Digital

We are preparing for the arrival of new models of marantz SA CD players and as such it is time to sell our demo units of the current stock. This particular unit is Black and in great condition. It comes with box and accessories and a three year factory warranty.

Marantz CD players have often been the port of last call for that particular customer that is searching for music in a digital realm where everything measures well but is post apocalyptically sterile to the listening. There is also that small but significant in our fanatics base of people for whom SACD is the only answer. And for them these high end Marantz players are the go to product for real quality and realisation of the potential of the format.

This new piece of kit has been voiced and refined by the Marantz dream team sound engineers and is an excellent external Digital to Analogue Converter for your other digital sources.

 

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The brand new Cyrus transport CDt-XR builds on a lineage of exceptional reference CD players.

Cyrus is a small brand in the HiFi world hailing from just outside Cambridge, UK where many heavy hitting HiFi players originate. Think Mission, Quad, Arcam and Cambridge Audio. Of course it's not really much of a surprise that such awesome HiFi comes from the University town where engineering excellence and ingenuity are in good supply!

The master clocks of the old Cyrus SE models that are now incorporated into the XR models are what provide Cyrus CD players with their true magic. Timing and rythym is sorted - period.

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The previous Aries G1 has been superb but relatively Auralic has released a new model with some significant upgrades including a high mass base and it now supports Airplay 2.

The new high mass plate not only looks great but increases sonic performance as well.

Reviewers have been very positive with the upgrades for the new version as well. Jason from The Ear says when compared to its predecessor:

"what surprised [him] given that they aren’t that different under the skin was that the G1.1 sounded so much better. It has finer detail, is fuller and richer and even excels when it comes to melody, painting a much more complete picture of the music.”

Read the full article here

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This is something of a reincarnation product but with rather cutting edge digital disc and streaming tech . . Made in Japan with love. Physically the SA30 is actually gorgeous, the photos don't do it justice, it really exudes a quality aesthetic presence. In combination with the matching amp it is a piece of Hi Fi art that will make people who know nothing about stereo want to go and fondle it inappropriately ...

StereoNet on the Model 30 release 

Marantz UK site for the SACD30 

"Hi-Fi News" loves the Model 30 

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Synthesis has just released a new Compact Disc Player ROMA14DC+. It uses a pair of  ECC88/6DJ8 on the output stage for warm sound characteristics. The particularly configuration is used to obtain a very low output impedance and extremely large bandwidth.

The Roma 14DC+ has USB "B" type, DSD 5,6MHz and optical input. The 32Bits of resolution give you a fantastic sound stage and a perfect sound reproduction. The TEAC mechanism is specially developed for audio reproduction guarantee at this CD Player high quality performances.

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Have your cake and eat it with a Yamaha Receiver born again for the third decade of the 21st Century … the RN2000 is going to be very much in demand. In some ways this hearkens back to the Receiver wars of the seventies where the likes of Yamaha Marantz Sansui and Hitachi made increasingly higher powered and more heavily buttoned AM FM receivers that became the battleships of the marketplace. This RN2000 is more of a Heavy Cruiser than a Yamato class product though ... Like the Heavy Cruisers of the Japanese Navy in the early forties, the RN2000 is outstandingly useful and versatile with a remarkable number of functions and high performance in a single chassis. Unlike the mad flagship battleships they proved to be tough and largely survived the awful depredations of the Pacific war until sunk as target practice in 1946.

This RN2000 is really nice though, actually a straightforward combination of the highly acclaimed AS1200 stereo amplifier with a high grade multifunction streaming engine and DAC. Come and listen to it through sweet natured loudspeakers. The FM section by the way is absolutely fantastic, hearkening back to the Yamaha T7 tuner of yore that is considered a reference for analogue broadcast quality.

Yamaha RN2000 Official site

"What Hi-Fi" on the Yamaha RN2000

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Aurender is the new kid at Carlton Audio Visual. The choice for digital streaming options in the realm of real HiFi has blossomed over the last couple of years and for the uninitiated the nuances and the differences between a good digital front end and an incredible digital front end get lost in a lot of computer terminology.

Like a caching server. What is caching? And whiy is it useful in a streamer?

Caching is a temporary storage of information using certain drive and memory chip hardware. Having this caching server on board the streamer means the music files are stored right there at the streamer once selected so data is handled at dramatically increased speeds. It also eliminates annoying drop out problems from sub optimal internet connections.

This all means a better musical experience.

And more than the caching server, the Aurenders examine all the detail within the circuitry and connections in their units to reduce or eliminate noisy electronic componentry corrupting the musical signal. This means quieter noise floor, more detail and soundstage...in essence...more Music, less noise!

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A network player or streamer has become an essential part of a modern HiFi system and for the very best in musicality, you can't go past a Naim. The NDX2 is one of their very best devices to date and is a delight to use. Put this together with the Supernait amplifier and you have a friend for life in your music. The NDX2 is getting into some pretty serious territory but it more than holds its own. This is about extended bass and a warm treble nature that is far away from the digital harshness of many products.

It really is no wonder that Naim have quickly become one of the best in the business at producing Streamers. From their inception, they've been focused on not just putting wires and components together to make the biggest amplifiers. They're about finding the cleanest most emotionally effective way to deliver music to a listener. A lot of their effort has gone into power supplies and the brilliance that's musically created when a units power source is perfectly engineered. 

All those 40 years of design expertise has been poured into what is to date one of the very best streamers that I've heard. The synergy of useability and music quality they have achieved with the NDX2 is remarkable.

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For the uninitiated in the digital realm of HiFi, the exact purpose and functionality of the M Scaler can seem perplexing. A unit that sits between your digital source and your DAC to drastically improve the digital signal....isn't it all ones and zeroes at that stage? How can you make ones and zeroes better?

Well, it's all about the Taps...the digital Taps that is. Taps refers to how many times and therefore how accurately the unit revisists the algorythm that's going to create the analogue Wave Form from the sample rate that's given by the source. Normally DACs would perform this function themselves but no DAC, not even Chord Electronics very own Dave comes even close to the amount of Taps that the M Scaler has. Normally an ordinary DAC would have a 100-tap filter, the Dave has 164,000-tap filter but the M Scaler has 1,015,808-tap filter!

In Rob Watts own words "If you have a conventional filter with 100 taps, you will recover some of the transient information. A 100-tap filter gives you sufficiently good frequency-domain performance, but not in the time domain. . . . Every time you increase the number of taps, you improve the perception of pitch, timbre gets better—bright instruments sound brighter, dark instruments sound darker—the starting and stopping of notes becomes easier to hear, the localization of sounds get better. There is less listening fatigue—the brain has to do less processing of the information presented to it to understand what's going on." 

And that perfectly sums up what you hear when you add an M scaler to a Chord Hugo TT2 or the Dave. It's an opening up of the musicality getting this normally step wise wave form of a CD player or 44kHz back to the most accurate analogue Wave Form you can possibly get. 

And this is where the M Scaler is particularly special because it's the most accurate digital device out there by a long margin. And that's because of the Taps. Turn on the Taps!

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Every now and then you get a piece of high fidelity that oozes high class as soon as you touch it, The Yamaha 5000 series preampifier and power amplifier have this quality in spades and so does this the highest ranging CD Player in the range of Yamaha high fidelity kit.

In the trade we can go a long way on the tactility of a product as a real assessment of its build quality, That and the less than minor matter of one's reaction to a component's particular sound quality are simply something that can never be realised via internet shopping. this is a device that begs to be individually auditioned.

There is definetly a Rolls Royce feel to this device and it immediately reminds me of the original Yamaha Centennial CD Player the no compromise CDX10000 that was released in 1987 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Yamaha music products.

The CDS3000 is also an external DAC that is a 32 bit device ...

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Available to Audition in our 164 Lygon st Showroom.

The Antila IIS Eco CD player introduces many unique technical and ergonomic innovations to combine state-of-the-art performance with surprising ease of use.

Leema's latest "Quattro Infinity Multi-DAC" employs multiple 24 bit / 192 kHz multi-bit delta-sigma data converters, specifically selected for their audio quality. These are driven from a fully balanced digital data stream. The result is significantly reduced levels of noise, distortion and crosstalk, thereby producing a breathtakingly real musical performance and a tactile panoramic image.

Read more at https://www.whathifi.com/leema/iis-eco/overview#GSADEh4qRgClhfC8.99

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A customer has decided to change over his SACD player for a serious streamer and this has meant we have a near new PS Audio SACD player Trade-in in stock.

This is the current Transport! And in immaculate condition.

These are incredible machines. Musical, resolving and detailed. 

These units have won accolades and awards galore.

For example the Absolute Sound gave it The Golden Ear award in 2021.

This unit comes with its box and all accessories.

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ARIES G2.1 manages every connection so you can explore your entire digital universe right
from our Lightning DS control app and take advantage of features like On-Device Playlists,
Memory Caching, Gapless Playback and Bit-Perfect Multi-Room functionality. With a
supercharged hardware platform

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There is something mesmerising in the sound of a Chord DAC/headphone amps. The unleashing of the music in its raw tangible beauty into your living room. The space the music inhabits seems to expand the boundaries of a room like a Tardis. And the instruments and vocalists seem to come together forming this 3D image of the broader soundstage. 

For those of us who spend far too much time listening to music, it's that feeling of being transported through time and space into where the music was performed. Like a trip in a Tardis, this is what a Chord Dac can deliver.

And they've got all the cool flashing lights and even a port hole to look through to see naked circuitry inside! 

 Chord Hugo TT2 official page 

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A killer all-in-one unit including amplifier, streamer and CD player. And this isn't just a thrown together assembly of various componentry. Each of its parts are in their own right, exceptional value and performance.

Naim products bought from us, a genuine approved Naim dealer, include the full 2 year warranty. 

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The Altair G2.1 is the unit in Auralic's range that does it all. A Preamplifier, DAC and Streamer with options to put in a 2TB hard drive and even a CD ripper. 

The Preamplifier is also a full blown analogue preamplifier. Not only does it have the analogue line and Moving Magnet phono inputs, it also doesn't simply convert these into digital signals within the chassis. Rather they are kept completely separate from the digital circuitry. Also the volume control is an analogue design based on resistive ladder construction. A less noisy, cleaner choice than other designs out there. Such all-in-one units have tended to use cheaper less fullfilling preamplifier modules that I normally recommend customers to bypass. That's not the case here.

Also a superior power supply and thick copper shielded chassis with isolating feet mean that noise and vibrations are kept to an absolute minimum. Couple that with a pair of super accurate clocks reducing jitter and this is a unit that stands above others in its category.

Clean, effortless sound and a unit that ticks all the boxes.

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This is a unique opportunity to purchase a current model, perfect condition top quality DAC

One of the very best DACs available. Every detail of this design has been lovingly thought out and designed with the one aim of recreating the best digital source possible.

We are selling this unit on behalf of a long term client. It has been meticulously looked after and comes with all of its boxes and accessories. 

 

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The super cool CD player to match the rest of the McIntosh gear. This unit is an SACD player as well. 

This is a solid unit where detail in the finish is matched by the detail of the sound. 

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CD is not dead ... it's merely resting a little. In my humble opinion you haven't heard how good digital music can be unless you have heard a Cd or SACD through a really good player like this ...

Considered by many long term reviewers as the standard in SA CD and CD reproduction. The depth of musicality, extraordinary; The imaging, second to none.

The amount of times hardened audiophiles have said to me with this CD player, 'I haven't heard that in that track before', countless. We've put this CD player into a whole range of different types of systems. We find it very versatile as to what it can be 'matched' with and that's also a testament to it simply being a REALLY good CD player.

 "Hi Fi News" on the SA10S1 

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