Sony TA-FA777ES

In fact, this where it really ends, for Sony as well as all the others : the launch of the best and least compressed audio format ever accessible to a soon-to-be wide audience.
SACD is like 10-bit / 4:4:4 video : pure signal, no loss. Unfortunately, it is big, bulky, expensive, and requires new loudspeakers, new sources and... new discs.

Ten years after, we all know where things are at : computers have engulfed everything and the best way to sell albums seems to either include a video track and "bonuses" aplenty or to go the download way through myspace and youtube.
Attempts at quality downloading (even 24/96 high-res) are actually ongoing but whether this will make a market (even if niche-like) remains to be seen.

So the TA-FA777ES was Sony's last stand for 2-channel audio, for the home and the old fashioned way, with Takashi Kanai at the helm as he had been since the late 1970s.

Non-magnetic and gold-plated MOS-FETs, Torus Toroidal Core transformer, copper-plated chassis (something Sony did much before Marantz started being praised for such audiophile seriousness), ultra-select parts, solid aluminium controls, heatsinks and switches - the TA-FA777ES inherited from both the contemporary TA-N1 & TA-E1 and the Series 5000 tricks while remaining price-wise accessible.

It was Sony's last high-end but non-exorbitant ES pre/main amplifier - a 1999 version of the 1965 ES TA-1120.