CD PLAYERS

  • Car CD Player in its casing
  • installed veiw
  • installation

Car CD Player

Car Disc player  come in various styles to suit your taste.  They are among the commonest car accessories these days.  Sometimes seen as fixed devices,  they are also manufactured as portable devices.

Variety of Looks to Suit Your Style

CD players are contained in a plastic and steel casing which also contains the electrical system and the user interface.

The casing of a portable CD player also contains ports used to connect the player to a speaker, headphones or a power system. A portable CD player generally contains an internal power source in the form of batteries.

The house of a CD player contains speakers and also a radio and tape deck. CD players used in component audio systems contain a power source, the user interface, and numerous ports to connect the player to the various parts of an audio system.

Different companies have given different looks to this music system making it more showy and portable.

Tray Loading May Vary

Sliding Load

Sony released the world's first CD Player called the CDP-101 in 1982 utilising a slide-out tray design for the CD. This one was easy to use and manufacture and so most CD player tray designs had followed this style of tray ever since. However, other styles evolved thereafter.

Vertical Loading

During the launch of the first prototype CD player by Sony, the company showcased the vertical loading design of the CD player.  The player was calledGoronta. Though the prototype's design was never really put into actual production, it was for a time adopted for production by a number of early manufacturers including Alpine/Luxman, Matsushita under the Technics brand, Kenwood and Toshiba/Aurex.

Top Loading

Tray Load with Sliding Mechanism

Meridians players were the first players to adopt tray loading with sliding play mechanism. Here, as the tray came out to collect the CD, the entire player's transport system also came out as one unit.

 Tray Load with Dampers

Some companies produced CD players with dampened trays. The dampers were rubber grommets built into the tray to reduce distortion.  CDX-1000 CD player  manufactured by Yamaha was a good example of this design.

Slot Loading

This is the preferred loading mechanism for car audio head units, the Apple MacBook, PlayStation 3, amongst other audio players. No tray pops out, and a motor is used to assist disc insertion and removal. However, Mini-CDs and non-circular CDs may have troubles with insertion and/or ejection.

Tracking Mechanisms

Two types of optical tracking mechanisms exist:

  • the swing-arm mechanism, where the lens moves at the end of an arm. This one is very much like the old turntables.
  • the radial mechanism is another one. This was designed by Sony.  It is used in most CD players nowadays because it is cheaper. Here  the lens moves on a radial rail.

Comparing th two tracking mechanisms, the swing-arm mechanism has a distinctive advantage over the other. Firstly  it doesn't  skip when the rail becomes dirty. Secondly, it tends to have a much longer life than their radial counterparts.
The radial mechanism works best for CD-Roms, though, as the speed of the disc increases.

How it Functions?

A CD player has three major components:
  • drive motor,
  • lens system,
  • tracking mechanism.
The drive motor rotates the disc between 200 and 500 revolutions per minute. The tracking mechanism moves the lens system along the spiral tracks in which information is encoded.  The lens reads the information using a laser beam. The laser reads information by focusing a beam on the CD, which is reflected back to a sensor. The sensor detects changes in the beam, and interprets these changes to read the data. This data is output as sound using a digital-to-analog converter (DAC).
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