Panasonic LX-101 (c. 1991)
The Panasonic LX-101 was a combi-player - one machine that played both audio CDs and laserdisc movies. The period record lists it at $600, in the new-products pages of Hi-Fi/Stereo Buyers (August 1991, p.16). Panasonic's own advertising (Audio, December 1991, p.23) pitched it simply as a player for both CDs and movies. The hardware backed that up with a good helping of early-90s video processing.
On the video side, it used digital time-base correction to compensate for horizontal and vertical picture distortion. A digital comb filter was aimed at preventing streaking and dot crawl in color images. Audio went through MASH 1-bit digital-to-analog conversion to reduce low-level distortion. The feature list was generous for the price: shuttle search, random play, six repeat modes, twenty-track programming, an edit function for fitting tracks onto a cassette, intro scan, and a remote control. The January 1992 review in Hi-Fi/Stereo Buyers (p.58) also noted track/chapter stepping in either direction, direct numeric-keypad access to any numbered track or chapter, and frame-number cueing on CAV laserdiscs.
That same issue ran a full lab session, with Hirsch-Houck Laboratories on audio and Diversified Science Laboratories on video. The recovered audio figures are respectable: frequency response +0/−0.87 dB from 20 Hz to 20 kHz, A-weighted signal-to-noise of 99 dB, THD+N around 0.035% at 0 dB, and a maximum de-emphasis error of +0.64 dB (Hi-Fi/Stereo Buyers, January 1992, p.61).
The documented record on the LX-101 is otherwise thin: a new-product blurb, an advertisement, and that one full review. No long production story or collector following is recorded.
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