Marantz (sold)

This is a hi-end CD player from the late 80's comparable to the top end Sony ES series. This was Ken Ishiwata's first CD player design for Marantz. At the time it was a competent implementation of the classic Philips SAA7220P/B 4x oversampling filter & TDA1541A (S1 single crown) DAC combination.

The die-cast chassis, power supply and transport are based on the Philips CD880, the rest of the player is Marantz' own design.  It employs separate regulated analogue & digital power supplies (discrete for the analogue section) and the main PCB has separate digital & analogue ground planes (joined at the filter-DAC interface). 

It has a solid die-cast metal Philips CDM1-MkII swing-arm mechanism with Hall motor. These almost never die, and if they do play up it is rarely a problem with the laser. This thing can in theory be kept going almost forever.

Finally, an additional 8 kg or so of base-metal thrown in for the chassis, bottom & cheeks bring the total weight to about 15kg.