the cheapest CD player from the 80s

[DVtyro]

Originally Posted by ChrisW6ATV

Your experience is yet another thing I love about the CD format. Decades later, with NO adjustments or parts replacement, and it sounds as good as new.

One can find from service manuals that there are quite a few things that can go wrong with CD players and may need adjustment or replacement. Sadly, I have neither skills nor equipment to do such repairs, so when it stops working it goes into e-waste.

BTW, old ladder-style DACs could barely resolve 13 or 14 bits and had various A/D errors. These things have been largely fixed by the end of 1980s with brute force, then by the early 1990s with delta-sigma DACs. OTOH, 14 bits is good enough, this is how Philips wanted it.