Disc Players

This French company's 'ecosystem' is founded on an extensive range of power and audio cables, but the brand's design philosophies also extend to an amp and CD player       

The world of high-end audio just wouldn't be the same without products like the Origine S2 from Neodio. It resides in that rarefied section of the hi-fi market where designers get to see their dreams fulfilled in large and beautifully appointed products. Head honcho Stéphane Even has energetically embraced the chance to make leading-edge, premium hi-fi products. As well as purveying expensive cables and isolating feet, his company makes the £15,000 CD player/DAC you see before you, alongside its companion A2 integrated amplifier.

One of my less endearing traits, of which I have several according to my long-suffering wife, is that I’m inclined to show off now and again. So when chatting to an acquaintance on the telephone recently I simply couldn’t resist dropping into the conversation that my living room was currently ‘cluttered’ by two outrageously expensive CD players: the £8000 Wadia 381i [see HFN July ’09] and the new £10,000 Oracle CD2500 MkII. Moreover I was going to have to spend several days listening to music on them, using the familiar Wadia as a point of reference, and subsequently write a critique on Oracle’s new baby. Such is a reviewer’s lot.

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.

It was the Dutch company's first ever portable CD player and one of the first players from Philips to use a 16-bit chip. But how does this milestone machine sound today?

While Philips' dominance of the market for full-sized CD players in the early days of the format has been well documented in these pages, little mention has been made of its activities in the field of CD portables. Despite an obvious flair for innovation and creativity, the company is not especially known for producing miniatures – that crown belongs to the Japanese, and Sony in particular.

This late '80s player may have been built to a price using a DAC suited to portables, but it promised few compromises when it came to sheer sound. How will it shape-up today?

One of the many impressive achievements of the early CD era was the way in which the price of players remained constant, or even fell, as the technology used inside them improved. The first machines were masterpieces, beautifully constructed utilising the best materials and processes. However, it was soon realised that when it came to the basic task of playing a disc, much could be stripped away, and in the years that followed the format's release this was exactly what began to happen.

Paul Miller compares the Philips DCC-600 with the Marantz DD-92, two DCC recorders with the same PASC encoder but different ADCs and DACs

This review deals with two first-generation DCC players. Philips and other companies are committed to this medium, to judge from the fast expanding list of pre-recorded software, if not in the range of hardware to match. DCC will certainly not oust CD: it is better to think of it as a stepping stone between analogue compact cassette and the digital audio systems of the future – systems that must surely avoid the cumbersome format of tape. But for the time being, these machines may be counted a success.

In an age of bulky carousel and multi-disc cartridge-loading solutions, this Pioneer player combined a single laser mech with dual trays for many hours of uninterrupted listening

Once CD players had become established it did not take long for hi-fi manufacturers to come up with new features and facilities to offer. Of these, the ability to play more than one disc at a time was perhaps the most intriguing and visually obvious. Toshiba was the first to produce a practical machine with the XR-V22 [HFN Jun ’24]. This could take two discs, but it was fellow Japanese brand Pioneer which led the field, coming up shortly afterwards with a six-disc cartridge player. This ‘universal’ cartridge system was common to all Pioneer’s multi-play models, allowing collections of discs to be rapidly swapped between systems at home and in-car.