I chose the track, Human Highway a low key country rock piece with a Young vocal, female backing, percussion and plenty of stringed instruments including guitar and banjo. I tested all three and used Neil Young’s Comes A Time album as the music. Using the method, you can connect the MCD600 directly to a power amp. In effect, then, the CD player becomes the pre-amp. This means that the CD player itself handles the volume. Here, you can by-pass your own hi-fi system’s pre-amp entirely using a bank of Variable outputs. What the MCD600 does provide, though, is a third option. That is, the volume is fixed coming out of the CD player which means that volume duties are handed by the pre-amp. Both are these options are connected to the MCD600’s Fixed outputs. Then there is a balanced option to allow you to connect XLR cables to your pre-amp. Firstly, there is a standard RCA to your pre-amp using single-ended cables. One of the best features of this CD player is the multiplicity of connection options. Power and data links are also supplied to connect to other McIntosh products. Spanning a healthy 44.45 x 15.24 x 48.3cm, this large box weighs in at almost 13kg. Part of that is down to the hardware, of course. I say it about vinyl but I now say it about CD too – there is more to come in terms of sound quality from this format. Have you seen the CD-based box set releases from the likes of Nazareth and The Beatles? You won’t get that level of sophistication and packaging from Roon, you know. Often complete with nice packaging, added books and other goodies too, I might add. And that in an untreated room too.ĬD is also the only viable physical digital format in town which means that you can actually own your digital music as opposed to renting it via streaming or holding it on a dodgy hard disk (all hard disks are dodgy) as a download. I heard a high-end digital hi-fi set up at the Cranage show in the UK, during last Summer and was, frankly, blown away by the quality of the music. Steadily upgraded ADCs used in modern studios mean that CD’s potential sound is better than ever. CD sound was never the perfect specimen offered by the format’s initial sales pitch but those early, bad old days of CD sound have largely receded. Yet the sales drops are sold by national media akin to a slow-motion disaster movie. From it’s sales high when it was the only digital format in town in a time that was pre-Internet (largely, at any rate), pre-Web browser, pre-digital mobile culture, pre-smartphone, pre-broadband, etc sales are bound to drop in the face of stiffer competition. The CD format has been receiving bad press for some time now but a lot of that is propaganda. Paul Rigby reviews the new MCD600 CD player
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March 2023
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