The first piece of HiFi equipment that I've bought in nearly 5 years arrived earlier in the week - a Quad Artera Play+ CD player. My next hifi journey now begins (without the meltdown hopefully) and while I still had some bits from my old system which all came out of storage a while ago, one major piece missing was some sort of digital playback system. I trawled through many reviews of various players over the last few months and to be honest I found it very difficult to shortlist a few nevermind actually choose one. What's more is that this would be bought 'blind' given the current climate which can be pretty risky when it comes to Hifi. I had some specific requirements which helped narrow down the choices. Firstly, it had to be a CD player instead of a standalone DAC. I have a decent sized Classical CD collection so there was no way in hell I was going to sit there and rip it all to harddisk. Secondly it had to support high res inputs given that a lot of new Classical releases are now only available as downloads. Thirdly it had to be reasonably priced. Gone are the days that I'll drop several K on such a player. This is mainly due to the fact that vinyl will be still be the main source of music for me and I already have plans in place to overhaul the entire vinyl playback system. So something very competent but not silly money was key. Next, it had to be from a reputable company with a decent internal DAC and solid engineering behind it. Far too many CDP's/DACs that I've seen the past had questionable build quality not to mention being very sparse on the inside. Finally, it had to have a smooth, but not overly detailed presentation nor was it to lean on the overly lush side either. The biggest hate I have of any piece of equipment is an overly bright treble. This is a big bugbear of mine and I find some HiFi companies 'guilty' of this in an attempt to impress. The Stax headphones and amp combo is fairly neutral so it tends to allow any traits of the sources shine through. So whatever character the CDP had I'd be fairly confident that that's what would come through the headphones. Again, in theory. You just never know. We've all been there.
After much mulling, I finally settled on the Quad. It ticked pretty much every box above. It’s a beautifully engineered piece of equipment, has a beefy linear power supply, an ESS Sabre DAC that supports up to 32/384kHz and DSD256 via some of the digital inputs.
Soundwise, I’m happy to report that it has lived up to my expectations, at least from CD playback anyway. It has a lovely smooth and open sound that just lets the music flow. It does it without the fireworks or fanfare and invites for long fatigue-fee listening sessions which was also a key requirement. Pricewise it comes in at around 1500Euro which had me worried if I was setting the bar too low given some of the previous CD players I’ve owned, but I need not have worried, the player is everything I had hoped for. Perhaps CD player tech has come along way in recent years.
As for PC audio playback, I haven’t tested any of that yet. I still don’t know what such a system will be. I do have a monstrous tower PC for gaming that has the bejaysus overclocked out of it, which goes against everything the CA lads say regarding noise etc. Perhaps getting an old laptop and daphile is the answer. I don’t know. One thing is that convenience will be priority here so the hair shirt approach is out. I do like the idea behind the Roon Nucleus but I don’t have the library to justify that cost. We’ll see. For now, I have plenty of CD’s to get through. I’ll post more when I get a better sense of what the player can do.
A few pics below of the Quad. The top is made of a heavy piece of dark glass which isnt obvious from the pics. Oh and kudos to Cloney's too who had Quad ship the unit direct to me. Nice.
20200523_141552
20200523_141603
20200523_141540
