Disc Players

Mitchell & Johnson's flagship silver disc spinner gets put through its paces

The French high-end maestro’s next-gen entry-level CD player featuring an upgraded DAC

Audiolab’s 6000CDT is a rarity – a great-value CD transport

And so it goes. The humble Compact Disc player, once a vestigial box with no inputs and a single pairof analogue outputs is increasingly becoming a preamp with a DAC and optical disc transport built in. Gone are the days when it was seen as an end in itself, now it is to all intents and purposes a digital music centre. Creek’s new Evolution 50CD silver disc spinner is precisely this, and costing under £1,000, is being positioned to take on the market leader, Audiolab’s 8200CD.

Flashy products come and go, sensations soar up the sales charts and then fizzle away and a procession of award winners fill dealers’ shelves. But amidst all this drama and chaos, there’s one thing about which you can always be sure – Marantz budget separates will always offer quality. Marantz’s entry-level CD playerand amplifier are never going to be stinkers! Nor, to be frank, are they going to be dramatically different from their predecessors, save a tweak here and a feature change there. Residing on the very first rung of the Marantz silver disc-spinning range ladder, the CD6005 doesn’t offer SACD playback functionality.

Ray of light How many features can you cram onto a CD player? Raysonic's latest appears to have all the bases covered, says Jason Kennedy The CD 128S is a brightly lit and styled-up player and just a glance at the back panel reveals that it has balanced and single-ended outputs, as well as digital in and outputs of all the key varieties. More importantly, it’s a fully balanced machine with a Class A output stage driven by no fewer than four triode valves, all this in a toploading aluminium chassis. It looks like an awful lot of hardware for the money. The question is, does the sound match the appearance? Electric blue Raysonic is a dedicated to valve electronics and has a wide range of amplifiers and a growing portfolio of CD players.