On October 1, 1982, Sony released the CDP-101 in Japan, the world's first consumer CD player. It cost ¥168,000 — roughly $1,060 at the time, or about $3,700 after inflation. The launch was meant to be global, but Philips, Sony's partner in developing the compact disc, wasn't ready with its own CD100 player, so Sony limited the debut to Japan. US and European buyers had to wait until March 1983.
The CDP-101 was promising but imperfect. To keep costs down, it used a single digital-to-analog converter for both stereo channels, and without sample-and-hold circuitry the left and right channels ended up out of sync by about 11 microseconds. Still, CDs offered clear advantages over vinyl and cassettes: laser-based playback meant no wear from physical contact, and listeners got near-instant track skipping and replay. Sony and CBS prepared 50 CD albums for the Japanese launch, yet the later Western debut had only 16 titles.
CD players didn't become mainstream overnight. Hardware prices needed to fall, and album catalogs had to grow through landmark DDD releases in the mid-1980s. Around the same time, CD-ROM drives began appearing in computers, though they only became common in the early-to-mid 1990s with the multimedia PC era. Today, vintage CDP-101 units can still be found on resale sites, often listed between $600 and $800.