What new gear are you listening to now?

[hmvman]

Bad news, Pulcers. But good to hear that you are back up and running.
A bigger coffee table may be a solution……

My Marantz all in one MCR 610 has developed a fault rendering it unusable.

Making do with a cheapie that I had in the study run through my Dali speakers while I consider my options.

Perhaps we should all be ordering Audiolab CD players and get a bulk-order discount....!

[richardfinegold]

Our trusty Cambridge azur851 CD player recently started to misbehave.
Initial attempts to find the problem proved unsuccessful, but as it was out of warranty anyway and a repair might have been fairly costly, we have replaced it with an audiolab 8300CDQ, which got installed yesterday, together with a replacement better set of leads (Chord); we did indeed find that they gave a cleaner sound than the original (already pretty good) set.
The CD player is a bit quirky compared to the Cambridge one (and it means yet another remote control added to the pile on the coffee table!) but so far I'm very pleased with it.
Stravinsky Rite (Boulez/Cleveland/Sony) on as I type.

The Audiolab uses an ESS Sabre Chip that is quite popular. I have had two components that use the same chip, an Oppo 105 Universal Player, which I use as a transport (therefore bypassing the aforementioned Sabre Chip). The Oppo Oppo was my principal DAC for a while until I replaced that with a Mytek Manhattan DAC, which uses the exact same chip but sounds vastly different than the Oppo did, proving that implementation of the DAC is more important than actual chip choice. The Cambridge player uses the same chip as the DAC Magic,now an antiquated piece by digital standards. The Audiolab has been out there for a while, but given that probably very little innovation has occurred during the pandemic, can be considered fairly current. I have the Cambridge Audio CXN 60 streamer which probably has the same DAC as your late CD player. It’s nice in its own right but the Audiolab should sound smoother, more detailed, with a lower noise floor. Try Mahler or Shostakovich and see if you don’t notice more low level detail, particularly percussion

[Pulcinella]

The Audiolab uses an ESS Sabre Chip that is quite popular. I have had two components that use the same chip, an Oppo 105 Universal Player, which I use as a transport (therefore bypassing the aforementioned Sabre Chip). The Oppo Oppo was my principal DAC for a while until I replaced that with a Mytek Manhattan DAC, which uses the exact same chip but sounds vastly different than the Oppo did, proving that implementation of the DAC is more important than actual chip choice. The Cambridge player uses the same chip as the DAC Magic,now an antiquated piece by digital standards. The Audiolab has been out there for a while, but given that probably very little innovation has occurred during the pandemic, can be considered fairly current. I have the Cambridge Audio CXN 60 streamer which probably has the same DAC as your late CD player. It’s nice in its own right but the Audiolab should sound smoother, more detailed, with a lower noise floor. Try Mahler or Shostakovich and see if you don’t notice more low level detail, particularly percussion

Mahler S9 (BBC MM vol 24, no 10: BBCSSO/Runnicles; live from Prom on 4 August 2014) on just now, but the percussive effects are coming from the rain battering on the windowsill!
The Shostakovich we listened to the first night (post #16867 in What Classical......) was very impressive; I think you're right!

[EnemyoftheStoat]

Agreed about the 'Lab, very impressive and seems superior to the more expensive Cyrus CDi that now languishes in the study as a very rarely used back-up. I might get around to a direct A/B play-off sometime but I wouldn't be surprised to hear my thoughts confirmed. One very minor gripe is that it doesn't do gapless playback of a programmed sequence of tracks - i.e. where I only want to listen to a particular segment of a CD - although it's fine in non-programme mode.

I'm using it with the 6000A and my old AE Aelite 2 speakers.

So... after the acquisition of a pair of Fyne Audio F301s that were intended to partner the Cyrus CDi & amp, they've actually replaced the AEs in the Audiolab system. Very happy with that set-up; it's never going to be the highest of hi-fi, but I can go to actual concerts for that, and the system will still dig out oodles of detail at both ends.

The latest development is that yesterday the CDi, sitting in neutral after playing a CD, just went pop, lights out and goodnight. It says a lot for my fondness (not a lot) for Cyrus that the worst aspect of this is that one of the eight CDs from my Hagen Quartet set of the Mozarts is still inside. My initial approaches to repairers indicate that they won't touch Cyrus stuff thanks to the company's poor attitude to independent repairers, even when Cyrus themselves no longer service the kit. (Yes, technically they do for the CDi, but it seems they will charge £300 just to look at it...)