The compact disc might be 30 years
old, but this format is alive and kicking and there are quality players aplenty
at every price point
Product of the year
Best CD player $750-$1,500
Audiolab 8200CD: $1,200
Audiolab’s mighty 8200CD holds on to the CD
player Award for the third year running and rightly so. No other CD player
we’ve reviewed this year has combined sound, build and features so effectively.
Audiolab
8200CD, the best CD player $750-$1,500
It takes a special product to pick up our
top accolade for one year, let alone three, and that’s what this Audiolab is.
Despite a price that’s crept up over the last couple of years this CD player
remains one of hi-fi’s true bargains. It impresses straight out of the box with
solid casework, a smooth-acting drawer and clear display. Take a look around
the back and you’ll find optical, co-axial and USB digital inputs alongside the
more usual balanced and single-ended analogue connections.
Whether using the build-in CD drive or the
digital inputs in conjunction with the player’s excellent digital to analogue
converter, the 8200CD is a hugely impressive-sounding machine. It has an open
and immensely clear sound that delivers a terrific amount of insight for the
money. There’s no shortage of agility either.
Audiolab has chosen to offer a range of
filter options. Each of these alters the sonic balance a few degrees. We found
the ‘Optimal Transient XD’ setting works best, but opinions vary even inside
Audiolab.
Delicate touch, thunderous rhythm
Spin a gentle, lilting tune such as Leonard
Cohen’s Lullaby and the 8200CD sparkles. It uncovers a massive amount of detail
and organizes it brilliantly, the leading edges of notes are crisply defined,
and all that resolution makes the most of the aural textures of instruments and
voices.
The
Audiolab 8200CD is a hugely impressive-sounding machine
Move onto the likes of The White Stripes,
with our old favorite Seven Nation Army, and the Audiolab steps up a gear,
delivering a sound full of passion and thunder. The song’s distinctive bass
line pounds out with terrific venom and the rhythmic drive can’t help but get
the feet tapping.
All in all the Audiolab’s many and varied
talents amount to a great performance from what we believe to be the best value
CD player around.
Best CD player under $750
Marantz CD6004: $465
Winning one Award is hard enough. Doing it
on multiple occasions is even tougher. But as the Audiolab, Roksan and, of
course, this Marantz all demonstrate, if you have the right product it’s
possible to take on all-comers and win year in, year out.
Marantz
CD6004, the best CD player under $750
So for the second year in a row, the CD6001
is our favorite budget CD player. The likes of Cambridge’s talented 315C ran it
close, but it’s the Marantz’s distribution of talent that gets it to the
winning tape first.
As with all Marantz’s best budget
offerings, the CD6004 is a beautifully judged player. It has a nicely balanced
presentation that marries refinement and drama brilliantly. This CD player’s
deliberate smoothing of rough edges makes a lot of sense in this part of the
market, because budget amplifiers and speakers are prone to aggression and
hardness, particularly with treble frequencies.
As well as being forgiving, this is a
design with plenty of sonic stretch, which is good news for those who love to
upgrade
No loss of excitement
That civility and calming of rough edges
isn’t, however, taken to the point where the energy in the recordings is damped
down. Any recording that should excite still does, and that’s vital.
The
CD6004 a truly complete budget player
While this machine sounds great out of the
box, there are a number of things you can do to improve the sound further.
First off, Marantz gives the option of turning the front-panel display off. You
can also turn off the digital output. Both these things are well worth doing
because the gains in transparency, dynamics and refinement are notable.
As well as being remarkably forgiving, this
CD6004 is a design with plenty of sonic stretch, which is good news for those
who love to upgrade. As you’d expect, this player impresses with similarly
priced partnering equipment – Marantz’s PM6004 is the obvious amplification
partner, but we think Rotel’s Ra10 will produce even better results when used
with quality budget speakers from Q Acoustics or Monitor Audio. Step the system
up to something like the Cyrus 6a powering KEF’s excellent LS50s and the
Marantz’s huge talent becomes even more apparent. It doesn’t sound out of place
at all astonishing considering its price point.
The CD6004 comes with a headphone output
and it’s a good one. Usually such circuits are an afterthought, and sound it.
This one performs to the standard of the unit’s line-level outputs.
Move away from sound quality and this
machine continues to impress. Build and finish could easily be from a player
costing twice as much, and the remote handset is well laid out and nice to use.
Last year we called the CD6004 a truly
complete budget player. It remains exactly that.
