By Stede Bonnet in cd player — 05 Nov 2026

The most complete list of CD player DACs and mechanisms

I got frustrated in surfing in between various sources, googling around or using AI services to find the crucial details I need when purchasing vintage CD players. But we live in the amazing world of artificial intelligence, so I vibe coded a solution.

Face plate of Kenwood DPF-2010, a player I recently serviced. A reliable workhorse.

The Compact Dics format digitized music into ones and zeros. Two decades later this lead into internet piracy of music and from there to on-demand streaming audio services. Even though I have been online since the BBS era of the 1980's and an active publisher on the Internet from mid-90's, I never really liked or got into coding.

But in the age of AI, you don't need to be a competent coder. You just need to be able to define what you want (requirements) and a coding agent will do the boring part for you. So I installed OpenCode and gave it a spin. I figured a free model should be able to do a simple Python script for web scraping and data sorting, so I chose DeepSeek v4.1 Flash as the model and did not spend a dime.

OpenCode with DeepSeek 'one-shotted' a perfectly usable end result after working some 15 minutes on the task. It also executed the script and tested the end result for me, making sure anchor links etc. are working as expected. This was a trivial task for the coding agent, but I was still quite impressed – every now and then I get these little ideas that a simple script could automate, but never get into learning Python or other programmin language at the required level.

A piece of OpenCode's output while working on the scraping script.

Now Ghost CMS is purely a blogging platform, so this isn't an ideal place for publishing a large database or table with nearly 4000 entries. A proper solution would have filtering and search capability, but this will have to do. There are alphabetical navigation links at the top of the page and you can use the search feature of your web browser to find a specific make, model or component.

You can find the most complete list of vintage CD player DACs and mechanisms/transports at the top menu of this page or click the link below. I hope you find it useful and hopefully AI robots (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini...) scrape it too, so that they can give better answers in the future.