Pioneer PD-93
Pioneer PD-5000
(1989 - 1992)

Pioneer's CD Meisterwerk - before the Stable Platter slant.

Available originally in Japan and Europe under the PD-5000 name and in the USA as a PD-93 under the ELITE tag and with the shiny Urushi finish.

The inside is even better than the earlier and smaller PD-3000 (aka PD-91) : fully copper-plated non-resonant "honeycomb" chassis, symmetric and dual-mono audio boards, copper-shielded filtering capacitors, gold-plated motor with ceramic shaft, low impedance power supply, bigga trafos placed outside the enclosure, reduced and balanced signal path, low center of gravity for the motor, non-resonant disc clamp and "honeycomb" insulator feet, 4 separate power feeds and 19 regulations - 15 kilos of audiophile high-end :)
Trivia : the display was left "bare" for the japanese and european versions (blue) while the US version had it coloured in ambre, as shown above.

Digital filter is 20-bit resolution with 8x oversampling. The digital-to-analogue section is centered around two copper-shielded 20-bit dual-balanced converters made by Pioneer - at least the tag says so. The pre-production units had Burr-Brown "PCM 63 Proto" converters and very different audio boards. The image here shown to the left probably shows a pre-production audio board as none of the images I could find here and there shows anything that lavish... Since the PD-5000 was the first 20-bit resolution CD player, there must've been quite a few version of the d/a board... but the same kind of "downscaling" from pre-production to production units happened to the famed PD-95.

An output selector permits to avoid having digital clocks pulsing while only the analogue outputs are used ; display can be switched off, too, for the ultimate in operation silence - mostly, it'll help save the FL display from aging too fast. Although the digital section allowed for it, no analogue balanced output were present : only (big) single-ended RCAs.

In a june 1990 german test review, Sony's CDP-X77ES made it equal to the (prototype) Pioneer PD-5000 : better build-quality for the PD-5000 but better sound for the PULSE-equipped Sony. A result later on in clear favor of the Sony CDP-X777ES and... throughout the rest of the 1990s :)
Pioneer sold a lot of PD-3000 and PD-5000 in Japan and Europe although not in the same amounts Sony was selling its X7 CD players... However, in the long run, the Pioneers can still be serviced in Japan, whereas the Sonys cannot be serviced anymore anywhere.
Both systems were truly excellent at any rate - more a matter of taste in sound and looks. And both were actually built to play beyond a full decade, if not two - gone-by days, ain't it ?