Nice to see this. I note the top loading mechanism, which I have heard has advantages in that there are less mechanical things to break and may hold the disk more uniformly since the bottom spindle doesn’t move when loading. No idea if true.
I have an old top loading Sony discman and I ran across some proper measurements of a few years ago, and turns out that cheap old plastic thing was a pretty much perfect transport with shockingly good DAC all things considered.
On the other hand, the best thing you can do with the late 1990s multi thousand dollar ayre multi format player I was gifted is bypass the DAC and use digital out to a sub $100 topping DAC. Or even to an AVR.
Or at least change the filter dip switch on the back from “listen” (where ayre says it should be) to “measure” which ayre says is only to be used for repair calibration and such. i don’t know what the “listen” filter is exactly, though it seems to roll off higher frequencies (10kz on say). Maybe so it sounds more like vinyl or “less digital” (aka, less accurate)?
Anyway you are in trouble when a company designs a machine/filter to perform worse than it can because it supposedly sounds better).
I say all that to support the premise that cd players were pretty much a solved problem by 2000, but could still be “broken” to create differences for “audiophile” performance. lol. Good to see here a machine of similar vintage with good performance. I suspect one did not need to spend 10k to get excellent performance. But at least one could spend that much and not have purposefully badly measuring device. Though Maybe Ayre made a 10k priced player where the measure and listen filters were the same…