14 bits is not what CD quality is, that is less than CD quality. That mean they are not giving you the best out of your CD's. These are the players that gave digital playback a bad name. Jes saying.
If you enjoy them great, but Digital is one area that has really moved forward since these players.
This simply isn't true. The Philips 4 times OS and linear interpolation gave the first generation machines using the twin ceramic pack TDA-1540Ds 15.4-15.8 bits of resolution- better than the 16bit D/As used by other manufacturers. The Sony CX-20017 used in the CDP-101 outperformed it, but only just.
In fact the dual-14 bit players handle 16-bit content just fine, better in fact than most of the 1st gen 16-bit stuff made in Japan which is actually the stuff that gave digital a bad name (that, and the failure by recording engineers to grasp the essentials for mastering CD's in the early days).
You might want to read a little more about the very excellent engineering that went into these early 14-bit machines before you consign them to the scrap heap. They did a superb job of pulling that off under duress of time after the consortium made a late decision to adopt 16-bit as the standard.
John
With all due respect, the 'consortium' didn't make a late decision to adopt 16bit.
Philips wanted 14bits because they never set their sights high in anything they did. Sony always were going to do 16bit- they already had 16bit stationary head PCM recorders, as did Soundstream, 3M, Ampex and Matsushita and 16bit production D/As ready to go. Philips thought they'd win the argument, but they lost. They'd bet the house already on 14bit and had nowhere to go. They still couldn't get their machines working well enough to sell, even with the 4x OS filter setup to improve resolution, so they cried and whinged and delayed the worldwide release by six months. Not that it bothered Sony, it gave them half a year to sell in their home market and establish themselves as the experts in Compact Disc.
The 'DAD convention' was a group of 35
Japanese manufacturers put together in September 1978 and by the 17th November 1978 the format they were to use was agreed to be 16 bit. This information is compiled in a summarised DAD Study Group, Joint Sessions. W62,3. The brief for working groups 2 and 3 was 16bit. They had multiple 'Working Group' sessions.
At the 67th Convention of the AES in New York, October 31/Nov3 1980, the joint presentation by Philips and Sony engineers covers the standard, including 16 bit quantisation, EFM and CIRC.
The "General Information on Compact Disc Digital Audio" was published in the JAES Vol29 No 1/1 pages 60-66 in Jan and Feb of 1981 and that was the Sony/Philips agreed format being 16bits. EFM and CIRC were standard at that point and it was all locked in, including the expansion to 4 channel option which they never pursued.
Philips had plenty of time, but simply weren't up to the task. It's amazing that Kyocera (DA-01) even had their machine (sold to many other OEMs and rebranded), using
Philips own chipset (TDA-1540Dx2 and 4x OS filter), being internally marketed in June 1982, 4 months before the official release in Japan and
10 months before Philips finally got a working machine to market.