Featured Articles & Reviews

Marantz's high end offerings have impressed us in the past. The new line gets away from the unique gold styling that so caught our eye for the more traditional black with blue lights that has been adopted by just about everyone. According to Marantz, they have a "silk-black" finish but that may not be enough to have this gear stand out. The SA-KI Pearl SACD Player is a $3,000 unit that can play stereo SACDs, CD, and CD-R/RW and is compatible with CD-DA, MP3, and WMA files. Of course, the unit is completely overbuilt but is it enough to justify the cost?

Apparently someone forgot to tell the high-end crowd that the CD isn't the pinnacle of all that is good and wonderful in audio. Instead of capitalizing on advanced features like hard-disc media storage and cataloging your entire CD collection in high resolution lossless format, Boulder Amplifiers has gone with an uber-expensive single-disc CD player. The new 1021 Disc Player from Boulder Amplifiers is going to make a lot of people exclaim "you paid HOW MUCH for that?!?"

Trekking a long on my series of disc player reviews, I stumbled a cross a Chinese unit. In a conversation with Mark Levine of Allied TV & Sound (the North American importer), I first heard of this brand. He raved about this unit. My cynical nature and desensitization to the enthusiasm of manufacturers/distributors has resulted in me being almost completely immune to the over-the-top pitches reviewers are commonly subjected to. But with Mark, I had to give his words a lot more credence, since his thoughts on the Cayin 265Ai integrated were on the mark (no pun intended).

After a few phone conversations with Audience's Technical Director Richard Smith, he made a convincing argument about parts selection mass produced players tend to use, which are primarily chosen for budgetary reasons and not necessarily audiophile performance. Rich ard was nice enough to extend me the offer of modifying my stock SCD-CE775 unit in exchange for reviewing the unit on Audioholics.com. I graciously accepted the offer and shipped out my barely-used SACD changer to them.