Philips CD473

Reviewed Feb 07th, 2021 by kcc

Had this player since new, my first. Languished for a while in storage until I got back into hifi. Severely underwhelmed by a more recent technics, I got my old 473 out of its box and was blown away, especially when paired with better amp and speakers than I had used previously. The rendition of acoustic instruments and voice especially is better than any bitstream DAC I've tried. Went through several ostensibly better players looking for the holy grail and they were all blown away by this. Here's the list of the fallen: Philips 740, Denon 625, Sony xb740, Sony 715, arcam cd72, Technics sl ps7. Oh and a later Philips recording player. The only players better were the higher end implementations of the tda 1541 DAC, namely Rotel 855, Sony CDP 222esd and a heavily modded Marantz.

Reviewed Sep 11th, 2018 by david haworth

I owned one of these in the later part of the 80s. First up it has an odd slope ledge front styling that needs to be taken into account when stacking equipment on top as the equipment will sit back maybe an inch or so.
This was one of Philips better players and apart from the average build quality (lots of plastic) it was one of the best players I owned, there were lots of features I never used such as Philips FTS thing. the remote was a good sized 2 inch wide type design.
Musically it was very good ,bass was good without being boomy top end was detailed without being overly bright. There was at the time some oddities about its compnents as some units had the TD 1541A chip and some the standard TD1541. The drawer mechanism was ok but clunky and at the time the Sonys were much smoother. But it all worked well enough and the player was quiet in operation. Again they seem to fetch a good price second hand nowadays (2018) so if you find one cheap enough and are tempted to hear just how good multibit could sound then grab it. It also has a coaxial digital output so you can hook up to a DAC.
It was part of a family of 6 from memory the other 2 brothers were the CD471 basic non remote version the CD 472 which added the remote but not all the features of the 473.

There were also 3 smaller sisters in the range which were said to be the same players just in smaller cases these were the CD371/372/ 373 and they dispensed with the decent blue fluroscent display of their larger brothers in favour of a rather painful different type. The CD 473 may have been the only one with the coaxial digital output and is a recommended player for anyone fortunate enough to come across one at the right money