What are the best Discmans

@Jorge @rcpilot23 I absolutely love these exotic colors ! White and red are particularly vibrant. There is one red D-50 on ebay ($1300 non-functional): https://www.ebay.com/itm/124509185173?hash=item1cfd536495:g:r3IAAOSwy8Vf7n-T

I find something intersting regarding those DC-DC coverters used by SONY: on some units they give the internal schematic in the service manual (like on the TC-D5M, WM-D6C, the WM-D3, the TC-153SD), but not on others (like TCD-D7/D8 and also Discmans).

Are the KSS220A and the KSS162 lasers interchanghable ? I found a cheap D250 described to have a faulty laser.

@Longman It's good to know that CF cards can be used instead of old IDE drives (I already ordered some adaptors to have when needed). Old IDE hard drives (especially very small capacity ones) are extremely hard to find. I am a retro computer enthusiat myself,
but did not invest that much time and money in that hobby compared to vintage audio. Mostly interested in laptops from early 90s. I grew up with DOS, Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, but never had any laptops at that point.

 

YES!

 

There was a Battery pack for the D-50 so it was portable. I have seen the battery holder online but very rare. I could easily power it from a small 3S lipo 12volts.

 

LOL $1300 crazy

I used a drop of contact cleaner in the gap of the volume dial and no more crackle. Works perfect. I paid $150 AUD for mine from a local guy last year. Lucky find

By the Valentin I am still trying to fix my Sony Cassette record level issue

 

Portable as in carriable but not wearable. And no skip pritection.

 

Mine has no skip if I carry it around or pick it up and move it around ?
I have read and seen this model does in fact have anti skip circuitry.

 

Oh, cool. I did not know that.

 

Here is a D-50 with the battery holder.

 

I remember reading about a battery holder, but it is rare. I think it was sold separately from the unit itself and it's likely not that many were produced. It's certainly one of the coolest looking CD players and I intend to buy one at some point, but at a reasonable price.

And I would certainly want a battery holder as well, as I want to be able to move it around without its power supply.

Something else I notice is this: a factor that certainly contributed to the success of CDs in the 90s was the lower price. From the very solid construction of the first models in the 80s many companies move to more plasticky cheaper models that also use simpler and more tightly integrated electronics.
Reading this article https://www.philips.com/a-w/research/technologies/cd/technology.html found out that the first generations of CD players used only 14-bit D/A combined with a digital filter to achieve the dynamic range and SNR of a 16-bit converter.
I can imagine that anti-skipping has developed in tandem with advances in memory IC technology, as cheapes and larger RAM chips became available, players could integrate buffers that could store more data than what was fed to the D/A converter.

 

I want to add some opinions about the SONY D-150 and D-250 Discmans, because now I have both in my collection for some time.

In terms of sound quality, the D-250 is a significant improvement due to the 4x oversampling digital filter. The D-150 sounds pretty harsh in comparison, because it lacks any reconstruction filter, either analog or digital.
However, both the D-150 and the D-250 sound considerably better when used with an external headphone amp (a difference in the favour of the D-250 still remains, which is to be expected), likely because of the additional filtering present on the input of a separate amplifier.
Probably this is one of the reasons SONY included a LINE OUT on these models, because that's the only way to get the full potential out of tese Discmans.
It is unfortunate that the headphone amplifier of these units is really good, but won't be used up to its full potential because of the "dirty" signal coming from the DAC.

It is clear that the higher end models with 8x oversampling digital filter sound even smoother than the D-250. Of course, the best are those that have a digital output: this way a better external DAC and amplifier can be used, but from what I have read on the forum, there are only a handful which have a digital out.