I have found the following text on:
http://www.dutchaudioclassics.nl/?strPage=Info&strBrand=Marantz&strType=cd85Review Hi-Fi Choice May 1989
With the Marantz CD94 starting to get a bit long in the tooth and with an unfilled market slot in the £500 price region, other manufacturers were in a position to take advantage, so Marantz now launched the Marantz CD85 which competes head on with some highly regarded established players in this price group.
In complete contrast to the light plastic boxed siblings that Marantz is so good at -and in true Japanese fashion, for an upmarket player needs to be weighty- the company has invested in some heavy engineering here. The heavy diecast zinc alloy chassis forms the very rigid structure upon which the player is founded. The top panel is another two-piece alloy extrusion, and some of the steel panels are copper plated, along with the screws that hold it all together. The front panel is yet another high quality alloy extrusion, but the buttons and end caps are plastic. To complete the effect, the side panels are solid wood with a high gloss finish, and the whole thing sits on four large round metal-finished feet.
There are all facilities you would expect from a machine of this type -
apart that is from a variable line output. FTS is available for a total of aroun 150 discs, plus all the normal track, index and search facilities (two speeds), full programming for up to 24 tracks or extracts, full edit facilities, AMS (which plays the first 10 seconds of each track) and full repeat facilities. Everything is duplicated on the remote handset, which also has a track select keypad.
Internally the player is very interesting. It has an entirely different board layout from Marantz's cheaper offerings, and represents a completely new computer optimised design, using multi-board construction techniques with ribbon cable linkages. The power supply uses a large transformer, ample audio quality supply capacitors and multi chip regulators attached to a proper heatsink. The main board is covered with audiophile Cerafine electrolytics for decoupling and a variety of film caps elsewhere, including coper foil polystyrene types.
The wiring around the transport control looks a little messy, but apart from that the design is well sorted. A selected 'B' grade digital filter drives the similarly selected TDA1541A S1 digital-to-anaolgue converter, with good quality film decoupling. The audio section is arranged in a straight line down one side of the board, with all components mirrored positionally for left and right channels. Single op-amps are used in place of the normal dual types for the audio current to voltage conversion, filtering and the final stage, which is direct coupled to the output. Output muting is by relay but de-emphasis is FET-switched. The transport is one of Philips' better types, with an alloy laser deck mounted on a foam-damped spring suspension. Even the draw is metal rather than plastic and is smoother in operation, but the disc clamp looks standard and it's no quicker than normal.
