search
For some months now, I've lived mostly without music. To survive the dust and grit of the renovation of our Manhattan apartment, all electronics had to be covered with heavy plastic, the speakers encapsulated in large green lawn bags, and the listening room partitioned off with a temporary wall. We could listen to music with our little 3.1-channel TV system in the den (eh) or through headphones (not!), or we could decamp to our house in Connecticut, which we did as much as possible. I felt deprived. Now that it's all over, I'm grateful to have it back—and grateful for the improvements in the…
Using my Marantz pre-pro, I used both HDMI outputs anyway, and yes, Audio Only sounded somewhat smoother, with less haze and, consequently, greater resolution of very low-level signals. But the difference wasn't much. I think this implementation of low-jitter HDMI is a pyrrhic victory, especially for BD playback, and that most users will forgo the low-jitter audio merely out of convenience.
These days I play few discs, but when I do, my Manhattan system can handle only multichannel sources with analog outputs. Fortunately, the implementation of the Sabre Pro DACs in the UDP-205 is…
Sidebar: Recordings in the Round
Rachmaninoff: Symphony 1
Gabriel Feltz, Dortmund Philharmonic
Dreyer Gaido 21100 (SACD/CD). 2017. DDD. TT: 45:43
I'd just switched on the radio. Wow. Several times, I thought, Yes, this piece must be ending now. It continued. I didn't know what it was, or that I'd tuned in at the middle of the first movement. What was it? Surely too brash and clumsy for Rachmaninoff, but . . . it sure sounded Russian—and boy, was it exciting.
That was more than 20 years ago, and I still find unique enjoyment in this work composed by…
Watch out Christmas! While December 25 may be the holiday with the most music written specifically to celebrate it, Halloween, that delightful pagan holiday that has become a multi-million dollar business in the United States, has its own growing body of musical works dedicated to ghosts, goblins and having a good time.
Along with the usual mix of sound-effect records featuring creaking doors and unhinged laughter, there are the mix records intended for Halloween parties. Of course it could be argued all Halloween records are party records? Most of these tangentially related rock…
For all the stir over newly excavated tapes by Bill Evans (and the stir is justified), the heart of his discography—the stuff for which he's most celebrated now and will likely be for eons to come—beats in the albums he recorded on the Riverside label from 1956–62. This is where "the Evans sound" was minted and nurtured—the lyrical way with a ballad, the sprightly spin on show tunes, the harmonic lushness with an edge, and, at the era's peak, the coining of a new sort of jazz trio: not a piano backed by bass and drums, but three musicians careening off one another as equilateral sides of a…
By no means could I undertake a survey of candidates for Your Last Perfectionist-Quality CD player—so far, my ongoing series of reviews has focused on models from Audio Note, Bryston, EAR, Luxman, and Metronome—without including Naim Audio. After all, it was Naim that brought to market the first really good-sounding CD player of my experience: the two-box CDS, introduced in 1991 at a then-staggering price of $6999. In doing so, they convinced me that a digital future might not be so bad after all.
Four years after the CDS's stunning debut—and three years after their introduction of an…
One more thing: To prevent the swing-out drawer from swinging out all over the place during shipping, and thus damaging the transport, Naim fits to the bottom of the CD5 XS's casework a transit bolt—as they've done with all their players equipped with such transports. I'd warn you against using the CD5 XS without removing its transit bolt, but because it isn't possible to do so—if you can't open the drawer, you can't insert a disc—I won't bother with that, either.
Listening
One thing in particular that characterized the pre–break-in Naim CD5 XS—and, if I recall correctly, the CD3—was…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: CD player. Analog outputs: 5-pin DIN, 1 pair RCA. Digital outputs: 1 BNC. Frequency response: 10Hz–20kHz, +0.1/–0.5dB. Maximum output level: 2.1V RMS at 1kHz (fixed). Output impedance: 10 ohms maximum. THD+N: <0.1%, 10Hz–18kHz at full level.
Dimensions: 17" (432mm) W by 2.75" (70mm) H by 11.85" (301mm) D . Weight: 13.2 lbs (6kg).
Serial number of unit reviewed: 418407.
Price: Originally $3050, now $3995. Approximate number of dealers: 100.
Manufacturer: Naim Audio, Ltd., Southampton Road, Salisbury, Wiltshire SP1 2LN, England, UK…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Analog Sources: Garrard 301 turntable; EMT 997 tonearm; EMT OFD 15 & TSD 15, Ortofon SPU #1S, Shindo Laboratory SPU pickup heads; Denon DL-103 cartridge, with/without MusiKraft body.
Digital Sources: AudioQuest DragonFly, Halide Design DAC HD USB DACs; Apple iMac computer (late 2015) running OS 10.12.1 & Roon v.1.2, Build 165; Sony SCD-777 SACD/CD player.
Preamplification: Auditorium 23 Hommage T1 & T2 step-up transformers; EMIA Phono transformer (copper); Sentec EQ11 phono preamplifier; Shindo Laboratory Masseto & Monbrison (2017…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
Like the Hegel Music Systems Mohican and Bryston BCD-3, which we reviewed in the May and August issues, the Naim CX5 XS has no digital inputs of any kind. This limited my measurement of its technical behavior to using 16-bit test files burned to a CD-R. I tested the Naim with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 "As We See It").
The Naim's error correction was adequate—no interruptions were apparent in the player's output until the single gaps in the data spiral on the Pierre Verany Digital Test CD reached 0.5mm in length, when there…