At the end of 1992, I stumbled upon a Pioneer CD player from the Reference series, the PD-8500; nothing special but with good reading mechanics, heavy weight, honeycomb base structure, dampened CD tray and the acclaimed Burr-Brown 24-bit converters (other than 1-bit! A few years later, multibit converters proved superior to bitstream, at least in some cases). I shelled out 230 thousand Lire and from January 1993 my digital source was still the weak link of my system, but at least it was a more dignified one. Finally I was able to listen to some things my beloved loudspeakers were capable of!