Two weeks ago I went to a little Comic Convention and found a comic and card shop which had a couple of old issues of Widescreen Review magazine. Since they were from 1998, I figured they'd be good reads for LD info (and since it was before WSR joined the DVD Forum, they weren't at the point of trying to kill off LD by lambasting the format just yet.)

Anyhoose, I found this interesting blurb about MSB's showing at CES 1998 where they describe what they were showing off. Most notably was the LS-2 Platinum, which is described as a...I'm guessing this is something that never made it out of the prototype phase as this is the first I've heard of it. Tried doing a search on it, and found this page from Soundstage.com which confirms that MSB had a unit they were showing off called "Platinum LS-2 Dual Transport" but gives no information on it.

Anyone else heard of this player? I can only imagine that it was based off of Pioneer's LD-W1 as that's the only dual tray player I've ever heard of.

Well we all know what this player was based off of:) ld-w1!!!

I wonder how it would be if kaleidoscape was around in LD day. Imagine 2 or more 2-sided LD players chained into a kaleidoscape controller for simulations playback. Kaleidescape players would be rs-232 control port modded. Control box would pull cover art/film info etc.. from the Internet via 56k dial up modem:) place all 3 CAV discs of sw ep4 jsc into 3 chained players and enjoy the full film uninterrupted thru kaleidoscape system:)

That's weird. I remember Duncan (ldservice) saying that Pioneer had a ton of unsold LD-W1s that they destroyed. The model would have been out of production for years by 1998. Maybe MSB was going to mod and resell "new old stock" LDW1 players?

The video quality of the LDW1 also wouldn't have really held up to the "sharp" picture of the later LD players that people would be shopping around for.

More likely just two LX-900U's stacked on top of each other with remote control trickery. But by 1998 there wouldn't be enough of a market.

Well, it's not out of the realm of possibility that MSB could improve the video quality of the LD-W1 since they improved the picture quality of the LX-900 with the Runco players.

Or maybe they tried, and couldn't get the quality that they wanted and scrapped their plans for the player after that CES?

Where is Disclord when we need him the most!!!

Does anyone have a photo of this player?

I vaguely remember MSB mentioning this dual LD player back in the day but I'm pretty certain it never made it to production. Also, I have never seen pre-production photos of it so I would assume they thought about it but it never went that far.

Somehow I missed this thread, this is all news to me.

The LD-W1 would made a decent reference deck if the video circuitry was completely thrown out. The transport is nice, the video is so-so. A stock LD-W1 looks pretty crap compared to CLD-97, CLD-99, etc and would never fly at a price several times an Elite’s price in 1998. It would have to have totally different audio and video sections as well as power supply and case. Would these garagistas actually be able to do it? I seriously doubt it. However I doubt even more that they could make a transport!

I think the theory of it just literally being two decks internally makes the most sense. There are a couple of ways of doing this with Pioneer industrial decks but a clever boy could probably even do it with the “control” ports in the rear of consumer machines. It could just be two DVL-90s.

Yeah I feel there would be at least one photo circulating around if this actually came to fruition.

It would have to be a full overhaul of the video section of a LD-W1 if they used that. I do believe MSB would be capable of that. I have seen a DTS mod on a preamp and progressive DVD mod they did and it is absolutely wild. I think MSB had better engineers than the OEM. The stacking of two Panasonics was probably the design though.


Interesting idea!