Technics SL-PJ20 CD Player
The Technics SL-PJ20 is a nice compact (same width as an LP jacket) CD player from 1986 - 1988. Despite the fairly standard appearance it's a particularly nice machine - featuring Technic's own "Fine Focus 1 (FF1)" single beam laser pickup, as opposed to the more common three-beam design. Instead of using a slow and whirring worm gear to drive the laser sled back and forth across the disc, it uses a linear motor design - printed on the front as "high speed linear access system", something which it certainly lives up to, being able to seek between tracks on opposite ends of the disc almost as quickly as if they were next to each other. It has the usual memory features, allowing you to queue up tracks in memory in any order by, upon loading a disc, pressing forward or back skip to your desired number and then "memory" to save it to the memory, before pressing play to run through your selection in order. The Sl-PJ20 uses a Burr-Brown design PCM54HP-1 DAC chip and 2x oversampling along with its single-beam laser pickup. It does not have any digital outputs, but does have a removable (figure 8) power cord, standard analogue RCA outs, as well as plugs for Technics proprietary remote control units and synchronised recording to cassette decks
I got my example at an op-shop for just $35AUD (about half that in eaglebucks), as I had been wanting a proper dedicated CD player to replace my Panasonic DVD-S33 with a missing remote (which wasn't of a whole lot of use, as that allowed you to press play and stop on CDs, but no track skipping or anything else). When I initially got it home it wouldn't release the tray, instead making a slight whirring for a few moments before giving up. I soon found that if I smacked the top while it was whirring, it would open the tray, and after a few repeats of this it started operating flawlessly and smoothly. It's a remarkably heavy unit for its size, and the plastics used for the faceplate feel quite premium, though the VFD on mine has faded slightly and is not as bright and clear as it would have once been. While nothing particularly special, it is a nicely "premium" feeling unit to own and operate, and I'm very glad to have it in my collection. One thing that is worth noting is that, as is common with players of this age, it struggles to read burned discs (though it does succeed, just with slow loading times) - with a little adjustment of the tracking potentiometers you could likely fix this as I did on my new SL-P1