Philips CD100
(1982 - 1985)

The other first Compact-Disc player !

Small footprint indeed but the massive CD-M0 mechanism was under the hood and it still is - nearly indestructible ; later units had the CDM-1 installed.

The CD100 (>above) was a 14bit deck which, through oversampling, reached the 16bit resolution for which Sony advocated since the 70s. There's a little story as to what Philips did to overcome this problem :

Thanks to Sony's tenacity, the CD standard was adopted by everybody at last - with 16-bit bit depth. Philips was suddenly stuck with batches of 14-bit TDA-1540 and couldn't redesign a new 16-bit converter in such short time - just over a year.
In came Karel Dijkmans, a Philips colleague of Dr Kees A. Schouhamer Immink, who said "No problem, I know a little trick... it's called oversampling". Ready, set, go - Philips was thus able to meet the deadline for the launch of CD in late 1982.
Dr Immink holds about 1000 international patents, many of which were developped during his 30-year tenure at Philips, between 1968 and 1998. CD-R, CD-V, DAT, DCC, DVD, VDR and Blu-Ray (to name but a few) all owe something, if not a lot, to Dr. Immink. Philips owes a lot to Dr Immink, too :)

The CD100 was updated as CD101 in late 1984 (>right) with slightly different looks but the same TDA-1540 D/A chip.
Like the Sony CDP-101, the CD 100 proved to be quite a seller and there are plenty of them around, although it seems Philips sold more of the bigger CD 300 and, mostly, its 1983 CD 303 evolution. The latter became, briefly, a would-be professional broadcast player (LHH 0502) before the fully original LHH-2000 was developped.

The Marantz CD-63 is the other well-known version (shown below) but is rather rare ; other rare versions are the Grundig CD30 and the two Meridian : Meridian MCD and Meridian MCD Pro. The Marantz CD-63 was also discreetely available in Japan under the CD-63B name with dark grey looks.