i thought it looked too much like a ceramic resonator myself, but dont those usually have 3 leads? i assumed it was a crystal from the marking on the board. Domonic Beesley had some issues with cd player stability when he was designing NBSC. http://authorityfile.co.uk/NBSC/article ... struct-5.1.
i wonder if the newer cd players -the ones with electronic skip protection- may be a bit better since they save parts of the data stream to memory.