Sony CDP-552ESD

Sony's first consumer & audiophile CD player, sporting a digital output as well : ES-D.

Inside is a sort of preview of the future X7 players : heavyweight copper-plated chassis, beefy 35VA transformer, transformer-balanced coaxial digital output, long-crystal LC-OFC wiring, very select caps (Nichicon Muse, Elna For Audio etc), generous copper-plated heatsinking / copper bus bars and twisted wiring cables ending on GIC low-pass filters.

The later CDP-555ESD or CDP-X7ESD would however see an even beefier and better regulated power-supply and a more logic wiring / placement of the boards.
The drive is a pre-BU : fairly similar with the two magnetic rails but based on Cerasin (a renewed SBMC of sorts with more ceramic powder) and without aluminium diecast.

Actual d/a is done not by Sony ICs nor by Philips ICs but by two BurrBrown PCM53JP-VK which brings us back to the fairly early days but the CDP-552ESD was however meant to be used with the DAS-702ES outboard d/a converter.

Although by then abandoned by everybody but Marantz Japan, a discreet reminiscence of the origins of the CD format was put at the back of the CDP-552ESD : a little switch allowing to output either a PCM digital audio stream or a "graphics" data stream :)

The CDP-552ESD was named CDP-650ESD in the USA ; it was highly reviewed everywhere and sold very well - CD-wise, Sony ruled.

Upgraded by the visually similar CDP-552ESDII, aka CDP-650ESDII in the US, aka CDP-553ESD in Japan.