Mr.Radar
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2004
- Posts
- 2,697
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- 11
I went to my grandparent's house over the weekend (56k + AOL seriously blows) and while looking around their house found two PCDPs: A Koss CDP 312CP "Anti-Shock Car/Home CD System" (mfgd. March 1995) which is a whole kit that includes: PCDP (obviously), isolation platform (for preventing skips while using it in a car), wall-wart AC adapter, car power adapter, cassette adapter, battery powered speakers, and headphones (the headphones were the only item missing from the kit, amazingly). The PCDP is pretty basic and it's only note-worth features are DBBS bass boost, programmable memory, and a true line-out. The headphone jack is crap (hissy, and the bass boost switch is broken, stuck at ON, crapifying the sound coming from the HP jack further), however the line-out rivals my Toshiba SD-3960 in quality. The only problem with this unit (besides the bass-boost switch) is that it occasionally skips. This appears to be a tracking problem and I'll have to open it up tomorrow to see if there are any adjustment pots inside it. It also seems to eat through batteries pretty fast.
The other PCDP I found is a Philips AZ 7331/17 which is in perfect condition, it still even has the price sticker on it ($49.99, down from $99.99) which was made in January 1998. It features a DSP with 4 presets: Rock (bass + treble boost), Pop (more bass + some treble boost), Car (opposite of Pop(?!)), and "Incredible Surround (bass + slight teble boost + some echo/reverb-type effect, sounds horrible)," "Bitstream Conversion," whatever that is (converts to DSD??), as well as a 12-second defeatable electronic skip protection. Unfortunately there is no dedicated line-out jack, however the built-in headphone amp is decent. It sounds a bit better than my GPX PCDP does, but uses more batteries. The display is also very hard to read.
Also, I found a vintage Sony Electret Condenser microphone that puts out enough current that I can use it with my EMU soundcard without a mic preamp (though I do really have to boost the signal in software).
The other PCDP I found is a Philips AZ 7331/17 which is in perfect condition, it still even has the price sticker on it ($49.99, down from $99.99) which was made in January 1998. It features a DSP with 4 presets: Rock (bass + treble boost), Pop (more bass + some treble boost), Car (opposite of Pop(?!)), and "Incredible Surround (bass + slight teble boost + some echo/reverb-type effect, sounds horrible)," "Bitstream Conversion," whatever that is (converts to DSD??), as well as a 12-second defeatable electronic skip protection. Unfortunately there is no dedicated line-out jack, however the built-in headphone amp is decent. It sounds a bit better than my GPX PCDP does, but uses more batteries. The display is also very hard to read.
Also, I found a vintage Sony Electret Condenser microphone that puts out enough current that I can use it with my EMU soundcard without a mic preamp (though I do really have to boost the signal in software).
