Disc Players

No, I don’t know what ‘Meracus’ means, and I stopped playing around with anagrams after I reached ‘rum case’. How about ‘US Cream’? No way: Meracus is so decidedly, unabashedly a German company that it couldn’t possibly apply. If you’ve ever studied a hi-fi magazine from the Fatherland or visited the Frankfurt or Berlin audio shows, you’ll know what I mean: staggering build quality, weird shapes, bold colours, lots of glass, wholly unique operational procedures. And the £4000 Meracus Imago is almost deliberately ‘unexportable’, because the customer has to be on some Teutonic wavelength to get to grips with it. Study the photos. You’ve never seen another CD transport like it, right?

Sexy hardware – strange use of the term ‘sexy’. But Wadia’s new CD player is sleek in a catwalk model/Euro-chic way, the same reasons why a hot Italian V12 can be regarded as sexy. More accurately, the Wadia 6 is severe, a mere glance at its styling, finish and hewn-from-solid build quality telling you that it’s no toy. You don’t have to lift it to know that it’s chunky... like 35lb worth of chunk.

Our feature review series has been planned to include audiophile and flagship CD models, and that is certainly an accurate description of the magnificent-looking Yamaha CDX-10000. This forms a major component in a new series of limited edition audio separates which have been designed and built with virtually no concession to cost in celebration of Yamaha’s centenary. This covers the period 1887 to 1987, and the models are appropriately entitled the ‘Centennial Edition’.

Appearances are almost always deceptive. Take Teac’s new £1300 VRDS-25. Here’s a CD player that looks rather like the established VRDS-10 and VRDS-7 [see below], featuring the CMK3 version of its VRDS transport with wafer-thin drawer mechanism, elegant orange-coloured display and basic range of onboard controls.

At the tail end of 2020, when Marantz released its Model 30 amplifier [HFN Jan ’21], the name paid homage to the brand’s Model 1 preamp of 1954 while the chassis styling nodded at past Marantz designs from hi-fi’s ‘golden age’. However, this was not a case of the New York-born (but now Japan/California-based) company jumping headfirst into the so-called ‘nostalgia economy’ with a retro/vintage-inspired product, more the first step in a complete overhaul of its brand image. Since then, there have been various additions to the new-look Model catalogue, but all have sat below the Model 30. Until now...

You don’t have to be a marketing analyst with a subscription to the Financial Times to understand why SACD might win the format war. Clearly, the SACD crew has delivered more hardware and (most importantly) in the order of ten times more software than DVD-Audio, according to the estimates of music vendors I’ve canvassed. All of which makes the arrival of a high-end SACD player with a mid-range price point something worth considering.

As the EISA Awards jury noted this year [HFN Oct ’24], AV furniture is ‘often overlooked… but has a crucial part to play’. Monitor Audio would agree, and having acquired Blok in 2019, it has launched a redesigned Stax 2G system this summer. Retaining its predecessor’s wooden box-like supports and full-width shelves, the improved modular form-factor promises to be easier to configure and assemble.