Philips CDV-487
A $949 combi player that promised CD and LaserDisc from one drawer. According to the chip-set chatter in the classifieds, it also hid a serious DAC inside.
Overview
The CDV-487 comes from the late-Eighties/early-Nineties moment when "CD Video" was supposed to bridge the compact disc and the LaserDisc. One machine, one transport, and it could spin a 5-inch CD or a 12-inch video platter. Philips priced it at $949. HiFi-Stereo (December 1989, p.100) grouped it with the Pioneer CLD-3070 at $1,200 and the Yamaha CDV-1600 at $899 as "among the finest" of the combi players it reviewed that month. So the Philips undercut the Pioneer by a couple hundred dollars and sat a notch above the Yamaha. It was reviewed as a peer of both, not as a budget afterthought.
What sets the CDV-487 apart from a generic video-disc deck, at least in the way the trade talked about it, is the converter inside. Philips' own dealer advertising in Audio (March 1990) singled out the CDV-487 as the "CD Video player with TDA1541A S1 chip set". That is the same S1-grade multibit DAC Philips was pushing at the same time in its CD-960 and CD-80 compact disc players. Collectors latch onto that detail. A combi player is a compromise by nature, but the CDV-487's pitch was that the audio side wasn't compromised, because the redbook decoding ran through the same silicon as Philips' reference CD spinners. Whether that holds up on the bench is a separate question. It is the reason the model has any following today.
Pricing is easy to trace because these decks moved through the audiophile classifieds almost as soon as they shipped. Audio's dealer listings (August 1990) show a used CDV-487 at $869 against its $949 list, a modest markdown for a machine still in production. By September of that same year, one clearance ad had a demo unit at $599, and the model was being lumped in with Philips' broader line of CD and CDV players rather than headlined on its own.
The format the CDV-487 was built around never caught on. CD Video had a handful of 5-inch video discs and relied on 12-inch LaserDisc for anything substantial, and the deck's video side is the least interesting thing about it now. The CD side is what survives, and the S1 chip set is the reason to care.
Collectibility is modest but real. The CDV-487 shows up in dealer stock lists alongside the CDV-488 (the step-up model with full digital effects) and the Magnavox-badged CDV474. That suggests it was sold through both Philips and Magnavox channels, the same deck wearing two nameplates. Prices in the period classifieds ran from roughly $599 for a demo to $869 for a clean used example. Today it is a niche piece, interesting to Philips completists and to anyone who wants a TDA1541A S1-based player without paying CD-960 money, but not a machine anyone is fighting over.
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