CD Player/Transport Reviews

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CD Player/Transport ReviewsGramophone Dreams
Gramophone Dreams #88: TEAC VRDS-701T CD transport
Herb Reichert  |  Aug 20, 2024  | 
It's the late 1980s, and I'm soldering tube amplifiers on a plywood bench. I decide on a whim that it's time to break down and buy a CD player to supplement the Dynaco tuner and Dual cassette deck in my workroom music system.

I was a slow starter with digital because of my early take on CD sound: It was emotionally drained with grumbling distortions in the bass and an off-timbre midrange, crowned by a thin, artificial treble, and penetrated by an eerie, unnatural silence whenever the musicians stopped playing. I thought cassettes had higher fidelity and that CDs would be a passing fad, but I kept browsing CDs at Tower Records, and the itch to buy some was getting pretty strong.

One of my friends said, "Maybe it's not the conversion principle that's to blame but something else, like an imperfect CD player?" That interesting thought had not occurred to me, and it obviously occurred to lots of engineers, because they are still trying to improve the quality of CD playback by adjusting the mechanism.

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CD Player/Transport Reviews
Hegel Music Systems Viking CD player
Herb Reichert  |  Nov 28, 2023  | 
The pleasures of reviewing a new CD player reside in its light weight, compact dimensions, and, most of all, its ABC-simple installation: no cartridge to mount, no stylus to break, no step-up trans formers or cartridge-load values to explore. No server, no Ethernet switches, no digital processor or outboard clock, no NOS, OS, filter choices, or upsampling (usually), no DSD or DXD, no specialized cables, and-especially-no garish, billboard-sized LCD menu to trigger anxiety. Just plug the player in, connect it to a preamp, and choose a CD to play first.

Yes, folks, digital audio was once that simple.

I'm pleased to be reviewing a new CD player, the Viking from Hegel Music Systems, in part because Hegel's founder and chief engineer Bent Holter appears to feel the same way I do.

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CD Player/Transport ReviewsDigital Processor ReviewsIntegrated Amp Reviews
AVM Inspiration CS2.3 CD receiver
Sasha Matson  |  Jun 09, 2023  | 
In the 1960s, my dad gave me a Panasonic receiver with two cube speakers, just in time for the advent of FM stereo radio in the San Francisco Bay Area. Out of the blue one night, he just walked in with it. The receiver allowed me to plug in a record player, though I only had a few LPs. Later, when I went off to college, my mom took me shopping for a new stereo. I chose a Kenwood integrated amplifier—without a tuner but with the capability to plug in a tape deck, which I did. During my undergrad years, it served me well. Later, I switched to an NAD receiver, which allowed me to listen to the radio again.
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CD Player/Transport Reviews
Jay's Audio CDT3-MK3 CD transport
Michael Trei  |  May 05, 2023  | 
They say a jack of all trades is the master of none. While this expression is typically used to describe people, it also works for machines that play 5" optical discs.

The Compact Disc was launched in 1982, but the four decades since have seen an alphabet soup of similar-looking shiny discs including major formats like DVD, SACD, DVD-A, and Blu-ray Audio. As each new format arrived, hardware manufacturers scrambled to keep up, developing machines that could play just about any disc you could throw at them (or, rather, insert in them). The result was a bunch of "jack of all trades" disc spinners...

But what if we gave up the notion of universal compatibility and concentrated on building a player dedicated to squeezing the best possible results from the very first, and by far the most common, shiny 5" disc, the good old-fashioned "Red Book" Compact Disc? Would we get better performance?

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CD Player/Transport ReviewsDigital Processor Reviews
Two Follow-Up Reviews: Benchmark DAC3 B & Rotel DT-6000
John Atkinson  |  Feb 13, 2023  | 
Stereophile's March 2023 issue includes two follow-up reviews of high-performance digital playback products: the Benchmark DAC3 B D/A processor; and the Rotel Diamond Series DT-6000 DAC Transport (a CD player with digital inputs).
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CD Player/Transport Reviews
Pioneer CLD-V710 Laser Karaoke CD/CDV/LD player
Corey Greenberg  |  Jul 13, 2022  |  First Published: Dec 01, 1991  | 
"JAPANESE BUY ROCKEFELLER CENTER"

"JAPANESE PURCHASE PARAMOUNT PICTURES"

"JAPANESE ANNEX NEW MEXICO; DECLARE ROBERT HARLEY 'PHILOSOPHER-KING'"

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CD Player/Transport ReviewsPhono Preamp ReviewsStand Loudspeaker Reviews
Three May Issue FollowUp Reviews
John Atkinson  |  Apr 11, 2022  | 
Michael Fremer wrote about the Paradox phono preamplifier in the March 2022 Analog Corner, Jim Austin reviewed the CH Precision D1.5 CD/SACD player/transport in March 2022, and Herb Reichert included the EJ Jordan Marlow standmount speaker in his April 2022 Gramophone Dreams column. All three products get further coverage in Stereophile's May 2022 issue.
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CD Player/Transport Reviews
Cyrus CDi-XR CD player
Ken Micallef  |  Apr 08, 2022  | 
In the 1990s, I was a globetrotter, interviewing musicians in diverse locales for several publications. My habit when arriving in London was to hit the duty-free shops for Cuban Montecristo cigars, move on to the newsagent for the latest issues of Hi-Fi News and Hi-Fi Choice, then take a leisurely romp through Oranges & Lemons, Richer Sounds, and Sevenoaks Sound & Vision—three major London audio stores.
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Audacious AudioCD Player/Transport ReviewsHi-Rez Disc Player/Transport Reviews
CH Precision D1.5 SACD/CD player/transport
Jim Austin  |  Feb 16, 2022  | 
There's a school of thought that maintains that among all hi-fi components, the D/A converter is easiest to perfect or come close to perfecting. Just make sure that every sample is converted accurately, that there's little rolloff in the audioband, that aliased images are suppressed almost completely, and that background noise is extremely low, and you have a top-quality D/A processor. Use of a high-quality DAC chip is assumed.
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CD Player/Transport ReviewsDigital Processor ReviewsStand Loudspeaker Reviews
Three December 2020 FollowUps
John Atkinson  |  Nov 16, 2020  |  First Published: Dec 01, 2020  | 
Three products are the subjects of lengthy followup reviews in the December issue of Stereophile: MBL's Noble Line N31 CD player-D/A processor, the GoldenEar BRX loudspeaker, and Alta Audio's Alyssa loudspeaker.
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CD Player/Transport Reviews
California Audio Labs Tercet Mk.III CD player
Guy Lemcoe  |  Oct 07, 2020  |  First Published: Feb 01, 1991  | 
At $1295, the Tercet Mk.III represents a step up from CAL's $750 Icon, which I enthusiastically recommended back in April 1990 (Vol.13 No 4, footnote 1). Externally, with the exception of a wider and slightly thicker front panel, it appears to be a carbon copy of that unit. Like the other products in California Audio Lab's stable, the Tercet Mk.III is designed from the ground up in-house.
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CD Player/Transport Reviews
Bow Technologies ZZ-Eight CD player
Michael Fremer  |  Sep 10, 2020  |  First Published: Aug 01, 1998  | 
"Something's coming, I don't know what it is, but it is gonna be great!"—Tony, West Side Story

While the Sharks and the Jets rumble in the consumer electronics playground, knife-fighting for supremacy in the next software go-round, in 1998 we're still living in the 16-bit/44.1kHz audio world, and will be doing so for the foreseeable future. Maybe your idea of audio bliss is listening to the equivalent of computing with a Commodore 64, but it's not mine.

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CD Player/Transport Reviews
Luxman D-105u CD player
Guy Lemcoe  |  Sep 08, 2020  |  First Published: Feb 01, 1991  | 
The $1200 D-105u, the top of Luxman's CD-player line, is novel in its twin-triode vacuum-tube amplification in the analog output stage. This configuration is said to provide high linearity with low distortion and that hard-to-quantify musicality found in tubed products. In addition, the D-105u incorporates an anti-vibration laser pick-up mechanism and a high-mass magnetic disc clamper, the latter feature said to mass-load the disc center to minimize spindle-motor microvibration, thus improving tracking accuracy for lowest error rate.
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CD Player/Transport Reviews
Denon DCD-2560 CD player
Corey Greenberg  |  Mar 13, 2020  |  First Published: Feb 01, 1992  | 
My first CD player was a Denon DCD-1800, the grandpappy of 'em all. It was big, clunky, and sounded like, well, you can read back issues to find out what it sounded like. But I was living in a fraternity house at the time, the kind of place where you wake up the next morning after a blow-out to find five plastic cups half full of stale margaritas merry-go-rounding on your turntable because whoever broke into your room during the party snapped your cartridge's cantilever off trying to hear the backwards messages on The Wall and decided to leave you an artistic message to buy a better needle next time, dude.
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CD Player/Transport ReviewsIntegrated Amp Reviews
Quad Artera Solus integrated amplifier/CD player
Herb Reichert  |  Mar 06, 2020  | 
The Quad Electroacoustics Ltd. Artera Solus is a multifunction audio component that was designed to look smart on top of a bureau in a living room or office. It comes with a thick, removable smoked-glass top that complements its compact dimensions. It weighs 25lb, and, in addition to being attractive, feels genuinely solid and well-made. Like its Artera-series stablemates, the Artera Solus strikes an intriguing engineering and aesthetic balance between decorator-friendly lifestyle product and serious audiophile product worthy of the Quad name.
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