When’s the last time you heard a new CD player and thought wow, this sounds terrific? I’m not talking about digital in general or a DAC, but a one-box CD transport/DAC playing just a redbook CD. That happened to me with the very first CD I listened to with the Audio Research CD6 SE. When we talk about advances in digital technology, in most cases we’re talking about DACs. We’ve seen plenty of innovative DACs over the last few years, usually employed in conjunction with high-resolution files and streaming from our favorite services. As far as “ordinary” CD players go, I feel like we hit the ceiling a few years ago. Most of the top-notch CD players over the last few years sound very similar, in my opinion—you play a disc and you think yeah, this sounds right. It’s been a long time since I bought a new CD player and thought it sounded much better than every player I’d heard before. I can probably go back close to 20 years ago, when I bought a Naim CDX2 and thought it couldn’t get any better. From those first few seconds with the Audio Research CD6 SE, I had that feeling […]
