Philips CD-960 (c. 1987–1989)
Documentation on the Philips CD-960 is thinner than its reputation suggests. What survives in the period press is mostly Philips's own advertising, which ran from late 1987 into 1989. The exact production dates, original price, and independent test measurements aren't confirmed in the record assembled here. The ads do tell a consistent story: this was Philips's late-1980s flagship compact disc player, built to show what the inventor of the CD could do.
The promotional copy that ran in Audio (October 1989, p.145) cited a signal-to-noise ratio of 100 dB and channel separation greater than 100 dB. It also gave a dynamic-range figure, but the surviving scan doesn't render it legibly. The same copy called the CD-960 world class, with a massive 4.4-pound nonresonant die-cast alloy chassis, a die-cast aluminum disc transport, and a digital-to-analog converter whose chip architecture Philips touted as superior. The heavy die-cast chassis and the cast transport are the most concrete facts the record preserves.
Philips's own advertising, running in High Fidelity (December 1987, p.34), claimed the first reviews were already in and unanimous: the CD-960 was the new CD reference standard. The same campaign paired the player with the FA 960 integrated amplifier, rated at 100 watts per channel into 8 ohms and offering a CD Direct mode. No surviving material settles whether the CD-960 lived up to that billing on a test bench.
Little else is documented. Serial-number date codes, the service-manual circuit description, or an actual contemporary review would be a welcome addition to this page.
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