CD Player/Transport Reviews

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.

A week with the Cyrus CD 8x CD player

You can't always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need—and Quad, bless its cockamamie heart, is the company that gave it to me.

Here we are, back to the Arcam I know and love: a company that not only invents good products, but good product categories as well. Like the Arcam Black Box of the 1980s, which gave so many people fits at the time—yet which, once you heard it, made good musical sense. It made good marketing sense, too: With that one stroke, teensy, weird, nestled-away-in-the-English-countryside Arcam did nothing less than create the domestic market for outboard digital-to-analog converters.

I've encountered a number of audio products over the years whose thoughtful design and intricate craftsmanship brought to mind the expression "built like a Swiss watch." As often as I'd thought or even written that phrase, however, I don't think I'd ever stopped to seriously consider what an audio component might be like if actually built by the nation that produces Rolex and Breitling wristwatches.

Naim Audio has a reputation for making products that are truer than most to music's temporal content: rhythm, pacing, the beat almighty. Beginning with their classic solid-state amps of the mid-1970s, Naim's designers have stressed, above all else, the reduction of distortions that puff up and pad the attack and decay components of musical sounds: Getting rid of those additives seems to clarify the timing relationship between different notes in a line, making music more compelling and easier to enjoy. That their gear has historically favored musical content over sonic attributes is no shock to the Naim faithful.

Simaudio has been doing well in the middle of the high-end market, providing products such as their Moon i-5 integrated amplifier (reviewed">http://www.stereophile.com/amplificationreviews/620">reviewed by Chip Stern in July 2002), which offers a glimpse of high-quality sound at an affordable price. That's not to say that the Canadian manufacturer neglects the cost-no-object market: the two-box, $5700, Simaudio Moon Eclipse CD player impressed the heck out of Brian Damkroger when he">http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/343">he reviewed it for Stereophile in April 2001 (with a Follow-Up in April 2003). So when Simaudio's Lionel Goodfield offered me their Moon Equinox player ($2000) for inclusion in my irregular series of CD-player reviews (footnote 1), I didn't need to be asked twice.