Sony CDP-620ES
At $950, Sony's "slightly downgraded" ES player undercut its own flagship by $350 - and one reviewer couldn't hear the difference.
Overview
Sony built the CDP-620ES as the practical sibling of the CDP-650ESD. The price gap tells most of the story: $950 against the flagship's $1,300. Sony's own line was that the cheaper machine incorporated "pretty much all of the new technology" of the expensive one, and the spec sheet backs that up. Frequency response is 2 Hz to 20 kHz, ±0.3 dB. Harmonic distortion is under 0.0025% at 1 kHz. Dynamic range is greater than 96 dB, and channel separation is greater than 95 dB. Those are flagship-grade numbers for the mid-1980s.
What Sony deleted to save the $350 was narrow. The 650ESD had a digital-code output port on the rear panel, a connector giving access to the audio bit stream for digital-to-digital transfer. The 620ES doesn't have it. The flagship also had an anodized copper chassis, which Sony claimed had better resonant and thermal properties, and it sat on more massive feet. Neither difference shows up in a listening session. Audio (September 1985, p.70) put it plainly: apart from access to the digital audio code, the 620ES offered the same quality sound and almost all the features of its higher-priced sister.
The one place the cheaper player out-features its big brother is the headphone jack. Sony's engineers argued that adding a headphone amplifier to a "pure" CD player like the 650 could affect sound quality a trifle, so they left it off the flagship. On the 620ES they compromised and included both the jack and its level control. Reviewers welcomed it and reported hearing no degradation. The same review noted a smaller difference: the flagship's track-number grid displays 20 numbers, the 620ES's only 18, even though both machines memorize 20 programmable selections.
The front panel is dense, the way ES buyers expected. A 20-key one-touch Direct Music Select layout sits near the center, with a "+10" key to speed up access to higher track numbers, plus Play, Pause, AMS, and Play Mode keys. A "Music Calendar" display shows the disc's track count, the program, and the current selection at a glance. Repeat, A-B repeat, Time (toggling elapsed and remaining time), Auto Delay, and Shuffle Play round out the controls. The supplied Remote Commander duplicates nearly every front-panel function, including random-access programming and remote adjustment of the variable output level. When the level is changed remotely, the knob on the panel visibly turns to match.
Sony rated the outputs at 2.0 V fixed, with a variable output adjustable up to 2.0 V maximum. Both fixed- and variable-level jacks are on the rear panel, alongside a multiple-pin connector intended for a future video-graphics interface module. An initializing switch lets the owner choose which play mode the unit enters when first powered on: continuous, single-selection, or programmed. Power draw is modest at 16 watts from a 120 V, 60 Hz supply. The chassis measures 17 inches wide by 3¼ inches high by 14⅜ inches deep (43 × 8 × 36.5 cm) and weighs 19 lbs., 14 oz. (9 kg).
The transport is the part that still impresses. The lower-mass pickup and linear-motor pickup drive developed for Sony's third-generation CD players carried over to this model. Audio (September 1985, p.70) found the results superb, in tracking stability and resistance to external shock and vibration as well as search speed. Sony claimed any point on a disc could be accessed within one second, and in the reviewer's testing that was no exaggeration. Double-digit track searches finished almost before the instruction could be entered. A torture-test disc of scratches and defects posed no real challenge to the error correction.
On sound, the verdict was unambiguous. The same reviewer had previously called the CDP-650ESD the best-sounding CD player he'd heard. After many hours of comparison he could not honestly detect any difference between the two. He placed the 620ES firmly in the "superb" category and wondered why anyone without a specific need for the digital output would spend the extra $350. Independent measurement backed the listening: response varied by no more than ±0.1 dB across 20 Hz to 20 kHz. THD at 0 dB measured 0.0038% at mid-frequencies, slightly higher than the flagship's 0.003%, but nothing to get upset about. A spectrum sweep of a 20 kHz test signal showed the reproduced tone and essentially nothing else, with no out-of-band components outside the audio spectrum. Audio (in a later comparison, p.78) held that result up as a benchmark alongside the Pioneer PD-9010X.
Sony iterated on this one. A CDP-620ESII appears in Audio (November 1986, p.22) advertising, described as a new direction in player design with enhanced display features and improved servo response for scratched or defective discs. That is a distinct model, not this one. The original 620ES is an ES-badged player with flagship measurements and a headphone output its bigger sibling lacked, and its secondhand market has never treated it with the reverence the 650ESD commands.
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