Disc Players

‘Only the left coast could produce a CD player with tubes’... So began our review of the California Audio Labs Tempest [HFN Jan ’87], a player based on a Philips donor chassis with its now-classic SAA7030/TDA1540 4x oversampling/14-bit chipset. At the time, CAL was not alone in bringing its own ‘audio thinking’ to bear on Philips’ ubiquitous range of CD players but it was the very first to replace the Dutch brand’s basic op-amp-driven analogue output with a very substantial triode-based alternative. Not only was the main PSU significantly beefed-up but no fewer than six 6DJ8/ECC88 tubes were employed for the post-DAC I-to-V conversion, analogue filtering and final Class A output buffering.

‘Some will forever write off this player as a joke’, wrote Ken Kessler at the time, ‘but the Tempest is no aberration, no bit of flim-flammery designed to make your CDs sound like LPs...’. He was right, for in the (near) four decades that have passed since the Tempest lit the flame, countless other players from the likes of PrimaLuna, Luxman, Canor, Audio Research, Musical Fidelity and, of course, Unison Research, to name but a mere handful of brands, have fanned the glow of digital/tube hybrid players. PM