Magnavox CDB-473
A mid-line Magnavox single-disc player that existed mostly as a mail-order price, a remote control, and a footnote in the great Philips-Magnavox CD flood of the late '80s.
Overview
The CDB-473 is one of those machines that survives in the record almost entirely through dealer classifieds rather than glossy reviews. What the period press does confirm is that it was a real, shipping product in Magnavox's compact disc lineup: HiFI-Stereo (July 1987, p.14) listed the CDB473 as one of three new front-loading CD players from Magnavox, describing a player with a multi-bit oversampling converter system, a six-function remote, index access, a headphone jack, three-speed forward and reverse search, twenty-track programming, and a fluorescent display. That's a genuinely useful feature set for the era — the remote and headphone jack in particular put it a step above the most stripped-down budget decks, and twenty-track programming was the kind of thing buyers actually used.
Pricing is where the CDB-473's story gets interesting, because it moved. None of these are list prices — they're discounted mail-order figures from dealers like Digital Sound Distributors, so treat them as a market trajectory rather than an official MSRP. The pattern tells you what you need to know: this was a fast-depreciating mid-market player in a market that was itself collapsing in price month by month.
Collectors note that the CDB-473 sits in a dense Magnavox family — the CDB-470, 471, 472, 480, 482, 486 changer, 582, 586, and 650 all appear in the same dealer ads across 1988 and 1989, often at prices within twenty or thirty dollars of each other. That clustering is the honest context for this machine: it was one rung in a ladder, not a flagship. The CDB-473 typically priced a little above the 471 and 472 and below the 650, which is exactly where a mid-line model belongs. Buyers who want the top of that range should be looking at the 650; buyers who want the cheapest entry should look at the 470 or 471. The 473 is the sensible middle.
What the documentation does not give is any measured performance — no frequency response, no THD, no signal-to-noise figure, no dimensions or weight. The HiFI-Stereo new-product notice describes the converter as a multi-bit oversampling design but does not quantify it, and no independent lab review of this specific model turned up in the period sources. Anyone buying one today should expect a working transport and a clean display to matter far more than any spec sheet number.
The remote control is worth flagging as a practical concern. The CDB-473 shipped with a remote — one dealer specifically advertised "w/remote vol" — and those handsets go missing. A unit sold without its original remote is a lesser thing, and replacements are not something the period sources address. The headphone jack and front-panel controls mean the deck is usable without it, but collectors should price accordingly.
As a collectible, the CDB-473 is not a destination piece. It's a representative artifact of the moment when CD players went from luxury goods to mail-order commodities, and it's worth owning for that reason rather than for any sonic reputation. The dealer ads that document it are the best evidence of what it was: a $250-ish player that became a $200 player within a year, sold alongside a dozen near-identical siblings, and remembered today mostly because the classified pages of Audio happened to keep printing its name.
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