Brand loyalty is one of the strongest selling forces in hi-fi. Develop happy customers and maintain the standards and you could hang on to them for life. So strong was the brand loyalty for Radford valve products that the company was able to take a hiatus (or remain very low-key) for over a decade without jeopardizing the worth of the name. Woodside Electronics, the licencee for the Radford marque, has re-established the company through a range of fine valve amplifiers and pre-amplifiers; now it's ready to enter the digital arena.

No, the WSCD1 CD player is not a valve-equipped device. The decision to go for solid-state circuitry does not mean that Woodside is about to abandon vacuum tube technology, and if the
designers thought that they could make a better CD player with valves and still stay below the #1000 mark, we'd probably see glowing bits under the lid. As it is, Woodside chose to create
what they believe to be the best single-box player on the market using chips of silicon instead of cylinders of glass, and they only just missed a four-figure price-tag by a scant six quid.

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What your #994 inc. VAT gets you is the latest in a run of British CD players to confound foreigners. Following the incredibly successful players from Meridian, Mission, Arcam,

Cambridge and a few others is a sleek, well-equipped machine which finds just the right balance between tweak appeal and commercial potential. Few thought that the small, specialist makers would be able to compete with a technology that seemed to be the province of the electronics giants, but the British makers are doing it, and at prices far below those of the audiophile players from foreign lands. No Accuphase or CAL or Micro Mega pricing here; this one's for the real world.

Granted, the WSCD1 is Philips-based, but that's the only way it can be done if a small maker wants a CD player in its catalogue. And I think it's high time we all accepted the fact that
specialist brands are entitled to purchasing OEM transports in the same way that the vast majority of parts are sourced from outside. (Go on: name a hi-fi maker that manufactures its own reisistors.) Woodside raids the Philips parts bin for their best die-cast transport (the CDM1 Mk II), servo system, hand-held remote controller and front-panel display. But it's Philips only up to the 4-times upsampling digital filtering, and even the control PCB for the display is Woodside's, as are the 16-bit D/A converter, the entire analogue section, the case and the fascia.

A key part of Woodside's CD player philosophy is isolation of all stages, however compromised this may be by the cost considerations which led to a single chassis design. (A dearer two-box player is on the cards for 1990.) The WSCD1 employs 12 separate power supplies, the four in the original Philips stage and eight more for the D/A section, derived from two separate mains transformers. This concern for minimizing the interaction between stages is near-fanatical and has led to a unique operating condition (which I'll describe below) that allows the use to switch off all but the most essential stages during listening sessions.

Internal construction was only 'OK', the review sample bearing a pre-production board which I am assured will be cleaned up before the player's release date. Even so, it bristled with
no-compromise components -- real chi-chi bits and pieces for the kind of people who wear clothes with the labels on the outside -- and all internal wiring is done with silver plated copper core wrapped in a PTFE sleeve. Woodside's paranoia about interference includes a fear of RFI breakthrough, hum and any other invasion, so the works are housed in a 430x340x90 (WDH) all-aluminium, non-magnetic case for better RF shielding.

Despite the clean, uncluttered appearance, the WSCD1 is no exercise in sacrifice. The front sports the minimum number of press buttons (engineered with a nice, positive feel), but the
Philips hand control allows for numeric track access, time elapsed/time remaining read-out, cueing, track scan and other facilities in addition to the basics. What Woodsie have added to
the conventional operations are the option to switch off the display for better sonics and a stand-by switch instead of main power on-off, the latter being relegated to the back panel.

The latter has been fitted because Woodside believes that the unit should be left on when not in use due to long warm-up times required by the Philips section before optimum sonics are
delivered. In stand-by, the display and transport controls are switched out, with the rest of the circuitry idling. More about this is a paragraph...

At the back, it's all gold-plated sockets for fixed output, variable outbput (a toggle selects either) and coaxial digital output. The variable output is operated by a passive rotary
control on the front panel which is completely isolated when the fixed outputs are employed. Although the Philips hand-held controller has volume up/down keys, they do not work with the
passive volume control and Woodside has decided not to fit a motorised pot for both cost and sonic reasons.