I bought a Sony CDP-101 in 1984 (their first commercial CD player). Unlike hifi components today that are mostly air and a small embedded processor, it was dens

I bought a Sony CDP-101 in 1984 (their first commercial CD player). Unlike hifi components today that are mostly air and a small embedded processor, it was densely packed with circuitry and weighed a surprising amount (10kg? maybe more?). For cost and packaging reasons, Sony only put a single DA converter in it. This meant that they had to alternate converting the left + right channels, which introduced a 11µs delay between them. Not ideal, but it was what was what they were able to do given the technology of the time. Much like Technics was with the SV-P100. Anyone saying the 44.1 kHz sampling rate was because of DRM [0] and that they should have used a more sensible rate like 48 kHz is just mistaken. DAT was the first commercial product to have 48 kHz sampling, and that wasn't available until 1987. [0] The Red Book CD Digital Audio specification obviously existed and was available, otherwise other equipment makers couldn't create compatible players.