that's what the PR said. I just talked with double Sato-san at the show, they both personally confirmed to me that this was not designed for portable use and my speculation was correct - the battery was completely for clean power, the side effect is of it being self powered. other nuggets I managed to get from Sato-san
1) he admitted that the use of a traditional DAC/amp chip is they wanted power which they couldn't achieve with the current S-Master, and he had to admit defeat here
2) the knob is milled out of a single block of OFC, and treated the same way as the 1Z thus the gold finish. thou they went with a mirror finish this time
3) all the new caps and condensers are going to trickle down to the next Walkman
4) there are indeed super capacitors build into the battery/power circuit, they just didn't mention it because "it's a matter of fact they are in there"
5) and of course they toyed with the traditional transformer, it was too big and won't fit in the chassis.
6) a lot of the components are hand soldered, also they used in house developed lead free solder formula that is mixed with gold.
7) the glass top was a designer decision to show off the internal and the gold knob, but it looked ugly when paired with the aluminium chassis, so they found a new way to treat the chassis so it resulted in a mirror finish just so that would look good under the glass, while not interfere with their chassis ground design
The DMP is a show off art piece and F1 machine to test new components and techniques blended together. So yeah it is off the balls crazy expensive. it's not worth buying for 99.9% of the users, but it's worth looking forward for the technology which will trickle down to the other product lines.