On the 25th May 1983, I visited one of the two Kent Hi-Fi stores (remember them?) in Canberra and handed over $1,199 to purchase my first CD player. It was, I was led to believe, only the second CD player to have been sold in Canberra. May 1983 was less than eight months after the Sony CDP-101 CD player had been launched in Japan.
That was, of course, a lot of money back then. The Reserve Bank of Australia tells me that in 2021 dollars, that comes to $4,050. Back then my salary was the equivalent of less than $50,000 in today's money. But I'd been into high fidelity for a decade and was almost dying for a format free from surface noise. I know, we're not supposed to be concerned about such vinyl defects, but when you're a kid and an album costs you six
