Kyocera DA-01

The original of quite a few rebadges :
Tensai TAD-2000, Micro Seiki CD-M1, Rotel RCD780, and Phase Linear 9500.

Also planned but finally not produced was an HK8000 for Harman/Kardon, a pre-production sample of which you can see in the Invisibilia section.
The DA-01 was originally planned to be all-black btw, and the first prototype named DA-01, 1981, was completely different and... horizontal.

The original 1983 USA 4-page leaflet dedicated to the DA-01 was printed by and © by... Cybernet - a prolific OEM provider which Kyocera (Kyoto Ceramics) had bought only a year earlier.

Better yet, Kyocera in the US advertised for the DA-01 as early as june 1982 : four months before the official 1982 launch in Japan and nine months before the worldwide launch of march 1983 !
The ad btw already bore the Cybernet © and mentioned "another breakthrough in the Kyocera series... even if there was no Kyocera series yet.

The ad shows a pre-production sample (or well-finished prototype) still tagged with "DAD" (and not "CD") but obviously a DA-01 nevertheless. And named as such, too : "DA01 Compact Disc Digital Audio Player".
Kyocera was therefore quite forward and ahead of everybody - Sony and Philips included !

The final DA-01 CD player shared with the Akai CD-D1 version of it the Philips D/A and digital filter scheme : dual TDA-1540D and SAA-7020 with the same majority of surrounding Toshiba ICs.

Since the laser in the big DA-910 came from Sharp, it is likely the one in the DA-01 was sourced alike.
And like many other 1st generation CD players, the DA-01 did benefit from a dual d/a system.


Nudies and detailed technical description at the indispensable vintage-audio-laser.com.