Mitsubishi DP-101

One of the rarest 1st generation of CD players and, contrarily to most other brands, a full in-house development - except the d/a processor and other ICs which were sourced from Sony.

Despite its price, the highest of all 1st gen' consumer CDPs (the Sony CDP-5000 was the most expensive but it wasn't for consumers), the Mitsubishi/Diatone DP-101 only had one d/a chip while most others had two in parallel...
And it wasn't sourced in-house, nor from Sony, but from a US company named Intech.


But where the Mitsubishi really was different is in its build quality and overall structure :
vertical plug-in cards (some double-sided with metallized holes), a huge trafo and all steel plus aluminum - a big hefty chunk of audio kit.

If steel + aluminium also was what made most other top end CDPs (Sony CDP-701ES, Yamaha CD-1, Pioneer P-D1, Aiwa dX-1000 etc), vertical cards weren't even in the near-topper Nec CD-803.

Besides the IR remote, the DP-101 had a big beautiful blue FL display which could either diplay the level in dB, the tracks present on the inserted CD or the progarmming of said tracks.

The scale surrounding the meters goes from 0 to 39 then, lower, from 40 to 75 - that's in minutes. The present/programmed tracks' light up, therefore landing "physically" on the CD in the user's mind - if CD was cool, it nevertheless was (and still is) visually a bit... mute.


The lid at the right opens up to give acces to the programming keypad plus the headphones' plug and level pot and two little buttons that change the bargraph's display mode.

That door was at first planned to be completely opaque but the marketing lads thought more visible buttons were a definite plus.
The CD door was also planned to leave more of the CD visible and the IR receptor is black on black, between the open/close and power buttons.


Mitsubishi worldwide and Diatone in Japan didn't sell many DP-101s : discrete advertising (even in Japan) and too high a list price.
Diatone was making much more money selling loudspeakers and Mitsubishi -at large- selling cars, construction caterpillars and satellite processors...

But it seems that, unlike most 1st gen' CDPs, the overall build quality of the DP-101 was quite time-resitant - the opposite of the well-remembered Yamaha CD-1 and Sony CDP-701ES bestsellers.


All about the DP-101 at the indispensable vintage-audio-laser.com.