Philips LHH-500 (c. 1990–1992)

Not much of the record on the Philips LHH-500 survives. It comes mostly from two places: Philips's own launch advertising in late 1990, and one full equipment profile in Audio magazine in the spring of 1992. Together they place the LHH-500 as a Reference Series CD player at the upper end of Philips's digital line. The ads ran in Audio (November 1990, p.61), Audio (December 1990, p.105), and elsewhere. They leaned hard on Philips's role as one of the inventors of the Compact Disc. They credited the LHH-500's sound to its Bitstream PDM (Pulse Density Modulation) conversion: 1-bit, 256-times-oversampling circuitry said to improve low-level linearity so quiet passages come through cleanly.

Audio (April 1992, p.44) ran an Equipment Profile and published the manufacturer's specifications. Frequency response is 20 Hz-20 kHz ±0.5 dB, overall 2 Hz-20 kHz. Signal-to-noise is greater than 96 dB, and EIAJ dynamic range is greater than 96 dB. THD is less than 0.0025% at 1 kHz, and crosstalk is greater than 96 dB. Output is 2 V from unbalanced RCA jacks or 3 V from balanced XLR jacks. The balanced XLR output is a strong hint of studio-conscious, high-end intent. The profile also listed Philips's U.S. address as One Philips Drive, Knoxville, Tennessee. Beyond these period documents, little else about the LHH-500 appears to have survived in the archive.

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