Disc Players

Although at the time of writing Micromega seems not to be available in the UK, it was once a well-known ambassador for French hi-fi, its CD players and DACs having a strong following in the 1990s. Micromega had a similar strategy to Meridian and others with its early models, utilising standard Philips parts and assemblies before making detail improvements – a popular approach with audiophiles looking for something more esoteric than the mainstream offerings.

It’s tempting to imagine a Frankenstein-like cry of ‘At last our creature is complete!’ emanating from the Cambridge HQ of dCS. The arrival of the company’s Varèse CD/SACD transport, retailing for £32,500, should come as no surprise to followers of the company’s flagship digital solution [HFN Feb ’25]. Bringing the complete Varèse ‘stack’ to a total of six units – the User Interface, Core, Master Clock and dual Mono DACs – the eagerly anticipated Transport also lifts the all-up price just north of £260,000.

While Compact Disc’s 1982 promise of ‘Perfect Sound Forever’ was largely aimed at the silver discs themselves, hardware engineers were not sitting back and thinking ‘job done’. Disc transport, error-correction, digital audio processing and DAC technology progressed at pace with players becoming bigger and more feature-laden. It was around the middle of the decade that ‘proper’ flagship players arrived, often in multiple enclosures.

You might be forgiven for thinking – bearing in mind the product name – that the Unico CD Uno from Italy’s Unison Research is ‘just’ a CD player. Yet on its website the Italian manufacturer gives it the title of ‘hybrid DAC with CD transport’, while legends on the player itself read ‘Valve CD Player’ and ‘Digital Sound Processor’. So, yes, this is a CD player with a little more to it than some rivals, including a switchable tube/hybrid output stage, USB DAC, and even built-in Bluetooth streaming. With all this, and the heavyweight build, its £2700 asking price seems far from unrealistic.

Ken Kessler admires the luxurious design of a top-loading CD player with upgrade potential. But will its performance also leave him spellbound?

Once CD players had become established it did not take long for hi-fi manufacturers to come up with new features and facilities to offer. Of these, the ability to play more than one disc at a time was perhaps the most intriguing and visually obvious. Toshiba was the first to produce a practical machine with the XR-V22 [HFN Jun ’24]. This could take two discs, but it was fellow Japanese brand Pioneer which led the field, coming up shortly afterwards with a six-disc cartridge player. This ‘universal’ cartridge system was common to all Pioneer’s multi-play models, allowing collections of discs to be rapidly swapped between systems at home and in-car.

Has hi-fi become a little crazy these days? Huge equipment, bizarre accessories, cables that look ready to moor an oil tanker? How about this though – a CD player that works under water. Not for audiophile reasons of course, but for practical ones and as a step along the road to making the Compact Disc system the perfect consumer bauble.