Blame the end of the Millennium, the coming of DVD, the arrivals of HDCD/20-bit remastering/XRCD, what-have-you. All I know is that we're experiencing a flood of deliberately off-the-wall CD players, and if this is anti-digital backlash, then it's over a decade too late. Even before recovering from the stress of the Rega Planet, here's a French offering to wrack my brain. Worse, it veers sonically (as I recall it) from the YBA CD2 I reviewed - what? four years ago? - enough to make me wonder who lost what beat. What was once a race to make CD sound like analogue has turned into a movement which attempts to redefine analogue in digital terms, when most of us liked analogue just as it was.

This 'redefinition' results in a sort of which exaggerates what we know to be the virtues of analogue until they become somehow detrimental to the sound. It reminds me of Bob Carver claiming he could dial in the sound of any amp, making his product sound like tubes or transistors depending on one's preference. You know the drill: crank up the third-order harmonics, soften up the bass, . But a facsimile is a facsimile, and we're way beyond such cop-outs as 'euphonic coloration' and gimmicks like CDs recorded with the sound of a stylus in a groove preceding the music.

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What these CD players do, these CD-players-which-are-ashamed-to-be-CD-players, is succumb to an extreme form of denial, that of transference, like a tabloid editor calling a paparazzo a 'sleazebag'. They deny over a decade's worth of fine-tuning and honing and reassessing, a period which created not an analogue surrogate, but a more acceptable form of digital. We've learned to listen in 70 minute spells rather than in 20 minute snatches. We've grown accustomed to the total absence of tracing noise. We've taught ourselves to compensate for CD's finite frequency response. In other words, we've grown up and learned to live with CD, while keeping analogue close to our hearts . And we've learned to stop fighting the inevitable. But not YBA, it would appear.

YBA's CD3a, blue light or not (see Paul Miller's panel), is a player which errs on the side of audiophilic attraction, betraying political as much as sonic motives. What at first seems like an only slightly odd player soon emerges as a machine imbued with the kind of hobbyist mythos which we haven't seen since the heyday of Peter Belt. While I adhered to the instructions regarding mains cable selection, polarity, positioning, lid open vs closed, I did so not so much out of any slavish adherence to nor belief in such concerns, but to pre-empt any flak from the distributor or manufacturer. Polarity, cable quality and the like are now such an intuitive part of audiophile practice that labouring the issues serves only to set up a smoke screen. I also tried the player with a flimsy rack, with the AC polarity inverted and with crap AC cables, and yet the primary characteristics remained unchanged.

The CD3a looks like the '1 and '2, sharing the YBA philosophy which states that a single chassis player betters separate transport/DAC set-ups because there is less jitter, the two primary stages are directly linked, a (digital) cable connection is removed and there's no chance of mismatches. You won't hear me arguing against this position, based as it is on clear logic, but equally persuasive arguments can be made for separates. I'm not prepared to side exclusively with either, because the proponents are evenly matched and there are good and bad single-chassis and two-chassis CD players. But this, along with over-specified power supplies are part of the YBA CD experience, so it bears mentioning, in case you want to know why there are single-chassis CD players at prices well above what will pay for separates: a sobering £2250.

Read more about the CD3a on Page 2.