A Quick Short Shoot Out With 3 Cd Players

agelessgoodguy · April 13, 2016

Given a quick chance to trial out 3 respectable CD players by one of our sponsors today I jumped at the chance. Who'd really take much notice of a CD player that costs 7 times more than arguably one of the worlds best Blu ray players? Cd's are a mainstay of many a audio library but not talked about so often so here goes.

I'd previously carried out shoot outs using the 105 before and it had come out tops in that round back in 2013 but here we were amongst a higher pedigree of machines, interesting I thought.

The line Up.......

1/ Rega Saturn RRP around $6k new.

2/ The well known Oppo 105 around 1.5K new

4/ The French connection YBA 400 around $10k new

All units played into the same amps with the same RCA cables and the same sound track with the same song, the speakers well yes, the B&W Diamonds were available, so why not?

First up was the Rega nice open sounding, clear stage presence but...

Then came the YBA, Ok it was clearly better in delivering/ giving a more spacial sound better clearer sound again, like a veil had been lifted off the speakers, such was the improvement. Yet if one hadn't heard the Rega's good efforts one wouldn't have been so easily able to hear the YBA's nice improvements provided.

Now for the cheapest RRP unit the OPPO 105, it sat in between the two with about a 20% loss of quality (not the right term I know but a quantitative rating to assist the reader) to the YBA, and well clear of the Rega in my opinion, so great value for money as many will attest.

Yes, to those who know there are much dearer cd players out there than these, but they come at much heavier wallet impact too and weren't the choice for today's tests.

As used players none of them have held up above 50% of their original buy prices but good value they certainly can be and are!

A hard choice between the Oppo which incidentally held its value more than the other two, against the such clear sound of the YBA, if you've got the coin I''d be taking the YBA no doubt, just too hard to not want the best of these at the sale price.

I have a 105.

Thanks boys.