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One of my fondest memories of CES 2005 was spending a spare (well, technically, stolen) hour in T+A's room, listening to the German company's $4500 SACD-1245 CD/SACD player through T+A's $8500 V-10 integrated amplifier and a pair of Amphion's $1150/pair Helium two-way loudspeakers. Accordingly, when Quartet Marketing's Stirling Trayle called me to announce that he was in New York with the first sample of T+A's new tubed $9500 D-10 CD/SACD player, I was eager to hear it.

So eager, in fact, that I completely forgot to take any demonstration material with me into Innovative Audio's Manhattan basement lair—which worked out just fine since that let Trayle introduce me to some new music.

The D-10 is a sexy-looking beast, with a pop-open disc platter, four individually caged tubes and four large canisters (capacitors? toroidal transformers?) rising out of its blue acrylic lid. The disc mechanism, digital section of its quadruple D/A converter, and decoder are all based on those in the SACD-1245, but the D-10 has heftier power supplies—and an analog tube output stage to boot.

The digital section employs a "secondary switching mains section with a torroid transformer, which offers excellent stability under load"; the analog output stage uses "an extremely stable high-voltage mains section [with] a reservoir capacity corresponding to more than 100,000 microfarads."

Even more unusual than the D-10's PS, however, is its D/A set-up: It is fitted with eight D/A converters—four per channel in "symmetrical push-pull mode" and completely decoupled galvanically and optically. "All the signal processing is under the control of [T+A's] freely programmable signal processor, which means the characteristic T+A oversampling and noise-shaper circuits are present."

Tech-to-plain speech translation: All PCM signals are upsampled via four user-selectable algorithms (including OVS 2 and OVS 3 Bezier interpolations that don't employ pre-echo, overrun, or post-echo). The D-10's DSD section has bandwidth settings that allow consumers to match the player's output to their electronics—if 120kHz bandwidth would introduce intermodulation effects downstream, consumers can filter the output to 60kHz.

Of course, I "knew" that 60kHz was still well beyond anyone's range of hearing, so I didn't expect to hear much when Trayle demonstrated the audible effects of the Bezier interpolations and bandwidth settings. Does the fact that I did consistently hear differences that I knew couldn't be there make this a valid sighted test—or are tests only valid when they produce a null result?

All I know is that, when listening to the superb sounding piano and drums duet Wet Map by Carolyn Hume and Paul Mays (Leo Records LR 385), there was consistently more sparkle, shimmer, and depth with the Bezier 3/wide bandwidth setting. And that was on CD, with its inherently bandwidth-limited 16-bit/44.1kHz resolution.

I should mention the rest of the system, since any differences I heard had to be transmitted through it. Innovative had set up T+A's V-10 integrated ("because it doesn't have any intermodulation issues," said Trayle) and a pair of Wilson Audio Specialties's WATT/Puppy System 7s connected with Transparent Audio cables. By ultra high-end standards, this was almost modest in aspiration.

Yet, it satisfied—and astonished. Extremely fine detail was revealed, and never at the expense of musicality. When I entered the sound room, Trayle was listening to a CD-R of an audio "installation" from a New York composer I wasn't familiar with; yet, even on first hearing, I was captivated by the phasey, big-hearted nature of this new musical experience. I also thumbed through Trayle's CD wallet of travel music and dipped into a variety of other unfamiliar artists. The D-10 demo is going to cost me a packet in new CDs—always an indication that something right is going on.

A 90-minute audition in a showroom certainly isn't conclusive, but I was impressed by T+A's D-10 combo player and would welcome a chance to peek under its lid and put it through its paces in my own listening environment. Heck, I'd even take another trip to the big city to go through Stirling Trayle's CD wallet again—only next time, I'll remember to bring a few discs of my own.