CD Players

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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This is the recently released version of PS Audio's CD Transport. And what sets this unit apart from anything that PS Audio has done before and also anything that's been done before by any other HiFi company, is their galvanically isolated output stage. That means that the data is being transfered from the input stage to the output stage via a type of very focused short wave radio frequencies. Any vestiges of interference that inevitably occur when these stages are hardwired, are completely eliminated.

Input and output stages have their very own board and power supply to keep them completely separated as well. FPGAs (Field-Programable Gate Array; if you'd like to learn more about these very handy devices see Paul McGowan's video here) is utilised to ensure clocking and data buffering are spot on. 

The best way to use this unit and unleash its full potential is to use the I2S output or the HDMI out put to a DAC (like the PS Audio DirectStream) that can handle it. In this respect you can hear a complete Raw DSD file...and that truly is another experience. A DSD file is what makes an SACD an SACD. Instead of sampling at a determined fast rate (bit rate) the sine curve of the musical file, a DSD file samples the whole sine curve. These raw files are bigger and have to be compresesd to even push it out of a transport. But not with this unit and the I2S...full blown raw DSD files streaming into your speakers. Heaven.

Of course you can still use this unit without the I2S and it's still devastatingly good. A pair of BNC connectors will double a normal DSD output to make it DSD128 and this connection is particularly scintillating with a Chord Dave...

Read theaudiobeatnik review of the unit here (he uses the I2S connection with a non PS Audio Dac with superb results)

The PS Audio website has some extra reading on this unique product too

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Rega, usually so famous for their excellent turn tables, have launched their new reference class CD player and it is a thing of beauty. Moving away from a naming convention of heavenly bodies (and hence Roman deities) we have something distinctly more Egyptian in the Isis. Learn More

Available for audition in-store, with the Chord DAVE. The Blu MkII is a compact, FPGA-based upsampling CD transport which offers the world’s most advanced filter technology. Used with DAVE, the combination delivers class-leading CD sound quality and technical performance. At the heart of the Blu MkII lies an enormously powerful Xilinx FPGA. Rob Watts’ (Chord’s Digital Design Consultant) has used this to create his exclusive WTA M-Scaler technology, which incorporates the most advanced filter of its kind in the world. The Xilinx FPGA has also enabled a key breakthrough in tap-length (the technical indicator of how complex the interpolation filter is) taking Blu MkII to an unprecedented 1,015,808 taps. Learn More

Sonically, the CD6SE is a stunner, uncovering new musical detail in every corner of your recordings and providing startling dynamics, both micro and macro. The top end is extended, airy and pure, while bass definition and impact are precise and powerful. The recording venues are lifelike, broad and expansive or close-up and intimate, depending on what was captured by the recording engineer. Like great analog, listening to music through the CD6SE draws you into the performance, not just the notes, with resolution and transparency that are in service of the music. Experience your music in High Definition

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Audio Research introduced its first Reference series CD player in 2005 with the Reference CD7, then evolving into the Reference CD8. Both players received critical acclaim for their accuracy and naturalness. People still want to play their CDs, but they also want to add other digital sources such as computer audio and streaming to their music systems, so we created the Reference CD9SE CD Player/DAC. It combines the best of both, a super high-resolution compact disc player with a super high-resolution digital-to-analog converter that is stunning in its musicality.

What Hi Fi? love it ...

https://www.whathifi.com/reviews/audio-research-reference-cd9-se

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