Disc Players

So you want to enjoy the best that Blu-ray has to offer but you’re loathe to part with that ‘legacy’ AV receiver, a fine-sounding and perfectly serviceable multichannel amplifier but one that pre-dates HDMI connectivity? Thanks to Pioneer’s flagship BDP-LX91, your options just got broader. You see this is one of the very first BD players with sufficient on-board processing power to decode both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. It’s also one of the first to offer a full 7. 1 channel analogue output – perfect for direct and unencumbered connection to the multichannel analogue inputs of that treasured AV amplifier.

Though CD players now bear a whiff of fin de siècle, this is a ‘golden age’ for silver discs. Despite sales pointing to CD’s demise, some of us still prefer CD to downloads and servers. Ironically, recent gems from Nagra, dCS and others recall the raft of sublime turntables of the late 1980s. Perhaps 10 years hence, CD will be to downloads what vinyl is to CD.

If CES 2008 sounded a warning shot across, if not into the bows of the HD DVD fleet then there was always the consolation that its players were, on the whole, far cheaper than their Blu-ray competition while boasting full compatibility with both the software-driven and web-enabled functionality of its discs. Not all Blu-ray players can currently promise that. Sony’s BDP-S300 is one of those players that neither fully conforms to the BD1. 1 video profile (which means that picture-in-picture, ‘Blu-Scape’ games and other bonus features may not function wholly as intended) nor deliver Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio bitstreams over its HDMI 1.

Canny audio manufacturers never seem to run out of new takes on old formats. Because of such lateral thinking, the humble and now familiar CD has weathered (easily) a few dozen silver disc variations, up to and including SACD and DVD-A, which achieved minimal market penetration. Leema’s equivalent of CD Viagra is to add so many DACs that you have to marvel not at the technological achievement, but at the price: the updated Stream still sells for under £1200. As the company puts it, ‘Sixteen 24-bit/192kHz multi-bit Delta-Sigma converters are used in Leema’s unique MD2 Active Differential Multi-DAC to produce an incredibly real and tactile musical performance with almost no noise and distortion.

It amuses me immeasurably that there’s a flood of new high-end CD players when the format is under serious threat. Even that über-geek bible, Wired, recently ran a blog titled ‘Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD’s Coffin’ – rich stuff coming from the most digitised read on earth. So, are audiophiles now being implored to buy our ‘final’ CD players? In the face of MP3, high-def discs and other threats, there are still billions of CDs out there. And I can tell you right now that many of us will not be replacing our collections again.

Italian hybrid amplifier specialist Pathos Acoustic unveiled its first CD player last year, the stylish Endorphin top-loader and has now already followed it up with a lower-priced alternative. Now while no-one could mistake the new Digit in its shoebox aspect case for the sci-fi statement of the Endorphin, Pathos says that the two CD players share the same technology inside, with the differences between them limited to the transport mechanism and the power supply. The Digit is designed to sit alongside the similarly-proportioned Classic One integrated amplifier, itself a more affordable version of the company’s more extended range of high-end valve/solid-state hybrid amplifiers. It’s a cleaner design than the Classic amp, though, without any bright red capacitors or transformer to populate the top board, nor the figured wood frontispiece.