My first digital player was a Philips CD-16 (below) I bought in the second half of the 80s. A renown HiFi shop in Rome sold it to me as a bitstream (or 1-bit) player, the new Philips technology for D/A conversion sections known for giving low price players an unusually good sound for the times. As I found out on the minute I arrived home, it was an ordinary 16-bit CD player, as it was made clear by its very name. I decided to keep it all the same since I thought Philips had invented the CD whose standard is based on 16-bit sampled sound. I also happened to like the sound thanks to the fact I had no turntable at the time (my first one was certainly not fine-tuned, since I didn’t know much about adjustments then). Furthermore, I had been playing a cassette deck for years, no wonder I found the CD sound quality superior…

A few years later, browsing through HiFi magazines, I was struck by the review of the JVC ZL-Z431 (below), a CD player that really used bitstream technology. The price was extremely inviting, a bit less than 200 thousand Lire, and the performance promised to embarrass the competitors. I sold the Philips CD and bought the JVC along with an Onlyo A-8200 integrated amplifier (in a different shop, obviously). When eventually I upgraded my system with the TDL loudspeakers and the Unison Research amp, the JVC player, though good, was not worth the rest of the system. I had just graduated,

I had no job, I dreamed about players such as the Meridian 506 CD but I certainly could not afford it at around 1 million Lire. I resigned myself to look for unsold stock models that had just gone out of production and were sold at lower prices.