Disc Players

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.

Has hi-fi become a little crazy these days? Huge equipment, bizarre accessories, cables that look ready to moor an oil tanker? How about this though – a CD player that works under water. Not for audiophile reasons of course, but for practical ones and as a step along the road to making the Compact Disc system the perfect consumer bauble.

Rotel has crowned its new Michi Q5 a 'Transport DAC', which strikes us as a somewhat vague description of what is, first and foremost, a CD player. Yes, it has digital inputs to make wider use of its onboard DAC, plus digital outputs, but just one glance at the Q5's distinctive top-loading drive mechanism – plus the fact it resides under the 'CD player' tab on Rotel's website – tells you this is a unit primarily aimed at silver disc lovers.

Conceived as the ‘command centre’ of a modern high-end system, T+A’s powerful all-in-one system embraces CD and streamed audio, in all its flavours, and radio too...

Looking for a simple, no-frills, ‘straight wire with gain’ amplification solution? If so, it’s a case of ‘move right along, please – nothing to see here’, for T+A’s R 2500 R, available in black or silver at £12,905, is a prime example of large-scale integration in the quest for one of those ‘just add speakers’ systems. Yes, you could connect other source components to it, thanks to a choice of analogue and digital inputs – but really, why would you want to?

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.

With Soulnote having already proved its analogue mettle in these pages with the E-2 phono preamp , does the brand have similar prowess with digital? And not just with CDs, for this S-3 flagship is a fully-fledged SACD player.

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.