Disc Players

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Disc PlayersVintage
Ferguson CD 03 CD player
Review: Tim Jarman, Lab: Paul Miller  |  Nov 21, 2019
hfnvintageThis slimline design was fashioned with Yuppies in mind yet packed tried-and-tested tech from premium Sony products. How does it shape up today? It's time to find out

When it comes to CD players, Ferguson has a claim to fame, for its CD 01 [HFN Jan '19] of 1984 was the first machine to appear from a British household name. The player's Sony origins also meant it stood out from the crowd. At the time, manufacturers wishing to gain a foothold in the rapidly growing market for CD players, but who lacked the R&D resources to build machines of their own, usually went to Philips for the hardware. Sony's players were considered to be top of the market, the Japanese company's carefully cultivated image only helping to justify their premium prices.

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Disc PlayersVintage
Fisher AD 800 (Vintage)
Hi-Fi News Staff  |  Dec 22, 2014
In the early 1970s Sanyo was a UK market leader in the field of music centres that were extremely popular here, but its separate hi-fi units were not as successful. It was intended that the acquisition of the Fisher brand (in 1975) would solve this problem and less than a year after the CD format had first been made commercially available by Philips and Sony, it launched its first machine, offered in the UK as the Fisher AD 800. A vertical front loader, the AD 800 was a confident entry into the digital field. One reason Sanyo was able to bring this model to market so rapidly was its use of integrated circuits made by Sony.
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Disc PlayersVintage
Fisher AD-812 CD player
Review: Tim Jarman, Lab: Paul Miller  |  Feb 05, 2025  |  First Published: Mar 01, 2025
hfnvintageFollowing its inaugural AD 800 CD player, based on a first-generation Sanyo chassis, the AD-812 slips into the mainstream with a stripped-out 16-bit/x2 player. How does it fare?

The AD-812 is the perfect CD player for those who dislike banks of buttons and legions of flashing lights. It has only nine controls and the simplest possible display, with no remote control or hidden menus with extra functions concealed within. While it might be marketed today as a stripped-out audiophile product, in 1986 it was simply a no-frills, straightforward player.

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Disc Players
Gato Audio Cdd 1/amp 150 (£5290 Each)
Hi-Fi News Staff  |  Nov 11, 2014
New to the UK market, the CDD-1 and AMP-150 are Gato’s flagship products, the visual design being the work of Kristen Dinesen. They are both so compact that you might even think that the 150W (rated) per channel integrated must be a Class D amplifier. In fact, it uses a single-MOSFET output stage (actually, a pair for each channel). The CDD-1 uses a Philips CD-Pro 2 mechanism and balanced dual-differential Burr-Brown D/A converters.
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Disc Players
Hegel Viking CD Player
Review: Mark Craven, Lab: Paul Miller  |  Oct 02, 2023
hfnoutstandingAs Hegel's previous 'last ever' CD player – the Mohican – gets the chop, the audio world faces a new invasion from the Norwegian longships, courtesy of the Viking...

When Hegel announced its Viking CD player, the phrase 'never say never again' sprung to mind. You don't need to have a particularly long memory to recall the company's previous silver-disc spinner was named Mohican [HFN Oct '16] because – geddit? – it was going to be the last such machine the Norwegian company would make. The format's popularity was seemingly dwindling in the face of music streaming and the vinyl resurgence. Hegel even made commemorative t-shirts for its final fling with CD.

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Disc PlayersPre/Power Amplifiers
JBL CD350/SA550 Classic
Review: Andrew Everard, Lab: Paul Miller  |  Aug 30, 2024
hfncommendedWith visuals inspired by JBL’s hi-fi products from the 1960s, the brand’s ‘Classic’ range of separates are populated by technology familiar to audiophiles some 60 years later...

Think JBL and, not unreasonably, you’ll probably think ‘speakers’. The company has been in the loudspeaker business for getting on 80 years, having been founded in California in 1946 by James B Lansing, from whom it takes its name. Lansing himself took his own life just three years later but left an insurance policy to keep the company going, in which form JBL has become an internationally famous audio company and, since 1969, part of what is now Harman International. In 2017 Harman became an independent subsidiary of South Korea’s technology giant, Samsung.

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Disc PlayersIntegrated AmplifiersVintage
JVC UX-1 micro system
Review: Tim Jarman, Lab: Paul Miller  |  Jun 09, 2023
hfnvintageOffering all the functionality of full-sized components, this petite five-part '90s system took micro to the max, spawning imitations industry-wide. How does it sound today?

The first time I saw a JVC UX-1 it was pictured on the side of a bus. The image was part of an ad that carried the simple message 'All features, Great, and Small'. And this turned out to be true, for the UX-1 micro system had every function imaginable, sounded like 'proper' hi-fi and was tiny.

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Disc Players
Kalista DreamPlay ONE CD player
Review: Ken Kessler, Lab: Paul Miller  |  Nov 01, 2018
Streaming – schmeaming: for many audiophiles CD still rules the high-end digital roost and Métronome’s Kalista division has a champion in the new DreamPlay ONE

Despite being an SACD-phile, I am also a realist: in my library, CDs outnumber SACDs by greater than 100-to-1. In the real world, I suspect that CD players outnumber SACD players by a higher ratio still. So, when Métronome brings out a new integrated model – the Kalista DreamPlay ONE with a price of £32,000 – CD-only capability is par for the course.

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Disc PlayersNetwork Audio Players/Servers
Kalista DreamPlay XC CD/SACD Network Player
Review: Andrew Everard, Lab: Paul Miller  |  Jun 09, 2022
hfncommendedThe first SACD player from French audio artisans, Kalista, is also this spin-off brand's most comprehensive digital hub to date, with wired/wireless network streaming

Having emerged from French manufacturer Métronome Technologie with its inaugural model in 2003 – think Citroën spawning DS, or Seat's Cupra line – Kalista now has a growing range of DreamPlay products. This includes the £21,000 Kalista STREAM – described as 'The only streamer on the market that combines perfect functionality with exceptional looks' – and a turntable, the £44,000 Twenty-Twenty.

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Disc PlayersVintage
Kenwood DP-1100SG CD Player
Review: Tim Jarman, Lab: Paul Miller  |  Jun 14, 2022
hfnvintageThis late-'80s flagship CD player boasted no shortage of metal for your money while offering 4x oversampling to boot. But with few to be found, is it worth tracking down?

The law of diminishing returns was perhaps never more evident than when the CD player arrived in the early '80s. As more machines came to market in the years that followed, all but the crudest would offer a level of perfection unthinkable to the majority of audiophiles in the 1970s.

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Disc Players
Krell Evolution 525a (£12,000)
Paul Miller  |  Nov 19, 2011
The latest Evolution drops SACD to focus on CD Krell’s first non-amplification component was the SBP 64X DAC. Twenty-two years on we have this high-end player, following on from the Evolution 505 but this time it doesn’t play SACDs. The two look pretty much the same: the front panel layout is virtually unchanged, although the transport drawer is replaced here by a disc loading slot. Above this is a bold, blue-lit dot matrix display.
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Disc Players
Leema Stream (£1195)
Ken Kessler & Paul Miller  |  Jan 05, 2009
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.
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Disc Players
Loit Passeri (£20,000)
Hi-Fi News Staff  |  Jan 13, 2015
Weighing over 20kg, the Loit Passeri CD player is the first product from the talented young designer Lup Yoong Kam of Singapore. Clearly a perfectionist, Kam has come up with a product that simply exudes quality. It is also a great piece of industrial design. At the outset, Kam commissioned well-known Russian designer Artemy Lebedev who envisaged the CD cover as a simple flat disc, ringed by a glow of blue light.
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Disc Players
Luxman D 38u (£2395)
Ken Kessler and Paul Miller  |  Mar 10, 2011
A CD player with a valve displayed in the front panel: Luxman references its own past for the D-38u, a machine that oozes retro, right down to its chunky wooden sleeve Compact Disc was only launched in 1982/3, which – though its demise is perhaps now in sight – doesn’t seem that long ago. Yet here is Luxman with a player that is decidedly two-channel-only, its digital outputs are limited to coaxial and Toslink optical, it arrives with a wooden case, and it features a design touch that refers directly to one of its ancestors. If that’s not retro, what is? But Luxman, cleverly, has never been shoehorned into a genre, having excelled in every area save speaker manufacture. Its amps have a cult following, as did the vacuum-hold-down turntables, and the company always delivered decent CD players.
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Disc PlayersPre/Power Amplifiers
Luxman D-N150/SQ-N150 CD Player/Amplifier
Review: Ken Kessler, Lab: Paul Miller  |  Jan 02, 2020
hfncommendedLuxman has re-introduced what just may be the dream desktop rig, comprising the new NeoClassico CD player and tube integrated amplifier – or is it much more?

Can we agree that it's possible to love more than one system, as you would savour more than one type of whisky or wine? Masseto and Tignanello are simply not mutually exclusive. Luxman's re-imagined NeoClassico series is appropriately costly but not saddled with a 'high-end' price, so at £2500 for the D-N150 CD/DAC and £3000 for the SQ-N150 integrated amp, it is not an alternative to, nor a substitute for a high-end, high-power system. It is not out to usurp the role of your D'Agostino.

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