Sony D-50
A portable CD player whose first owners found out the hard way that "portable" and "skip-free" were two very different promises.
Overview
The D-50 was Sony's bid to shrink the compact disc from a living-room component into something you could carry, and the early-adopter record on it is unusually candid about what that first generation of portable CD hardware actually delivered. A letter published in HiFi-Stereo (June 1985, p.11) recounts an owner whose D-50 made "blipping" sounds on certain passages of a couple of discs — the kind of glitch that sent him to Sony for an explanation rather than back to the store. That single anecdote captures the machine's reputation better than any spec sheet could: a genuinely new category of product, shipped before the world had figured out how to make it behave.
The documentation situation around this model is genuinely thin. The fact sheet for this entry carries no verified specifications, no confirmed production history, and no independent bench measurements, so anything beyond the period letter cited above should be treated as unconfirmed.
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