If any of you doubt that CD will remain the dominant playback source for the foreseeable future, the CD-only player before me should rattle your cage. It comes from one of Europe's canniest operators, retailer extraordinaire Peter Lyngdorf; you know his manufacturing efforts from the truly pioneering TacT digital amplifiers and processors. TacT has now metamorphosed into the eponymous brand that produces the CD-1, and - trust me - Lyngdorf wouldn't have OK'd a player this sophisticated if he had any insecurities about the format. Instead, he would have badge-engineered some Pacific Rim poo-poo and left it at that. No, the CD-1 is a statement of intent. And it's audiophilic intent, too, for this is one seriously fine-sounding silver-disc spinner.

Being about as European a brand as it gets, Lyngdorf Audio has to take the home continent into consideration. Equally, it is also painfully aware that many of the diktats that come from the Assholes of Brussels can have detrimental effects on sonic performance. Among the CD-1's design considerations was a 'good mains filter at the input.' But Lyngdorf UK's David Rapoport pointed out that, 'Normally only very small mains filters are seen on CD players - for meeting the EMC requirements. But we are concerned about the influences on sound quality as well.'

To avoid compromise, Lyngdorf felt it was, '...worth the money doing better filtering than required to make sure there is a minimum of noise entering the player. Grounding is optimal, and the entire chassis connected electrically. The back panel is electrically conductive (as with all our products) and if you note the side panels and top panel, the oxide layer in the anodisation has been removed to make them conductive as well. The design around the Holmgren toroidal transformer and the linear power supply is also well-regulated, filtered and decoupled with different supplies from three independent secondaries.'

To be frank, I have yet to use any player above dreck-level - with the exception of some lunatic-fringe valve players - that exhibit even a hint of noise, but there seemed to be something palpably hushed about the Lyngdorf. Here's how the CD-1 behaves in a powered-on, but not-playing state: it reminded me of systems using either mains regenerators or overkill filters, from companies like PS Audio or Isol-8. If silence can have a quality - sorry to go all Lewis Carroll on you - then it's one of Stygian totality in the CD-1. You'd be hard-pressed to tell that the CD-1 is on until the music issues forth - even if you turn the volume way up with nothing playing - and the net result is a deliciously pure canvas against which to display the music.

But silence is not what we're here for: it's the playback that matters. The CD-1 is built around a Philips audio CD mechanism, 'designed for audio,' Lyngdorf emphasises, not a universal or CD-ROM mechanism. 'The reason for designing for CD rather than DVD/SACD is obvious from a musical point of view. All DVD/SACD drives are based on video designs and clocks, and the output is re-sampled (uncontrolled) to audio output clocks. So our preference is simpler and better: a good audio drive, a clean clock on the drive and external optimisation. We have chosen to get the signal [off the CD] as cleanly as possible and do the last final cleaning based on our precision clock system close to the output stage.'

Lyngdorf's experience with all-matters-digital is vast, not least because of the aforementioned work on true digital amplifiers. Without nods to false modesty, the company says, 'We know what clocks are supposed to do and what they don't do, so we have taken the best clock we have found, from our work with the Millennium digital amplifier, and implemented it within the CD-1. The key here is low phase noise in the audio band.'

Lyngdorf has no doubts about the benefits of upsampling the output. Rapoport continued, 'First, we use the sample rate converter, the best on the market, for attenuating jitter to a very low level on the output. Secondly, we enhance the audio quality by upsampling to 24 bits at a higher rate. You can be assured of the differences just by listening to the output - and getting the output frequency away from the 44.1kHz input can do very nice things to the sound. But the best is that some people prefer 48kHz, I actually prefer 96khz finding it delivers more colour and flow, while Peter likes the 192kHz, which to his ears sounds smoother. But I have not met anybody preferring the 44.1kHz output.'

No argument here - I found it the same with other upsamplers I've tried, including the Musical Fidelity kW 25...but then I've still got a warm spot in my heart for one or two players that date from the era before upsampling or high bit rates, so Lyngdorf's inclusion of user-selectable rates is another 'fun area' for inveterate tweakers. To look at it another way, surely the ability to play around with sampling rates is the CD surrogate for user-adjustable impedances with m-c phono cartridges? And don't you dare tell me - if you're a vinyl user such as I - that you haven't had many hours of gleeful pleasure fiddling phono stage switches.

It's worth pointing out here that this facility makes it more difficult to assess a player, because you can - literally - tweak it from disc to disc. Does the reviewer assess it at 44.1kHz to level the playing field? Or find the best setting per disc? What I did, to keep from going nuts, is listen again and again at various settings, eventually settling - as David did - on 96kHz as the best 'universal' position.

The input to the DAC section is upsampled to 96kHz, and that's fixed, by the way, '...but here the sample rate converter is also used for taking care of another drawback of modern DACs. The resampling for the DAC has a negative gain of -2dB, and the re-sampling filters take care of the inter-sample clipping problems (of which not many are aware) in a very delicate way.

'In modern CDs, the level is very high, and by analysis you will often find several "max" samples in a row indicating something is clipping, away from the original signal. With this kind of input most DACs sound very bad and their often fine specifications will suffer to a high degree in the conversion process. But in the sample rate converter the signal is treated differently: after attenuation, the output is low-pass filtered to reshape the signal. This eases the burden on the modulator in the DAC. This, of course, loses a couple of dB in dynamic range of the DAC, but is well worth it when you hear the result.'

The CD-1's DAC is built around the Wolfson WM8740. The company admits that it is, '...perhaps not the best performing DAC on the bench, but in our balanced design, with very fine audio op amps, the sonic quality is outstanding.' The analogue output can be attenuated from a high level, for matching the Lyngdorf amplifiers, to a lower line level; additionally, the analogue section can be powered down completely if the user wants to use the CD-1 as a transport-only, thus optimising its performance even further.

Housed in a sleek, 450x357x100mm (WDH) enclosure - those dimension including all protrusions - the CD-1 is a handsome device with a surprisingly clean, if not quite minimalist front panel. A comprehensive remote control helps here, a 36-button affair that also operates other Lyngdorf products. Also aiding the absence of clutter is the 'Skip Wheel' for play and select functions at the extreme right, which features a press button encircled by a press-ring that will be instantly familiar to iPod users, gamers and mobile phone abusers. For old farts, there is still an array of conventional transport buttons below the display, including a menu button for accessing the user-adjustable settings.

Naturally, it has a few of its own quirks to address, which - rather than upset you - should be regarded as evidence that Lyngdorf didn't simply badge-engineer someone else's design. For example, the remote might not operate the player unless the CD button is pressed. This only needs to be done once. David admitted that, 'I made this mistake and gnashed my teeth until my colleague pointed out the issue.' You have a choice of on/off or standby from two separate buttons on the extreme left. And you will certainly want to read the 21-page manual if you hope to get your money's worth out of the CD-1.

Among the facilities accessed by the menu button are: the variable gain to match the analogue output with the sensitivity of your preamplifier input; access to the user-selectable upsampling frequencies of 44.1, 48, 96 and 192khz; switching off analogue outputs for using the CD-1 solely as a transport; display brightness; repeat and random play; communications modes.

A varied selection of outputs will endear it to enthusiasts: both balanced (XLR) and unbalanced (phono) analogue outputs, and transformer-coupled digital outputs - to eliminating earth loops - via Toslink optical, AES XLR and co-axial SPDIF. The CD-1 also has a pair of RS232-compatible R&45 sockets for connecting a PC for firmware upgrades, for linking it to all-Lyngdorf systems, for daisy-chaining components, or for incorporation into custom installations. Mains enters through a three-pin IEC socket.

What stood out above all the CD-1's qualities - apparent from the very instant I turned on an already-run-in machine - were the cavernous, open sense of space and the phenomenal retrieval of low level detail. And here, yet again, I expect to upset some of you: my first action was to play two copies of Candido & Graciela's Inolvidable (Chesky JD249), one treated by the Golden Sound magic chip. For whatever reason, this player responded even more vividly to the tweak, and it was most easily perceived with the disc's bass.

Inolvidable is rhythmic, flowing Cuban music and it's a challenge for any system. What the CD-1 pulled out was even greater atmosphere, more air, wider dynamics, but - as far as the lower registers are concerned - far better presentation due almost entirely to subtle, barely perceived clues at the best of times. Added mass, tighter transients, smoother decay: if you like your music to have a solid, palpable presence, and your speakers and room can handle it without going all woofy and woolly, the CD-1 will have you grinning from ear to ear.

To see if this is consistent with other genres and that I was not just hearing the GSIC tweak, I moved onto the remastered Ramones canon via the Weird Tales of the Ramones box set. This time, it was disconcerting, almost to the point of betrayal if you still have perforations on your face testifying to your adherence to the punk ethos. Bugger me if the recordings didn't sound simply amazing! You don't listen to the Ramones for sonic ecstasy: you listen to them to have your cage rattled. Sound quality was never even an issue. But the CD-1 revealed their studio work to have far greater dynamics than their three-chord balls-to-the-wall bombast ever suggested. There was clarity and transparency that spoke of expensive studios and genius producers. And, damn, could those guys play. Check out the crystal clear, liquid-y guitar work on their version of 'Journey To The Center of the Mind' - Ted Nugent would be proud.

Fast, punchy, with crisp attack - it was almost impossible to find any areas of behaviour to criticise. I had to look to the £4k Musical Fidelity kW25 package to improve audibly on the performance, and the main gains were in the sense of scale: the MF transport/DAC combo sounded bigger, with a slightly wider and deeper soundstage and slightly greater image height. It also added a hint of warmth, which - in this case - was so subtle as to become merely a matter of taste.

Back to the CD-1, and I wanted to test this with mono recordings, including the remarkable early Neil Diamond tracks - a raspy voice, great arrangements, but single-channel. Here is where the CD-1 showed why it can fight with stuff at double the price. It was able to reveal layer in mono recordings, to separate vocals and instruments with such precision, that it enables the listener to forget that the sound is dead centre and devoid of spatial effects. Diamond's voice remained to the fore, while behind him were examples of sublime musicianship probably not noticed by most listeners who only ever heard this stuff on the radio. Overly familiar material sounded absolutely fresh - and that's just about the greatest gift a sound system can present to the listener.

Think about it. I must have heard ? & the Mysterians' '96 Tears' a few thousand times. It was the garage band anthem for Yanks in the 1960s. It was glorious trash, simplistic to a fault. The mono take on the recent 'best of' sounded fatter, more majestic than I recalled, the angst in the voice, the sheer cheesiness of the organ riff. I left it on repeat for an hour or two.

What Lyngdorf has produced with the CD-1 is the kind of no-brainer choice that takes the worry out of buying a £1500-plus player - still a lot of money to most people. You can drop this into a system with a total price tag in excess of £50,000, and it will not let it down. If its reliability as is solid as its construction, the CD-1 will see most of you out in the way that Quad gear used to go to the grave with its first owners. Its flexibility will render it suitable for any system it's likely to face, the user-adjustability will keep 'enthusiasts' permanently amused, and the sound is, well, delicious. Good grief: what a debut!

Lyngdorf Audio UK
Tel 0870 9100100
www.lyngdorfaudio.co.uk

Manufacture's Specification:
DAC frequency response: 20-20kHz +/- 0.02dB
Signal-Noise ratio: -115 dBA
Distortion: 0.0018%
Crosstalk: -114dB (125-16kHz)
Unbalanced output: 75ohm
Balanced output: 50ohm
Dimension: 450x357x100mm (WDH)
Price £1545

100wd summary
I didn't see this coming, because I was not one of those who succumbed to TacT's digital amplifiers. But, damn, this player ups the ante for sub-£2k players, even challenging machines all the way up to £3k. Beautifully-built, highly adaptable, practical and functional, but - above all - great-sounding, this debut player is a sensation. Its real appeal is for veteran audiophiles, who'll appreciate the choice of balanced or single-ended outputs, the selectable digital outputs, the gain matching and other features that lift it out of the mass-market, no-brainer morass. It's early 2006, but this deserves short-listing for CD Player of the Year.

Alternatives:
Copland CDA813 (£1750): Like the Lyngdorf, it's northern European, offers balanced output...and it's beautiful
Marantz SA-11S1 (£2000): Gorgeous in every way, with stereo SACD playback, too, for the masochists - a future classic
Quad 99 CDP II (£999): If £1545 is too much, here's a knock-out at 2/3rds the price

We listened to:
Candido & Graciela: Inolvidable (Chesky JD249)
Ray Davies: Thanksgiving Day (V2 Music 63881-27286-2)
Neil Diamond: In My Lifetime (Columbia 504501-2)
? & the Mysterians: The Best of (ABKCO/Cameo-Parkway 18771-92322)
The Ramones: Weird Tales of the Ramones (Rhino 8122-74662-2)

Review System:
Musical Fidelity kW25, Quad 99CDP II and Marantz CD12/DA12 CD players
McIntosh C2200 pre-amp
McIntosh MC2102 power amp
Rogers LS3/5a speakers
Wilson WATT Puppy System 7 speakers
Transparent Ultra balanced cable
Transparent Reference speaker cables