Pioneer VP-1000
A $749 laser videodisc player that promised 40 Hz to 20 kHz sound and delivered pictures nobody had seen on a television before — when the discs cooperated.
Overview
The VP-1000 was a laser-optical videodisc player, and the way it reached customers tells you how new the whole idea was: it went on sale in June 1980 in just four test markets — Dallas/Fort Worth, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Syracuse, and Madison, Wisconsin — with the company planning to add four more cities every sixty to ninety days. The list price was $749. A shortcoming of all the video-disc machines, the magazine observed, was the relative dearth of discs for sale — software, not players, was the bottleneck.
What the machine did, it did with a laser. Inside the VP-1000, optical information is converted into electrical signals for the audio, video, and tracking systems, and a laser beam is reflected off the disc and back to a photodiode to read the signal. That's a contactless system, which is the whole point: no stylus dragging through a groove, no wear in the usual sense. The trade-off Pioneer's engineers had to manage was keeping that optical servo locked while the disc spun, and the period reviews suggest they mostly managed it.
The sound was the part that made audio people sit up. High-Fidelity (1981, p.258) reported that Pioneer's spec sheet claimed 40 Hz to 20 kHz response, 55 dBA S/N, and less than 0.3% THD — far better than videotape could offer, and videotape ran at a slower speed than audio cassette tape.
For anyone who had been putting up with VHS and Beta hi-fi hiss, those numbers were the argument for the format.Pioneer also built in the conveniences that the laser system made possible. Still-framing was among the conveniences the VP-1000 offered, with virtually no visible jitter.
The picture quality, when everything worked, drew genuine enthusiasm. Audio's Bert Whyte (August 1981, p.12) wrote that with every part of the system functioning optimally the results were of outstanding excellence, and that apart from a direct live satellite feed, no other medium would give you television like it. That's a strong claim from a reviewer who had spent months waiting for the machine to settle down — he opened his August 1981 column (p.10) by noting the review had had a gestation period almost as long as a full-term human birth, thanks to the format's "teething troubles."
And there were teething troubles. Whyte's central complaint was the software. Playing movies from the MCA DiscoVision catalog — discs made originally for the Magnavision player but supposed to be fully compatible with the Pioneer — he found the software not very reliable, with glitches that could appear on one side of a disc and not on the other. By February 1983, in a follow-up column (p.86), he was able to report that the manufacturing side had been reshuffled: some companies had left the field, others had modified their procedures, and Pioneer's own LaserDisc plant in Kofu, Japan had significantly increased production with better technology. The hardware had been fine; the pressing plants had to catch up.
That's the honest shape of the VP-1000 story. The audio performance was genuinely ahead of its time — 55 dBA and under 0.3% THD from a videodisc was a real achievement, and the 40 Hz to 20 kHz claim held up well enough that the magazine covering it treated the spec sheet as news. The video, when the disc was good, was better than anything else on the shelf. But collectors chasing one today should expect to spend their time hunting discs, not servicing the player — and should expect a certain number of those discs to glitch.
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