CD Player/Transport Reviews

My first exposure to Burmester electronics was some years back at a New York Hi-Fi Show, where they were powering a pair of B&W">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/207">B&W 801s and impressed the hell out of me. But Burmester's distribution seemed sporadic and the prices beyond my consideration, so I put them out of my mind.

In the early 1980s, Ivor">http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/1101ivor">Ivor Tiefenbrun, of Linn Products, Ltd., compared digital audio to "a nasty disease" that his company offered not to spread. Less than 25 years later, digital sources outnumber analog ones in Linn's product line—so much so that the venerable Scottish manufacturer has expanded its line of disc players to encompass two different formats: multi- and two-channel.

Naim's new "statement" CD player, the CD555 ($20,300 by itself, $28,150 with PS555 power supply), breaks no new technological ground. Rather, in typical Naim fashion, it attempts to optimize 16-bit/44.1kHz CD performance by paying fanatical attention to the devilish details. It doesn't play the DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, or SACD formats, nor does it have a digital output—and it doesn't create an illusion of higher resolution by upsampling the data.

We were driving to a friend's house to celebrate her dad's 92nd birthday. Halfway there, a bright yellow, ground-hugging insect pulled in front of my car from across street. "Wow, that's a Lamborghini Countach!" I exclaimed. You don't often see one of those in my neighborhood—or in any neighborhood.

When, at the beginning of this century, the market profile of the high-end Mark Levinson brand took a dip due to the parent company's reorganization, one of the companies that took advantage of the opportunity was Classé Audio. Founded in 1980 by engineer Dave Reich (now with Theta Digital) and run by engineer-entrepreneur Mike Viglas since the mid-1980s, the Canadian electronics manufacturer's Omega line of high-end amplifiershttp://www.stereophile.com/solidpoweramps/878">amplifiers; and preampshttp://www.stereophile.com/solidpreamps/132">preamps; had universally impressed Stereophile's scribes, and its Omega SACD player (reviewedhttp://www.stereophile.com/hirezplayers/474">reviewed; by Jonathan Scull in November 2001) was the first such product to come from a North American company.

Larger than a stocking stuffer, Musical Fidelity's X-Ray^v3 CD player is nevertheless quite compact and would be very nice to find under the Christmas tree.

You've heard it said that the early bird catches the worm, which is all well and good if you like worms. If you're more interested in music, you might want to follow the lead of Roy Gandy instead: He's the managing director of Rega Research, a 33¹/₃-year-old audio company that was the very last of its kind to enter the CD market. Rega's first CD player, the Planet of 1996, was a success in virtually every way.