Pioneer PD-91

Export version of the japanese PD-3000, built as lavishly as can be and from the last days of hifi's golden years.

If the 18bit digital-to-analogue converters are now a bit dated, the mechanical integrity and minutious care of the smallest details are, today, completely unbelievable :
all-copper chassis, non-resonating honeycomb plates, eleven regulators and sixteen power supplies, copper/resin laminated mechanism base, large magnetic disc clamper, wear-resistant loading tray, ceramic supports, Class A buffer amps - and more.
Read the TECH1 section for all the details !

It should be noted that the PD-3000 original sports a completely different audio board and has two external power transformers - I don't know if this is related to Pioneer's hesitation between its own d/a chips or Burr-Brown's for the PD-91 and PD-93...
Both ended up with Pioneer's own converters - but maybe not in Japan ?

Anyway - only Philips in Japan (LHH series), Sony and Pioneer kept so consistant with the build-quality of their digital sources throughout the 1980s and 1990s. All this is now gone and CD itself will vanish in the forseeable future...

But the PD-91 and its PD-5000 later elder (aka PD-93) are good reminders of a time when true craftsmanship still was part of this industry.

The PD-93 remained Stereoplay's reference player for a long while, only to be dislodged from that spot by Sony's Pulse-based CDP-X777ES in 1992.