Can you say "detailed" boys and girls?

Alas, due to some, ahem, "shipping malfunctions" during our move out into the middle of the ocean, the vast majority of my stereo made it (Adcom pre-amp, Adcom mono-block amps, Infinity 8 Kappa loudspeakers) including the R/C for my Denon DCD-620 CD player, which itself did not arrive.

So when we were back on the mainland last year (HEL-LO McDonalds!!!), I perused a few stereo stores in search of a new CD player. Since the town is small, the assortment wasn't too varied, but I was able to find a NOS Parasound carousel, some Onkyo stuff, a couple of Marantz units, and the NAD C521BEE and the NAD C542.

Now normally you obviously want to audition components in your home on your system, but since I live 5,000 miles from modern civilization, that isn't a feasible option for me. So we went ahead and ran the units side by side in their system, which was some Parasound amps and Paradigm speakers. Yes, I know, I gasped too when I saw the Paradigms, but they have actually improved their sound considerably and they were actually enjoyable to listen too, albeit they weren't Infinitys...

All of the gory details about the C542 can be seen here http://www.nadelectronics.com/cd_players/C542_framset.htm Most notable are the 24-bit Burr-Brown DACs, HDCD compatible, CDRW compatible, and absolutely no MP3 capability.

Anyhoo, I won't go into the usual pompous comparisons that one unit had 10% more soundstage than the other, etc., rather, I just really enjoyed the sound of the C542 the most. Most notably, the music was extremely detailed, yet without the harshness that I've come to associate with "detailed sounding" cd players of days gone past. Perhaps it's the 24-bit Burr-Brown DACs, or maybe the advent of DVD has truly helped to eliminate jitter as some claim. For the demo I listened to some Santana and some Dire Straits (I, unfortunately, had left my CDs at home a few thousand miles away). But I was duly impressed, and hoping that it was "the" player for me, purchased it for $499 and shipped it home.

Finally, the big day arrived and we returned home and I hooked it up to aforementioned Adcom/Infinity setup. In another word - Wow! I was floored by the higher amount of detail and the additional bass extension right off the bat. Crank the volume up, and the tweeters' circuit breakers started tripping from being driven so hard - never had that occur with the old Denon, and I never heard all of the higher pitched sounds (Neil's high-hats, as a blatant example - I'm a Rush fan) on the old Denon either. Even more amazingly, cranked up to around 75%FV, there is still no harshness, no headache inducing high frequency noise, just amazingly clean music. I'm still just amazed as I'm used to the cd players of old where you chose between warm and muddied (Denon, etc) or detailed and brutally harsh (Nakamichi for example), and instead I have detailed, wonderful music w/o any hint of harshness.

Now, what about all of this HDCD nonsense? For those of you who don't know, HDCD is basically 20-bit encoding on the digital master instead of the normal 16-bit. Microsoft purchased the rights to it, and hasn't really known what to do with it since, so HDCD CDs aren't real common. I went ahead and purchased a HDCD sampler CD (mostly classical and jazz), and I also have Yes' Magnification which is HDCD encoded. The sampler makes it pretty obvious with AB comparisons of the same song recorded at the same time with both standard 16-bit and the HDCD encoding - the HDCD is much fuller and richer, dare I say, a big step closer to vinyl? As a side note, several receivers have HDCD capability which can be used with any CD player with digital outputs, in case you'd rather buy a new receiver instead of a new CD player.

Downsides:

* The green power led really doesn't go with the rest of my gears' red power leds.

* NAD still thinks that you'll never want to know how much time is remaining for the current track.

* Every once in a while it just doesn't want to play a CD, but a quick power off/power on seems to alleviate the issue every time.

Anyway, I love the sound, and I'm pretty happy with the C542. The C521BEE sounded almost as good to me and is only $299 but doesn't support HDCD.

The last comment that I'll make is that I've read quite a few reviews of the C542, and everyone raves about it, but several people felt that the $700 Rotel 1072 was even better, so check one of those out if you get a chance.