Let the music transport you

It's the late 1980s, and I'm soldering tube amplifiers on a plywood bench. I decide on a whim that it's time to break down and buy a CD player to supplement the Dynaco tuner and Dual cassette deck in my workroom music system.

I was a slow starter with digital because of my early take on CD sound: It was emotionally drained with grumbling distortions in the bass and an off-timbre midrange, crowned by a thin, artificial treble, and penetrated by an eerie, unnatural silence whenever the musicians stopped playing. I thought cassettes had higher fidelity and that CDs would be a passing fad, but I kept browsing CDs at Tower Records, and the itch to buy some was getting pretty strong.

One of my friends said, "Maybe it's not the conversion principle that's to blame but something else, like an imperfect CD player?" That interesting thought had not occurred to me, and it obviously occurred to lots of engineers, because they are still trying to improve the quality of CD playback by adjusting the mechanism.

My friend's thought prompted me to ask my engineer pal, a short-tempered wizard named Dick, what CD player he used. He responded in his best gruff know-it-all voice, "These new CD players are shit! Don't buy one until they make one where the transport mechanism floats!" When I asked if anybody made one that floated, he said that he used a portable, battery-powered Optimus CD player from Radio Shack, and that its transport mechanism floated, and that it sounded better than any audiophile deck.

Dick "knew things," so I believed him.' When I got to Radio Shack and saw the player he recommended, I laughed at its plastic-toy flying-saucer style. It looked the opposite of serious, but a closer inspection and a quick listen with its included headphones suggested there might be some good engineering hidden beneath its UFO casework. The more I examined the Optimus, the more it seemed perfect for my workbench, my bike, and my car. It cost around a hundred bucks, so I bought one and kept it as my only CD player until 1993, when I capitulated and bought my first nonportable CD player: a TEAC VRDS-10.