they had home units, but with how people would usually buy Type 1 tapes and record from the radio, and even pre made cassettes usually coming on type 1 as well, most people would still use vinyl discs for home media and CD was meant to be the next gen replacement for that... so i think sony making this unit, it was meant as a compact player for using headphones like when daughter was doing homework in her room she wouldnt disturb the rest of the family, but it was also meant to be something you could lug to your friends house and show off your new next generation audio format player.
Still have my D-55 from June 1986. Has an FM radio too. Was dropped once back in the day and skipped forever after, even after I took it to Sony service for repair. 📀😢
the D-5 also showcased that simpler "bare bones" design was not only cheaper and easier to sell, they also were more reliable. The vast majority of CD players from the 1980s are in non-working order and the few players that do work are often these lower end and simpler designs similar to the D-5. Many budget manufacturers made similarly simple CD players basically using Sony's basic CD player design, getting the price down to less then $100 by the end of the decade. The famously low-end Yorkx CD PAL was a good example and used mostly Sony sourced parts in a bare bones configuration to drive the price down, and most still work to this day 30 years later.
I still have the silver round one too, I have it on my 120 watt B&O speakers through the old Bose life amp and it doesn’t skip, is programmable and the same rechargeable 2 AAA batteries have been in for nearly 20 years (built in charger). I got the boom box with double CD player and every gadget ever on the first model instead of the model reviewed, it had twin tape decks and supposedly skip proof, one of the promises CD s never met.
The first CD player my parents bought was from Radio Shack, probably the Realistic CD-1000 (it looks like what I remember) which they bought just before Christmas in 1985, if I remember correctly. Some sites say it was being clearanced in summer 1985 for $500 though we're talking Canadian Radio Shack (now The Source) and it was almost half a year later so I'm not sure if they paid more or less than $500 Canadian. It lasted around a half-decade. I know it was dead by around late 1993 when my father had some kind of Christmas party and he came downstairs to get my Sega CD, thinking he could just hook it up to the stereo somehow (despite needing a Genesis and a television for it to run properly). On a different tangent, I still use a CD Walkman today, a D-NF430 from 2004, one of the CD Walkman models that is also a radio.
I had my walkman (cassette) and then skipped the discman era into to the Minidisc (that was difficut to get in Mexico). I always wanted a Portable CD player.
"...it actually sounds surprisingly good." Well, that was the greatest selling point of all sony compact or portable music player devices. I remember seeing and listening to the actual first model sony walkman TPS-L2 back in 1980 when it became available in europe and I was completely blown away - it seemed on par with any high-end home stereo system. Soon knock-off versions made by various "cheaper" companies pressed into the market, but none of them were even remotely as good in build quality or sound.
I bought one of these when it was released. This was actually my second CD player. Somebody stole my first one a Sanyo CP 10. I had bought about 30 CD's before I bought my first player. I was in the Navy at the time so being able to take it on the ship was so nice as I didn't have to rely on cassette tapes anymore. Good memories.
EEVblog did a teardown of this :) I knew yours would still work just like his - he even said that it worked as opposed to his previously torn down 1979 TPS-L2 cassette Walkman which didn't, because no drive belt to perish.
Always cool to see tech that I never saw during that era - mainly because it was so expensive. I think I was still rocking a cassette player well into the mid 90s.
Not exactly true. The regular CD jewel case was in use since the very first CDs hit the Japanese market in late 1982. However some record shops in the US used the "longbox" design to deter theft. I have Japanese CDs that were made in 1984 and they don't use the longbox design.
Great video. I would like to mention that Sony's stuff from this era (mid 1980s) is really good quality as. As you can see at 0:17, it was made in Japan. Pretty much everything that Sony made in the 1980s was made in Japan. I have two of their portable Betamax VCRs, one from 1978 (a professional ENG recorder, SLO-340) and a consumer one from 1981 (SL-200). Both still work amazing. Sadly during the early 1990s they sadly switched to Mexico for their stuff, and the quality dropped. I had a Sony boombox from 1992, and it was made in Japan.
Neat! Gotta love those 80s aesthetics. It playing CD-R discs just fine got me thinking: did you try out other "odd" disc types with it? Like for instance, those copy-protected discs that were (thankfully briefly!) a bit of a thing in the early 2000s that aren't technically compact discs due to not conforming to the Red Book standard, or really long-running regular CDs that go near the maximum running times of the medium (e.g. Metallica's Load, clocking in at 78:59).
Is there an online resource for Sony portables? I'm interested in seeing the evolution of the D series discmans. I have a D33 and I'm curious to know where in 'the time line' that falls. lol
Yes. But its robust sound made for a whole other experience with a decent set of headphones at the time. It was mainly meant for listening indoors or during a flight or a bus ride.
I remember back in the 80s when you have a portable CD player, you were Hi-Tech than the rest of the kids at school. Lol 😂!! DC 5 player is a pure tank, I have the same model still works like a charm.!! Good video!!
Anytime something can be made smaller, they always had that snowball effect. Wonderful review for a wonder device . After all these years I still don't ha portable disc-man. Unless my 1991 JVC boombox/w hyper bass, live effect double cassette/w cd player counts, though it has never left my apartment, not really portable or easy to carry and that's without the 8 D-size cells. Now that cd have been somewhat relegated to the retro genera. I feel bad never finding the time to get one.
I was a Sony and Technics dealer when these CD Players first came out. I settled for the Technics SL-XP7 myself. Sadly they all tended to skip because they didn't yet have that feature. Even the Technics SL-XP900 skipped to some extent but did have a much improved DAC
I had a d5 that had tracking issues. Sony sent me a D14. It looks like the d5 but also has a mat finish. It came with a sled that took the mini plug to rca. It still plays but doesn't sound all that great. It does play most CD-R's with the exception of some of the gold Maxells at the time.
I had that player and battery pack. Got it because it was actually less expensive than the cheapest home player. It’s big issue was that it skipped at the drop of a hat.
The D-50/D-5 is built like a tank, very robust and very reliable. It's rather slow skipping track, but works flawlessly after more than 30 years. I have the slide dock too and I really think this was Sony attempt to lure casual listener into CD world; more or less like the first MacMini for Macosx: low price devices people can buy to try out the technology.
My 1st gen G-Protection walkman just died on me recently, my god was that an amazing unit! Wouldnt skip no matter what you tried, and 2 AA batteries would last 3 full days of use at in school suspension. Im vry tempted to buy another!
The design of this player actually holds up really well
Sony design is timeless. Except the PS5.
@@onometre And the Ps3, and Ps4..
@@neoasura the ps3 and ps4 look great
@@onometre also some of their more modern walkman/"mp3 players" looks so boring
A lot of sony’s design work still holds up. I love their hi fi / portable electronics from around the mid 80s, the later walkmen were a bit shite though.
Their design was that good that steve jobs himself was such a fan he actually gave permission for sony to run mac os on their laptops around 2008 ish, although they never did.
Hey Colin, im not into retro audio equipment but as of lately I really enjoyed this series of videos on the subject, the history and story behind it along with your great narration is truly truly top tier! Thank you for posting! Love your work
Is the KSS-110G optical drive compatible with the KSS-110A?
I remember how much they would skip if you bumped them. I was so excited when I could actually buy a CD player with that like 10 second buffer to prevent skips. People like me who kept them in our jacket pockets, it was like a miracle to be able to now worry about it moving around inside our pockets.
I bought a digital walkman a couple of years back and it still skipped if the bus went over a big bump
So many generations of anti skip, the first ones with only a few seconds would skip like crazy after a bit. Once you got anti skip of a minute or more could bring them anywhere. My favourite was a Panasonic shockwave, such a great player with rugged good looks.
@@Angultra Yup, I have a few with good anti-skip.
My Philips Magnavox one (AZ 7781/17) from 1999 has 25-second anti-skip, which is enough for just walking around or riding the bus. I took it to school a lot too, often listened to music when working quietly in the library or in my architectural drafting classes.
And I have a Sony CD Walkman (D-E226CK; unknown mfg date, the bottom label got peeled off) that I used in the car with a tape adapter. I think my dad or my brother might've had it first; it has velcro strips on the bottom which I don't recall using. (In my cars, it stayed put well enough without velcroing it down.)
Our local Chinese restaurant is still using it as long I can remember. It's on top of an even older Sony receiver/tape deck they use since their opening in the 70's. TLDR: Quite reliable equipment since it runs all those years almost every day.
This was my first CD player. My wife bought it for me when it went on sale. I used it with my home system and several years later, when I purchased a component CD player, it moved to my car, a Honda Accord where it was powered via the cigarette lighter port and fed the system via a cassette adaptor. It served me well for a number of years in the Accord, until I bought a new Accord with a built in CD player. It was a great piece of kit, that D5. Great video.
This was also my very first CD player. Sony and Philips introduced the compact disc digital audio format in 1982. Sony also had the world's first car CD player released in 1984.
This is truly one of those CD players that's "portable" and that means Luggable. you can take it with you, but you're not expected to use it on the go, you're meant to use it on a desk or on a plane
fun fact...my dad had this exact player when i was growing up and it had a shoulder strap case with it and we both used it on the go all the time. Worked great.
I like this design for that reason, it looks good sitting on a desk or shelf in a minimalist style. The actual portable ones to run with looked horrible, especially velcroed to car dashboards in the 90s.
@@JimmyRussle And it did not skip?
No, it definitely skipped. There was no buffer whatsoever, which made startup nice and fast.
I'm not sure if I had the very first one in the US but it was apparently from the earliest shipment in 1984. No one who saw it had ever seen another before.
incorrect I walked around with it playing ac/dc, gary moore and queen all over the place. the portable case had a strap like a camera case strap and you just walked kinda like you had a stick up your ass to cut down on the skipping.
Kudos for the video.
Sony D-5 was also sold by Pioneer tagged as Pioneer PD-C7. Except for cosmetic changes of the body, they are identical. Pioneer released the very first portable Boomboxes with CD player using detachable PD-C7 player docked in a slot on the top - Pioneer Boomboxes CK-R500 (single cassette) and CK-W700 (double cassette). A slider panel at the back end of the dock has two protruding pins for Power and Audio, which exactly engages with the Power input and Line-Out sockets of the cd player.
In fact the Sony D-5 can be readily docked on Pioneer CK-R500 and CK-W700 and will play seamlessly.
I had a Pioneer CK-R500 in the 80's during my childhood, but with a blank CD player bay.
But now, I have both D-5 and PD-C7 and a NIB Pioneer CK-W700.
Nice player, looks like Sony has always made nice hardware throughout the years
Yes, their design aesthetic in the 80s and 90s was very strong. Just look at their “Sports” seties
I have a sony stereo receiver from the 70s that still works great!
Yeah, until the 2000s when everything became silver and bubbly looking.
I have a very recent Sony that looks great but is the biggest piece of crap I’ve ever used literally my grandma immediately hated the sound!
Sony is so big they make amazing and they make crap!
If that had a Toslink I’d be in the market for one!
There was no significant memory buffer which resulted in skips on car rides when using the battery pack.
“And as always, thanks for watching” is this the US TechMoan?!🤣
Next thing you know, he brings in the puppets. 😅
I graduated from DeVry/Chicago during 1985, with an Associate Degree in Electronics Technology and began my Electronics Technician career that same year. I have been into technology since early childhood.
I got a D50 (as it was here in NZ) new in the mid 80s, and it still works fine. As you said it was/is mostly used as a home player but did take in the car with the lighter socket power adaptor. Pretty amazing it still plays as well as ever, or perhaps not. 'It's a Sony' from an era when that really meant something.
I also purchased the large battery case for the Sony D-5 which required 6 C size or 4 D size batteries. I purchased it from an audiophile store in Chicago during 1985.
Marketing and product genius. With this Sony dived right into the format and drove it into a lot of homes. Great vid as always!
Came for the handheld gaming content, stayed for the Mac/Audio content!
I wish minidisc was more successful.
Imagine bluray on minidisc, or game consoles.
I just like the form factor.
Me too, they're cute and no scratches. Shame they didn't have blue lasers and Opus compression back then.
It was probably cheaper for manufactures to make discs without the case so CDR's won the race. Even DVD RAM dropped the caddy case after it's short success. DVD RAM cart discs looked like a big MiniDisc and worked very similar to MiniDisc's. I could use them in my PC or DVD Recorder.
@@s8wc3 Opus wouldn't have been good for music.
@@marekvrbka You're right, I just tried encoding a CD rip to vorbis and opus at 64 and 96k with ffmpeg and 64k vorbis sounds much better than opus 96... Don't know why that is, opus is _supposed_ to be better at everything, not just speech.
I still got tons of self recorded minidiscs from 1995, unfortunately many of them are not playable anymore, they disintegrate and they are genuine sony md's, very expensive back then. :-(
My Nana brought one these back for me as a gift from Hong Kong in early 1984, prior to international release. It came with the portable speakers. Super cool product.
I have a TEAC X1000R and a Sony Budokhan Walkman. Both are around same vintage as this player and they have similar black and silver designs.
I still have this player with the battery pack and the slide on power jack. Still working great. Just don’t shake it while it’s playing. There’s no memory buffer to keep it from skipping.
I still have a D70 from 1986 which here in Australia was called the D50-MKII. It's a slicker looking version of the D50 and has a thin special battery the same size as the player but about 10mm thick that clips to the bottom as standard. I don't remember how long it worked but I remember it getting to a certain point on any disc then skipping backwards, like the worm gear had a flaw at that point. It was by no means old at that point, maybe a couple of years only. But by that time it was out of warranty so it got tossed in a drawer and stayed there for 35+ years. Now I have advanced electronics skills and equipment so one of these days I'll find it, open it and figure out what's wrong and hopefully fix it.
It's crazy to think that in just 3 years Sony went from the CDP-101 to the D-5
bought mine in 85. d-50 bought at us military base in UK. Came with the portable case and the wall connector with rca outputs.... played this a lot with my technics sa1010 receiver. with kenwood 350 watt speakers.,..
Hey Colin, you’re slowly turning into techmoan 😂
Don’t we all?
@@AllonKirtchik, hmm, how would a Miss Techmoan look like?
Only a cheap knock-off of Techmoan.
We need more technology historians
@@tarstarkusz That’s fairly unnecessary.
I had the first Sony with CD boombox,
in 1985, which I purchased for $500.00
It cost $600.00 at Neiman Marcus. Talk
about markup. A couple of years later
I had a portable Sony CD Player, but with
an attached Ni-Cad battery pack for over
$300.00. Like it was stated, before Apple
with the iPod, Sony was a leader in their
innovations and packaged their products
well as a friend so stated to me.
The D5 was my entry into the World of CD Music -- I had rented an apartment in Tokyo for the summer of 1985 so my family could be with me (got tired of flying from USA every 2 weeks for a year), and space was at a premium. I had bought the D5 with the integrated a.c. adapter base and a pair of little Sony powered speakers, fit perfectly on a little shelf.
Then I started dreaming about a really portable Walkman CD player to replace my tiniest Sony Walkman, but I think that the MiniDisc probably came next to replace my Walkman for my frequent flying.
Thanks for the memory, Colin!
I owned this player when it came out, i also purchased the portable battery pack. I really enjoyed it but the big caveat is that it skipped so easily since it had no buffer. I had to put it in the portable battery pack and hang it by its strap to the back of my passenger seat, swaying from side to side, it did not skip. I used it as a cd source for my Concorde cassete receiver in my car, one of the first to have an aux input. Thanks for the great video, brought me back to when i was 19....
Awesome vid! Love seeing old Discmans! At the bottom of the price comparison chart was the Yamaha CD-2 (built in 1984), which I own. Still works, but the laser gets out of allignement occasinally and needs a good whack to get it back on track. It has the best remote transmit I've ever seen. Keep up the awesome vids!
They used to lead the market just like apple used to with the ipods. Good times
Unsurprisingly, Steve Jobs was a huge fan of Sony.
I got one for Christmas in 85.
Still got it?
@ Might be in a box in the basement.
I already owned 5 CDs when I bought my Sony D5 with the D50 back in the 80s. I loved that machine! I lent it to a friend who returned it broken. I hope to find one in great condition again someday.
Man, seeing the Sony Walkman cassette player brought back memories. I wish I still had it. Can't even remember what happened to it. I think mine was a different color. I remember more of how it felt with the strap around me, and the satisfying sound of putting in the cassette. I loved that thing!
I owned the original Sony D-5 when first released in 1985! Good times! The world's first consumer compact sized compact disc digital audio player. I purchased it new for $300 in 1985, which was affordable. About $1,200 in 2024 dollars. I also purchased Sony's service manual for the D-5.
Sony > Apple
I was the first DJ in Cleveland to use CD's and the D5. I still have over 1500 original cd's that I used. I made cases to fit and it took up half the space of records and I never had skipping issues like the other DJ's... I could play anywhere and the sound was Fantastic.
Still have and use mine that I bought in 1985. I have the ACD50 adapter to make connecting to my sound system easy.
I used to have a JVC boombox thing that had a removable CD player that looked a lot like this, I said to be manufactured in '86, you could take it out of the main body and used as an independent unit (with a power brick), can't remember the model...
Yeah i remember those
Thanks for the video. At the moment I'm collecting many models of the Discman.
3:53 which model is that? looks more futuristic than modern CD players
I bought one when I was 19 and stationed in Germany, it didn’t dawn on me that it was the first portable CD player, it just fit well with my Sony FH-7 Mk II stereo system I bought a couple months before. Yes, it was prone to skipping if bumped. And it had a lot of power as mentioned but back then, most stereos and players had a lot of power which was something each company increased year to year to gain a market advantage. And the price was pretty strong at just over $200 when I bought mine and back then a young Army Private made just $650 a month so it was steep. If you had a full time job near minimum wage, you’d be getting around $460 a month so you can see how strong the price was to the average person in my age demographic back then.
I had the same one. Had it hooked it to my stereo system into the Aux port. It worked great for years.
The D-50 / D-5 took the EBP-300 Battery Case, which attached underneath and into the back and allowed you to go portable with it. I used to work for Sony. :D
I bought one new in early 86 at Price Club (Costco now). It came with 2 docks. One with batteries and one for home with a real power cord coming out of the back. It was my jump from cassettes to CDs. If I remember correctly, it was about $250. It got broken in a car accident that year, and I replaced it with a dedicated car CD unit from Yamaha.
II bought one in 1985. It cost 900 gulden in the Netherlands. I had to work for it for 8 weeks plus graduation money from my parents. It worked well for 2 years, but then the laser got wrong or misaligned. I carried it around with a 6V lead-acid battery on a belt. Worked fine, for a while. I still have it, non-working.
2:51 Such an early CD player being able to do CDR's just shows that CDR's are a good test for poorly designed machines of any age. If your player can't handle CDR's, quite probably it is also picky with factory pressed CDs, and won't have much tolerance to compensate for discs with not so pristine a bottom surface.
I've had that thing back then, it was impossible to listen to a CD while walking since this player had no buffer, the CD would skip all the time. Later I had the Sony MZ1 Minidisc recorder, it was about the same size, but was playing the MD's perfectly also while walking or even running. Battery life was bad tough, I think it was approx. 60 Minutes, or one minidsic (60 or 74 minutes)
being the first one the skipping sucked but we didnt have anything better, you just learned to walk stiff with them. I was barely 18 when i got mine in 85
The most exciting tech device I’ve ever owned. I had the VHS battery pack. Disks rarely skipped when I walked.
I had one of these. I bought it in 1995 when I started my first job while still at uni. From memory, it was around AU$500, with the AC adapter that connected to the back of it. I also had some Sony headphones to go with it. Later I had it connected to a twin cassette boom box. I was using it until I moved to London 1993. I didn't bring it with me, nor any of my CDs. When I left Australia I sure how long I would be away. In London I bought a new Sony Discman, which I used to listed on the train to and from work.
With Sony, I only owned a CDP-200 CD player back then and never a Discman. The only two remaining ones I still have are a Panasonic with built-in speakers and another off brand that included FM transmitter (for the car radio).
This was my first player, bought on clearance as a showroom demo unit with the battery pack.Still have it, and last time I checked still works. Never used it with the battery pack though, just too ridiculously huge.
Wow. The Technics portable CD players look like they were modeled after their linear tracking turntables! That's so awesome!
they probably were, technics, sony all the big guyd used to have their HI-FI stuff follow a similar design so that the components would match, i have an older technics mini component system that looks very similar to that CD player, kinda makes me want to find it, since the CD player i currently have is also a technics, but it was a larger unit made for the larger component systems and just the CD player is larger than the rest of the components.
OMG Flashback. My dad had this when I was a kid and I would sometimes use it with the battery power pack. We also had a Sony Laserdisc player.
Can you imagine how cool you would have felt, walking down the street with this thing in a backpack listening to CD music in 1984. Hmmm Considering i was only 2 years old at the time, I think its going to be a struggle.
I know exactly what it was like. I picked mine up in December of 1984 from what was apparently the first shipment to New York City.
(Resuming here since apparently TH-cam just removed the edit feature?) Anyway, I fashioned my own battery pack and used it on a bus in California where I was in college. Other students refused to believe it was real. The only other time I had similar reactions was with the original Tesla Model 3, and people on the road reacted for months on end since it was also the first one they had ever seen.
I recall some of the later models, compared to the contemporary cassette players, they were really expensive in the UK. Didn't this also have a kit to fit to your car stereo?
I couldn’t find any mention of such a car audio kit for the Sony D-5a though I maybe there were cassette adaptors on the market during the lifetime of the D-5a that would allow you use with a car cassette player. You’d still need a battery pack or 12v cigarette lighter plug power plug of which I not aware existing though maybe it did but just is rare these days on the vintage/used market. You’d still have the issue of skipping a lot with any even slightly ruff driving as these models predated by a decade the electronic anti-skip feature introduced in 1995 for portable and car CD players. Some early portable CD and Car CD players (pre-1995) solved this somewhat by including heavy rubber shock absorbers into the case making them much bulkier then skip-prone models.
Given the D-5a doesn’t even have rubber shock absorbers due to it small size (for the time period) and the fact that it’s not really intended as a battery operated portable walk-around with/Drive around CD player despite offering an external battery pack as an option. Now if you had one of these units at the time and where handy with tools you could probably rig up some sort of shock absorber cradle for it so you could plug it into to your stereo with a cassette adaptor (if they existed then) or otherwise add somehow an aux audio in jack to your car stereo system. You;d also Cig lighter DC power adaptor that would work with this unit. Without some sort of shock absorber you’d only be able to use it in your car for use on well maintained roads and even with one off-road or use on very poorly maintained roads use would likely still be a problem. Did such a car kit exists back then in the mid-80’s, I don’t see anything mentioning it in my Google searches but maybe it just wasn’t common enough accessory to show up on Google these days.
@@Charlesb88 you may be right, I know car kits came later for other models, quick Google shows that but I think you're right for this one.
I highly doubt there was a car-kit for the D-5 since it skipped at too much motion.
my thinking with the D-5 D-50 is there is no car adapter cause you can kinda see by its design and even its accessories its meant for home use, and in 84 im pretty sure sony and philips were still intending CD to be a home format... the main reason i think that is because of A no form of shock protection... B the DAT and DCC formats coming out not long after... I think that Cd was meant to be the next big thing to replace the record, as far as i know, and i only know based off history as i was born in 87 and can only recall the 90s, was that in the 80s the cassette was seen as a portable format more than home quality stuff, yes they had home units, but with how people would usually buy Type 1 tapes and record from the radio, and even pre made cassettes usually coming on type 1 as well, most people would still use vinyl discs for home media and CD was meant to be the next gen replacement for that... so i think sony making this unit, it was meant as a compact player for using headphones like when daughter was doing homework in her room she wouldnt disturb the rest of the family, but it was also meant to be something you could lug to your friends house and show off your new next generation audio format player.
Still have my D-55 from June 1986. Has an FM radio too. Was dropped once back in the day and skipped forever after, even after I took it to Sony service for repair. 📀😢
I still have my complete D-5 kit with all the accessories somewhere in a drawer that I haven't touched in over 25 years.
The world's first CD boombox was actually Sony's CFD-5 launched in 1985. And yes, the built in CD player was based on the D-5/D-50.
the D-5 also showcased that simpler "bare bones" design was not only cheaper and easier to sell, they also were more reliable. The vast majority of CD players from the 1980s are in non-working order and the few players that do work are often these lower end and simpler designs similar to the D-5. Many budget manufacturers made similarly simple CD players basically using Sony's basic CD player design, getting the price down to less then $100 by the end of the decade. The famously low-end Yorkx CD PAL was a good example and used mostly Sony sourced parts in a bare bones configuration to drive the price down, and most still work to this day 30 years later.
I've never seen this kind! I still have the silver/round one. Still works!
I still have the silver round one too, I have it on my 120 watt B&O speakers through the old Bose life amp and it doesn’t skip, is programmable and the same rechargeable 2 AAA batteries have been in for nearly 20 years (built in charger). I got the boom box with double CD player and every gadget ever on the first model instead of the model reviewed, it had twin tape decks and supposedly skip proof, one of the promises CD s never met.
The first CD player my parents bought was from Radio Shack, probably the Realistic CD-1000 (it looks like what I remember) which they bought just before Christmas in 1985, if I remember correctly. Some sites say it was being clearanced in summer 1985 for $500 though we're talking Canadian Radio Shack (now The Source) and it was almost half a year later so I'm not sure if they paid more or less than $500 Canadian.
It lasted around a half-decade. I know it was dead by around late 1993 when my father had some kind of Christmas party and he came downstairs to get my Sega CD, thinking he could just hook it up to the stereo somehow (despite needing a Genesis and a television for it to run properly).
On a different tangent, I still use a CD Walkman today, a D-NF430 from 2004, one of the CD Walkman models that is also a radio.
I couldn't help noticing the Trip Shakespeare album. That's an obscure one! *wanders off singing "Closing Time" to herself.*
I had my walkman (cassette) and then skipped the discman era into to the Minidisc (that was difficut to get in Mexico). I always wanted a Portable CD player.
Remember when you would go for a walk or bike ride with a Discman™️, the song would just skip every minute for like 30 seconds... The good old days.
before learning buffers are a powerful thing
"...it actually sounds surprisingly good."
Well, that was the greatest selling point of all sony compact or portable music player devices. I remember seeing and listening to the actual first model sony walkman TPS-L2 back in 1980 when it became available in europe and I was completely blown away - it seemed on par with any high-end home stereo system.
Soon knock-off versions made by various "cheaper" companies pressed into the market, but none of them were even remotely as good in build quality or sound.
I bought one of these when it was released. This was actually my second CD player. Somebody stole my first one a Sanyo CP 10. I had bought about 30 CD's before I bought my first player. I was in the Navy at the time so being able to take it on the ship was so nice as I didn't have to rely on cassette tapes anymore. Good memories.
Just rediscovered this in a box in my mom's basement. But it came with the "dock" that included power and line out via RCA.
Yes, it was not for on the go use. It did not have electronic skip protection. Still a fun and cool technology device to own at the time!
My first Sony Discman was the D220 it have a great Design, and a display with backlight.
EEVblog did a teardown of this :) I knew yours would still work just like his - he even said that it worked as opposed to his previously torn down 1979 TPS-L2 cassette Walkman which didn't, because no drive belt to perish.
I liked this video format, very informative
Always cool to see tech that I never saw during that era - mainly because it was so expensive. I think I was still rocking a cassette player well into the mid 90s.
I bought one new soon after they first came out. I’ve still got it. It’s still around here .....Somewhere?
IRC there was a rechargeable battery pack available for this that clipped onto the bottom.
Back When CD's First Came Out, The "Jewell" Case for TheCompactDisc was a *CardBoardBox* almost 2 Feet Tall!
Not exactly true. The regular CD jewel case was in use since the very first CDs hit the Japanese market in late 1982. However some record shops in the US used the "longbox" design to deter theft. I have Japanese CDs that were made in 1984 and they don't use the longbox design.
Great video. I would like to mention that Sony's stuff from this era (mid 1980s) is really good quality as. As you can see at 0:17, it was made in Japan. Pretty much everything that Sony made in the 1980s was made in Japan. I have two of their portable Betamax VCRs, one from 1978 (a professional ENG recorder, SLO-340) and a consumer one from 1981 (SL-200). Both still work amazing. Sadly during the early 1990s they sadly switched to Mexico for their stuff, and the quality dropped. I had a Sony boombox from 1992, and it was made in Japan.
Neat! Gotta love those 80s aesthetics.
It playing CD-R discs just fine got me thinking: did you try out other "odd" disc types with it? Like for instance, those copy-protected discs that were (thankfully briefly!) a bit of a thing in the early 2000s that aren't technically compact discs due to not conforming to the Red Book standard, or really long-running regular CDs that go near the maximum running times of the medium (e.g. Metallica's Load, clocking in at 78:59).
I'm looking forward to your future video on what the M1 can actually do in terms of video editing.
I had one of these in the 80s! I'd forgotten all about that! It came with a copy of Alan Parsons Project i Robot!
Is there an online resource for Sony portables? I'm interested in seeing the evolution of the D series discmans. I have a D33 and I'm curious to know where in 'the time line' that falls. lol
How well did it work as a portable? Did it skip if carried around?
Yes. But its robust sound made for a whole other experience with a decent set of headphones at the time. It was mainly meant for listening indoors or during a flight or a bus ride.
I remember back in the 80s when you have a portable CD player, you were Hi-Tech than the rest of the kids at school. Lol 😂!! DC 5 player is a pure tank, I have the same model still works like a charm.!! Good video!!
That player either has been reglued or the lid haven't been opened often. I have one, still have the battery dock.
To me the best technology from the 80's nice video
i still have mine.. my grandparents bought me one when i was 6 thinking it was a portable small record player
I love you and your channel.
I had one of those, complete with slim battery (not pack) and the leather strapped carry case. I was the envy of my friends! 😎
A “portible” cd player without being literally portible, but that was the 80’s, nano technology was still in it’s infancy stage.
I actually need help fixing my D-5 the diode by the power supply is burnt out and I don't know how to replace it.
Anytime something can be made smaller, they always had that snowball effect.
Wonderful review for a wonder device . After all these years I still don't ha portable disc-man.
Unless my 1991 JVC boombox/w hyper bass, live effect double cassette/w cd player counts, though it has never left my apartment, not really portable or easy to carry and that's without the 8 D-size cells.
Now that cd have been somewhat relegated to the retro genera. I feel bad never finding the time to get one.
What's the walkman in the foreground with the last image shot of the D5?
I was a Sony and Technics dealer when these CD Players first came out. I settled for the Technics SL-XP7 myself.
Sadly they all tended to skip because they didn't yet have that feature. Even the Technics SL-XP900 skipped to some extent but did have a much improved DAC
I feel like this is the only Sony product where I understand where the product number came from.
I had a d5 that had tracking issues. Sony sent me a D14. It looks like the d5 but also has a mat finish. It came with a sled that took the mini plug to rca. It still plays but doesn't sound all that great. It does play most CD-R's with the exception of some of the gold Maxells at the time.
I am very surprised about the great headphone amp. Also love those metal buttons! I, for one, am glad they didn't try to do a battery.
_"Congratulations, your a father."_ 👨⚕️
*"It's a SONY ™ "* 💿
I SO wish that someone would make reproductions of those stickers!
I had that player and battery pack. Got it because it was actually less expensive than the cheapest home player. It’s big issue was that it skipped at the drop of a hat.
My first cd player was a Magnavox that slid in a adapter that held 6 c batteries. Now that was heavy but built like a tank.
I think my Sony CFD-5 boom box uses this same CD mechanism.
The D-50/D-5 is built like a tank, very robust and very reliable. It's rather slow skipping track, but works flawlessly after more than 30 years. I have the slide dock too and I really think this was Sony attempt to lure casual listener into CD world; more or less like the first MacMini for Macosx: low price devices people can buy to try out the technology.
My 1st gen G-Protection walkman just died on me recently, my god was that an amazing unit! Wouldnt skip no matter what you tried, and 2 AA batteries would last 3 full days of use at in school suspension. Im vry tempted to buy another!
*SONY has always been famous for it’s good and loud sound so no surprise this unit is that good guys*