Hitachi DA-800 (c. 1983–1984)

Not much is documented about the Hitachi DA-800 beyond its launch advertising and a published equipment profile. It was an early Hitachi Compact Disc player, introduced alongside the DA-1000. The two were promoted together as "the next generation in sound."

Hitachi's own ads, which ran in High Fidelity (November 1983, p.40), made the usual first-generation CD claims - "a technological breakthrough," "the most perfect sound system in audio history." The line offered a choice of vertical- or front-loading players, with ten-key or two-key programming and visible or hidden disc loading. The ads don't say which features belong to which model.

The record gets more concrete with an equipment profile in Audio (May 1984, p.78). The surviving portion lists the DA-800's manufacturer's specifications:

Frequency response: 5 Hz–20 kHz, ±0.5 dB
S/N ratio: 95 dB
Dynamic range: 95 dB
Channel separation: 94 dB
Harmonic distortion: 0.003%

Those are strong numbers for a first-year CD player. Beyond that, the archive has little on the DA-800. No full lab report survives in the corpus, and the model left a small footprint in later documentation.