I had one for a number of years and it sounded great. One of the Stereophile reviewers used it as a transport between reviews, sorry can't recall who. However that model was known for reliability issues. Mine, for example didn't like reading the first song on a number of discs. If you put it in and hit play on those discs it would not recognize the disc. If that same disc was inserted and you skipped to the second track the CD played fine from there.