Pioneer Elite Reference LD-S1 laserdisc player

starkiller

just picked up one of these the other day and was wondering if there is still a market for these. i have yet to find a laserdisc to test it with but it does power up/the drawer slides in and out and the panel lights up so those are good signs. thing weights almost 50lbs so its pretty substantial.

mantis

I owned Lasredisc myself. it's old technolgy but it was the beginning of the shiny disc format and a step up from vcr. it's fun to play with old technology. I loved mine. I had a Pioneer Elite as well. CLD-59.

There are disc's to be found, start checking ebay and audiogon.

Dan

Falcon01

You can find laserdiscs on craigslist also. Check your local listings.

LuSh

Hi StarKiller,

Laserdisc was a wonderful playback format. Pure analog on a disc. From a pure fan's perspective Laserdisc was a step-up from DVD playback. Yes, DVD offered slightly higher resolution in picture but at the cost of MPEG2 compression. Many could and do argue that the pure analog nature of Laserdisc better preserves the film presentation of movies.

Sound quality is also better in almost every instance, there are a number of technical reasons for this. Laserdisc contained a PCM (lossless two channel) soundtrack which was re-encoded into multi channel Pro Logic, although channel separation wasn't discrete it offered no compression, unlike DD and DTS sources which were discrete but compressed. Blu-Ray has finally offered the best of both worlds.

If you get a chance pickup Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now or Jurassic Park on LD. These soundtracks will be clearly better then their DVD counter parts. LD's used to use direct final mix recordings where DVD and Blu Ray use near-field mixes, the difference is that the final mix is mixed in an actual theater using much better equipment where a near-field mix is used to dumb down things so consumers using non-home theater gear (or inferior HTIB) can still hear and enjoy all aspects of a soundtrack.

Jurassic Park on DTS is a revelation as is Apocalypse Now. I really thought long and hard about buying an LD player, I've decided to wait for Blu Ray releases, however there are many advantages to LD over DVD and not just VCR.

Great find, you will be able to find quite a collection of discs.

http://www.canuckaudiomart.com/details/123739-laserdisc_player_and_discs/

I'm not associated with the link above but 75 movies and a player for about $100 US, you can't get much better.

danz1906

I have Sony MDP-650 it was killer in its day, I still have some Concerts on Laser-disc.
Also Star Wars Trilogy S.E. LD..

nooshinjohn

if you want to sell it let me know... I have some great disc's and no player

starkiller

will do, have to find a disc and make sure it works ok