In article ,
wrote:

Is there something I don't know
about CD players, or how they
function? Does the audio arrive
out of phase/polarity at some
point in the chain inside the
player?

As I recall: in some CD players (mostly very old ones?), there's only
a single DAC, which is shared between the two channels. The "left"
and "right" samples are converted back to analog at slightly different
times, in alternating sequence. The analog voltage coming out from
the DAC is then fed to a pair of sample-and-hold circuits, one per
channel, and these then feed the (low-pass) analog reconstruction filters.

As a result of this, there's a slight phase delay (equal to the actual
DAC conversion time, or half of the nominal sample rate for the stereo
signal) introduced between the two channels. This would tend to
"pull" the perceived stereo image slightly to one side, since our
ear/brain systems are sensitive to a signal's inter-aural arrival
times as well as to inter-aural amplitude differences.

[I used this trick years ago as a way of enabling a videogame system
to convert a monaural sound sample to one which appeared to move left
and right, quite smoothly - a simple DSP algorithm did both sample
interpolation and filtering, to create timing and amplitude and
frequency-response differences between two copies of the sampled
sound. It could even introduce the equivalent of Doppler shift, to
mimic a sound source moving towards or away from the listener. My
first patent ever!]

It sounds as of the CDP101 used a "tweaked" reconstruction filter, to
introduce a bit of phase difference between the analog signals that
would partially cancel out the phase difference introduced by the use
of the single DAC.

I don't think I've seen the "one DAC, two sample-and-hold" technique
used in a CD or similar media player in a lot of years. Stereo (or
even 5-channel) DACs are jellybean parts these days.