Dick's Gadget Warehouse - The First Sony Portable CD Player.
September 7, 2012 2 Comments 
This 28 year-old beauty was on Ebay recently!Sony introduced the world’s first portable CD player, the D-5 in late 1984. It was called a portable because of its size, not really because you could take it for a jog while you listened to your music. At first it was called the Sony Portable CD Player, the more popular “Discman” name came a little later. CD players took a fairly long time to catch on in the 1980’s because they were very expensive. Add to that the cost of early CD’s, which were about twice the price of LPs and cassette tapes. Sony’s first CD home player was more than $600. That made the Sony Portable CD D-5, which sold for about $300, a great way to add CD playing capability to your home audio system. Even though it was sold as a portable, it really wasn’t portable because it needed the included AC adaptor to work. You could listen to your CD’s via headphones, or get the docking accessory, which offered RCA stereo jacks for direct hook-up to your music system. If you wanted to actually take your portable CD player on the road, you needed the rather large battery pack accessory. I read that a set of batteries lasted for just about an hour on that first CD portable. And the D-5 was before the invention of CD-buffer, so you had to tiptoe to prevent skipping. That’s why it was more of a stay-at-home portable, than one you wanted to actually use on the go. I remember how much I liked the pop-up cover on this beauty. It had a see-thru window, so you could watch the CD spin. If you’re a fan of nostalgia, you can still find one on Ebay from time to time.
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Reader Comments (2)
One thing about the early players is that they featured indexing. It's now forgotten and I haven't seen a player in years that had it and only came across a few CDs that featured it but I always thought it was useful.
What was it? Well, indexing allowed you to have a track for a song but then have little sub-sections you could go to. So, say you selected track 3 and it's 20min long and features several distinct sections to the music. Indexing would let you just skip right to that section of the music if you liked.
Something else that was added later (not related to the disc man) was CD-Text and it's a shame it didn't catch on. Only a few players supported it and CDs that supported it were few and far between. Basically it let you see the artist/title of the song on the display. It didn't cost anything extra to add it to the disc so I don't know why it wasn't adopted there and it seems like it would have been easy to add it to players but it wasn't widely supported.
Now we have MP3s (AACs) that are far better (well, still no indexing).
I remember buying the D-5, sometime around 1985 for maybe $350 and taking it on a road trip using a dc/ac converter. It did skip a lot but if I put it on a pillow that fixed the skipping First cd I bought was Dire Strights-Brothers in Arms