The Specials Album is one of my favourite albums. Some great songs on it. I distinctly remember watching a very early video of Ghost Town when I was around 11-12 years old and off school with a badly twisted ankle. Ah nostalgia, music can really help you travel back in time and recapture memories.
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So which of the top budget CD players did you decide on? Probably doesn’t compare to the gear you have now. 
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We must be about the same age! Yes, I remember rushing over to my friend’s house to tell him that I’d just bought The Specials and then we rushed over to my house to listen to it. I’m sure the sound coming out of that boombox must have been terribly tinny, but it sounded wonderful at the time.
I still love that album too. If you haven’t tried it yet, I’d recommend The BBC Sessions, which has a lot of the same songs, but I think it sounds a bit better. They have a live feel, and the BBC probably provided them with better production than the original album.
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LOL, that is lost in the sands of time, I’m afraid. I know it seemed like a lot of money at the time, because I was still at college, so I had to use money I’d saved from my summer job.
I can’t imagine what the 20 year old me would have thought about spending several thousand dollars on headphones. Back then I had a pair of lightweight Sennheisers, with yellow foam pads!
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Thanks, I will definately look into those BBC sessions.
Yeah man. I thought about what I’d have bought had I been 25 years old in 1985 let’s say. I think I would have been a reel to reel guy. Lol.
And would have bought a digital VHS recorder, so all my music could be played back on VHS tape. 
Reel-to-reel wasn’t a mainstream thing in the 1980s, or something interesting to people in their 20s. In 1985, those who were “serious” about high fidelity audio were all over home CD players. This would have “gotten you closer to what the artist intended,” “been exactly what the studio engineers heard,” and “never wore out like a vinyl record.” CDs were all the rage because they didn’t have surface noise and were (initially said) to be unaffected by dust, fingerprints, and minor scratches. You’d have paid $15 to $18 for each CD album with 8-10 songs, and most albums had only one or two songs worth listening to.
Mobile CD players (Sony Discman) and car CD players were cutting edge, not common, and often skipped badly. You’d probably have a Walkman stereo cassette player with Koss Porta Pros, and carry a blocky box holding 10-20 tapes with you everywhere. Some of the tapes might be a hand-copied mix from other tapes (eek!), recorded from LPs, or recorded off FM radio (double eek!). If your car was new you’d have a cassette deck and it may even have auto reverse; if built in the 1970s it would have an 8-Track player with a cassette adapter insert.
Those on the cutting edge might have tried this on the technically superior Sony BetaMax video tape system (not VHS), but CDs dominated mindshare in the mid 1980s. You’d have owned Dire Straits Brothers In Arms as one of the first albums intended for the CD buying market (who were largely well off white guys). By the late 1980s and after “pure digital DDD” releases hit the market, you and many others would realize CDs were often cold and brittle sounding.
By the 1990s you’d likely have become a tube amp and vinyl defender.
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Great post here, man. Yeah but I’m a huge CD guy now! Lol I just like to think I’d been a bit different, but I think you probably called me out on that. I love CDs. Have a Cyrus CDi with the PSXR-2 unique intelligent power supply to go with it. It is heavenly paired with my chord Qutest.
Anyhow. Had it been 1982 and I had been living in America I’d have bought the first ever commercial release cd, which was Billy Joel’s double disc of his greatest hits.
CDs in the U.K didn’t go bananas until 1985 and of course Brothers and arms sold so big in the U.K then.
Pretty cool history.
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Agreed, that was an amazing post by @generic, which eerily reenacted my whole childhood.
I persuaded my Dad to buy a Philips CD player in 1985 because Philips were giving away 2 Dire Straits tickets with every purchase. Actually I told him how great CDs were, I didn’t tell him that I would get those tickets! 
I saw them at the Hammersmith Odeon, which relatively speaking, was a very small venue for such a popular group - what a great show.
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Well I’m pleased to say that it is not an RL SS copy. I went up to the inconvenient storage location for the 90% of my albums that are not in the much smaller convenient location. And I’m pleased because I would not have wanted to see a valuable pressing in this sad condition. Quite playable, but that record has seen a lot of parties in it’s mis-spent youth.
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Toss up between this or Bad Co Bad Co…
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You had me right up till this 
I guess my Sony V6 were too warm to make CDs sound cold
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Something like this was the worst “upgrade” of my CD player buying era. Panasonic “MASH” technology made everything very bright and painful:
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I never tried anything with MASH. Essentially I went straight from this to iPod:
In my defense, my budget for audio gear was very constrained after 1990.
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For me it was a cassette of Depeche Mode Violator in the early 90’s, bought it on CD a year later, after starting down the black hole that is HiFi etc.
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Likely DM’s “Magnum Opus”. Great album. 
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The title track is what I bought it for, but the rest of the album is very well played and gritty blues. I didn’t understand it until decades later, and now it’s one of my favorite blues albums.
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The parents purchased a turntable for me around 10 years of age and said I could buy 1 album for it. This was the beginning of my musical journey:
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That was pretty precocious of you! (I’ve never heard of them, any good? 
)
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Yeah, I grew up in a hippie household.
My folks enjoyed rock and listened to stuff like Traffic, Jimi Hendrix, The Moody Blues, Deep Purple, Janis Joplin, etc… I heard the Beatles on the radio a lot and found it far more comforting than Dad’s Iron Butterfly album so it seemed like the obvious choice.