CD Player Buying Guide
Introduction
I saw Aimee Mann play in Birmingham on a Monday night in February of 2026, and it got my blood pumping, no joke. I love Aimee Mann. I saw her once before in Atlanta, about twenty years ago, and it was a great show, exactly my speed, staged at an Arboretum, the concession stand sold wine and cheese plates. It was great. Well, I must have been in a rut or something, because the Birmingham show felt like the rediscovery of music itself. The attendees were mostly people my age in the small Iron City venue in downtown Birmingham. We nuzzled up close to the stage and managed to stand on the second row, and Aimee was right there. I walked out feeling so grateful. So inspired. She performed the entire Lost In Space album, and she played stuff from Whatever and I'm With Stupid, so she went back to the earliest stuff. I loved it.
A couple of weeks later, we were walking around Frenchmen Street in New Orleans and we ducked into this really good record store, and I ended up buying a couple of Aimee Mann CDs. Now, this is going to sound ridiculously trite, but I'm going to say it anyway: There's something to it, to holding a physical album, to shuffling through racks of disks and stubmling upon a find, and then claiming it. This one is mine, and then taking it home and giving it a play.
With a CD player, I can put a disk on the tray and push play, and it just plays. No fiddling around. I liked that idea, so I started shopping for a CD player. When it comes to a new player, only Onkyo and Yamaha offer players aimed at the consumer market. Teac and Yamaha and Denon make them, too, but those are more niche audiophile-aimed, and I'm a decidedly middle-range type of guy. Sony, the creator of the CD, doesn't offer a CD player anymore, which is strange. Onkyo offers the best deal, a carousel player for around $350. You can find these for $200 refurbished and used. If you don't mind a carousel player, this might be the thing you need.
I want one disk at at time, though. I want to look over my collection, select a disc, and play it. So, I started looking at the used market on Ebay, and that's how this page started, because I was making a list and trying to keep track of things, and it was easy to just write it all in html as a way to keep it sort of organized. I spent seveal days looking at the used market on Ebay, just to see what I could see, and I noticed some patterns.
My Most Desireable Vintage CD Players
In general, one can divide cd players into a first generation, a second generation, and a third generation, leading up to the present.
First Generation CD Players
The first generation players were made during 1982-1985, approximately. Almost all of these units were manufactured in Japan, but some were made in Europe. These would have been expensive, and they are bigger and boxier, with big buttons and simple dot-matrix displays. These first-generation units used single 16-bit DAC chips and did straight-line processing. I've never heard this before, and I would like to, just to see if I can hear a difference. This would be one of the best reasons to buy a player from this generation, to experience the technology before all the oversampling and digital filtering that came later. I listened to some guy on Youtube talk about how the first generation units sounded thin, but I couldn't tell you because they are almost impossible to come across on the secondary market. Occasionally, I will run across a unit manufactured in 1984 or 1985, but it is uncommon.
My favorite first-generation player, in terms of its looks, is the Technics SL-P10,pictured above, followed closely by the Sharp DX-3, and both of these are vertical-loading curiosities that I have never seen on Ebay. Realistically, the value ratio is terrible in this category. To get my hands on an interesting player, it would take hundreds of dollars, and what do I get? A conversation piece with the single-DAC processing, and that brings up the maintenance and repairs that come with these early units due to their complexity. Suffice it to say, none of the players in generation one make much sense from a practical standpoint.
Second Generation CD Players
The units from the second generation start to implement two DACs, and then four, and all sorts of filtering and oversampling, so there's lots of interesting things going on in this second generation as the technology advances and new implementations emerge. The second generation players were made during 1986-1992, approximately. At this point, the CD has caught on, and it is on its way to surpassing vinyl and cassette tapes, and there's a clear move to market them to the masses. The second generation player are cheaper-looking, more plasticky, yet they are a little sleeker, usually finished in black, and somtimes have interesting colors and text on the facia. They retain the bigger buttons and dot-matrix displays, but some have LCD displays. Most of them are manufactured in Japan.
I would consider my Sharp DX-R250 a good example of the tail end of the second generation players. It claims to use two-DAC processing, and it is just a reliable beast. No frills. It just plays CDs. In my view, the second generation is where you want to look for a good player. You're going to get a good DAC setup no matter what you buy, for the most part, and these are mostly still made in Japan, so they are sturdy and well-designed. Most of them can be revived with a belt change and a careful lens cleaning.
When I've gone through the second generation players, a few things stand out. Sony is dominant, followed by JVC, Kenwood, Pioneer, and then Onkyo and Denon, Panasonic and Technics. You do find oddball names here, too, like Fisher, ADC, MCS, Realistic, Akai, Sanyo, and many others. These are fun because you could get something truly off the beaten path and it could be great. I found myself particularly interested in players that had digital output in the 1980s. My understanding is that digital output has been around as long as the CD has been around, so in theory it could have been on the very earliest players, but I haven't found it with any regularity unil the late 1980s in upper-mid range to higher end players. It just makes sense to have another output option if one is available. From there, I looked at a lot of the repair videos on YouTube, and you can absolutely see the players become simpler and easier toward the end of generation two, so anything from 1988 onward is going to be pretty good.
Criteria:
First, I like the Technics SL-P350, the SL-P550, the SL-P555, and the SL-P770. All of these have digital output and are made in Japan.
Next, I like the JVC XL-Z331, the , the XL-Z444, and the XL-Z555, which is harder to find than the others. All of these players have digital output and a pretty good reputation when it comes to reliability.
Thirdly, I like the Onkyo DX-2500. Digital output and a solid reputation.
Fourthly, I like the Denon DCD-1500, the DCD-1420, and the DCD-1520.
That's really sort of it. If I were going to buy a vintage player and make it my primary listening unit, I would probably go with one of the above. If digital output is not an important thing to you, I would still stay within these manufacturers and look for some good deals.
Overall, I like the players from Technics, Panasonic, and JVC the best as these seem to represent a high value segment of the secondary market. Sony and Denon and Onkyo are fine players, too. I would avoid Pioneer players all together because they have a problem with the laser lens falling out, if the YouTube repair videos can be trusted. I like the late second generation Sharp players, too.
The following is information I collected while shopping on Ebay. It can give you some sense about what is available and how it fits into the larger market footprint.
Third Generation CD Players
The third generation is marked by production moving from Japan to countries like Malaysia, Singapore, and China, and there's a glut of carousel players. By the third generation, the features and DAC implementations are quite advanced; the CD player reaches its final form, if for no other reason than the DVD player becomes dominant. For example, the currently-available Onkyo C390 player is a carousel that would be right at home in the year 2000. By far, the cheapest and easiest player is going to be a third-generation carousel player.
The CD
Music recording technology never really evolved past the CD. I'm aware of the various high-definition implementations out there, but none of them are as popular as compressed MP3 and M4A files. Like I said in the introduction, a few weeks ago, I had the chance to peruse the offerings at a second-hand music store, and I ended up buying a few CDs, and now I appear to be getting back into them a bit after scuttling my entire collection about fifteen years ago and just ripping all of them to flac. I still have all of those flac files, too, but when I was in the music store, I guess I sort of missed browsing through the media. I had fun doing it.
As an aside, Vinyl is back bigger than ever, by the way. I monkeyed around with vinyl for many years, and I had some interesting turntables, especially a NAD table, but my favorite one was this direct drive and fully automatic Onkyo. Records are fun, but they have some serious drawbacks that made me start to question if it was worth the time and money. For one, records are dust magnets, and you can brush and brush them, spray them down with all sorts of cleaners and chemicals, and you still get dust, and that turns into pops on the record. For two, they are bulky and heavy. For three, they don’t sound good anyway especially compared to a CD with a good DAC setup. It’s not even close.
It’s just kind of weird that if one wants to get into physical media nowadays, the best option is still a technology that’s been around since 1982. There were attempts to move beyond that with DVD-Audio and SACD, but those never caught on, and the culture shifted to MP3s and streaming. My flac files are as good as they ever were, in terms of what’s out there. Music is still sold as MP3 on Amazon, with no better option, and MP3 really does suck compared to CD. I noticed it the other day in the car, the album I was listening to, which in this case was Colors by Beck, kept revealing little details, so much so I perked up and noticed it. Twangier guitar strings, more background noise, more detail in the voices. It’s a real thing.
I’ve watched all of this unfold in my lifetime. When I was a kid, my dad saved up and bought himself a nice hi-fi system, and I remember waking up on weekend mornings to Billy Joel pumping throughout the house. His setup was good by any measure. He had a couple of AR tower speakers, which I kept for many years before I let them go, a nice Dual turntable. Then it was cassettes, which are worse than vinyl, their only virtue being their portability, and then in the mid 1980s the CD came onto the scene. I had one of those mini stereo systems in my room, and it must have had RCA inputs, because I saved my money and my dad took me to Rex, which was an electronics retailer here back then, and I bought a Sharp CD player. I believe it was model DX-677, but I can’t be completely sure. I had saved up my money and I bought a Sharp DX-677. These are the most stripped-down mass-market devices imaginable, like brutal Japanese efficiency made real, and they are good. Put a CD in the tray, hit play, and the CD plays. I did some reading about these units, and as far as I can discern the DX-670 through the DX-R777 are using a single-DAC setup. I could be wrong about that. At the very least, the PCBs are different between those units and the DX-200 units, which are advertised to use two DACs. When I opened up my DX-R250, I didn't see two DACs, just the one Sanyo chip, and another Sharp chip that I googled, and it was more about transport control, but perhaps that is what counts as the second DAC.
At any rate, those DX-200 units represent the most advanced of the Sharp players before they exited the market. I like them quite a lot. The sound stage is lively to my ear, full of energy, and the controls are snappy.
Then another thing happened. I put on a disk, and I just let it play. The album. The whole thing.
No screens. I just put a disc in the play and pushed the play button, then went about doing house chores and the like. I suppose I had forgotten what this felt like because it was both familiar and comforting and somehow newfangled simultaneously. I liked it. I want to do more of it