Disc Players

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Disc Players
NAD M5 - £1,600
Ed Selley  |  Aug 15, 2010  |  0 comments
NAD M5 - £1,600 Judged for its CD performance only, this multi-format player managed to hold its own Here’s a multichannel SACD player, competing on the strength of its CD performance. Although it should be noted that the M5 offers the full gamut of SACD replay, stereo and 5. 1, complete with bass management and a video output for use in setting up (though an external display’s not actually essential). That much will already make it appeal to lovers of true high-fidelity surround-sound, but there’s plenty more behind the attractive all-metal fascia.
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Disc Players
Moon CD.5 - £999
Ed Selley  |  Aug 15, 2010  |  0 comments
Moon CD. 5 £999 Inspired by some cutting-edge technology, the Moon has a few surprises in store Moon’s range extends upwards from this simple and businesslike model to some quite fancy players, including the two-box Andromeda which is well over ten grand’s-worth of cutting-edge technology. While it’s hard to see many physical constituent parts that have ‘trickled down’ from the Andromeda, the design aims seem consistent across the range. For instance, Moon is keen on integer oversampling, rather than the asynchronous ‘upsampling’ which has been in vogue for some years.
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Disc Players
Micromega CD-10 - £820
Ed Selley  |  Aug 15, 2010  |  0 comments
Micromega CD-10 - £820 It has a limited repertoire, but this player still divides opinion on its performance abilities Micromega’s name was made with mid-price CD players, and the company continues to enjoy a high reputation for such devices. As the baby of the range, this model doesn’t do anything particularly surprising, but it’s clearly a carefully designed piece of kit. Micromega makes particular mention of the power supply arrangements, which start with an R-core transformer. The R-core design originated in far-Eastern budget audio, but as Micromega points out, one of its characteristics is a rather narrow frequency band, which isn’t ideal for all applications but, in low-power equipment like CD players, it effectively contributes a degree of mains filtering.
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Disc Players
Cyrus CD 8SE - £1,300
Ed Selley  |  Aug 15, 2010  |  0 comments
Cyrus CD 8SE - £1,300 Cyrus has included its own servo evolution platform, bringing CD replay close to perfection we’ve seen this model before (HFC 310), but it has been very slightly revised, so we thought a re-test might be a good idea. Many of these revisions are cosmetic, including a new window for the display and a redesigned bezel, which fronts the slot-loading transport and puts the mind at rest about scratching discs (not that we hand any such concerns in the first place). But there have also been some changes to the software which controls the disc-reading servo. This servo was the ‘big news’ about the 8SE (the letters standing for ‘Servo Evolution’) and was something of a novelty for a specialist manufacturer such as Cyrus, in that it optimised disc-reading from a high-quality audio standpoint, rather than the more common trade-off between read quality and performance with dodgy or damaged discs.
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