For an affordable player, the Music Hall CD-25 digs amazingly deep into harmonic and ambient recovery and quite outperforms the more expensive Audio Refinement CD Complete which serves as my traded-in master for CD/R compilation recordings. "Horchat hai caliptus" on Ishtar's The Voice of Alabina [Atoll, 2002, 91115] is a female vocals tour-de-force set against piano and strings. What makes it challenging to reproduce this French/Moroccan lead singer for the popular Gipsy-Kings-with-Arabian-influences formation? A high amount of metallic overtones in her voice. It's a timbre prized by Spanish gitanos for the "uncivilized" wildness it allows a singer to project, for raising those li'l hairs on the nape of your neck.


A less refined CD player like my long-lived but recently buried Denon DCD-1560 (its tombstone reads "it just wouldn't quit") will render this pronounced overtone content edgy, the piano flat and tinkly, the string section more synthetic than real. You curse production values and recording quality for wrecking a beautifully charged performance. Not! The very unconventional Zanden Audio DAC 5000MkII, with its by now private-reserve non-oversampling 16/44 Philips chip, tube-rectified power supply and proprietary analog reconstruction filter -- possibly one of the finest DACs extant -- reveals just how much magic is still hiding in the pits of such presumably inferior Pop recordings. Its relaxed yet phenomenally resolved smoothness is partially a function of sustaining decays to not prematurely clip off a tone's infinity-in-a-milisecond fade into silence.


The reason cheap CD players sound harsh, flat and lifeless has to do with this digital "clipping". It's not a distortion like amplifier clipping but just as audible. It's an obscuration of micro detail which, when recovered, shows notes to linger longer. In obnoxious wine speak, tones then have a more extended and complex finish - velvety shades of raspberry, walnut and cinnamon. You know the blasted poetic descriptions. In the absence of this subtle shimmer -- notes overhanging each other as on a piano with its damper pedal lifted -- tones end abruptly. The minuscule trails of boundary reflections that would light up the space in which they occurred are wiped out. We instinctively call such renditions dry and damped or, in the extreme, edgy. What should be water-color type soft transitions between sounds and silence are reduced to brusque oil-color delineations. Would it surprise you that with these transitions intact, music appears richer and fuller while also more gentle and less hyped - more analogue?


All this by way of complimenting the CD-25. While certainly falling well short of the $9,800 Japanese statement DAC, it more importantly fell equally short of committing the errors my old 24-bit ladder-type Denon had been guilty of by virtue of advanced age. The Music Hall retrieved far more of this "atomic half-life" activity around and between the notes, allowing appreciation for elongated sustains, for expanded harmonic envelope, for more subliminal recording venue data. Here it was audible in Ishtar's unfettered pipes when she veered into her upper register with high air speeds to inject those intense white noise components of emphasized harmonics. It fleshed out the rich overtone aura of the piano, the body of the massed strings.


By comparison, the Complete was drier, slimmer as well as more distanced and removed. Part of this also seemed a function of transient rise times. The CD-25 was crisper, more incisive. On livelier subsequent tracks like "Apprivoise-moi" or "Lamouni", this quality enhanced and solidified rhythmic drive - leading rather than trailing edges, an important qualifier and sign of cannily crafted balance. The Audio Refinement was more polite, with less snap, spunk and clarity. Somewhat uninvolving. I much preferred the Music Hall whose bass also clearly offered more displacement and concomitant get-up-and-go bounce.


Inserting my reference Cairn Fog V2 24/192 upsampling player into the mix now minimized the differences. The CD-25 was tonally a bit more forward, thicker, the Cairn's sonic events arising a bit farther behind the speakers while also more lithely focused. The Cairn's portrayal of leading edges was as precisely timed - accurate without being unduly sharp, doing the famed PRAT thing to garner it the underground designation as the French Naim -- while the upstart Music Hall additionally produced what I thought was superior image density. Performers benefitted from an extra degree of thereness, a few more pounds of substance on their physical frames.


This was confirmed on the Goran Bregovic/George Dalaras collaboration whose title remains, literally, Greek to me [EMI/Minos 7243-4-93587-20]. While otherwise cut from a very similar cloth -- with the Cairn's display functionality and cue-up times more to my liking -- the darn CD-25 was sonically superior by a small but significant margin. My audiophile ego's still reeling from this sneaky blow. To add insult to injury, the Music Hall also offered optical and coaxial digital outputs whereas the Frenchman inexplicably skimps on the RCA jack. Most appallingly, the Chinese/Scottish hybrid as reviewed costs $750 instead of $1,595. Okay, I'm of course joking about the appalling bit - it's really, truly and vexingly appealing. Why? Because just like savvy airline shoppers, audiophiles on a budget can now enjoy the same sophisticated flight and on-board service which their seat neighbors paid more than double for. Pretty flight attendant, could I get some more honey peanuts and another soda? How about a pillow and blanket?


Hey, don't push your luck. In a few months, I could spot a giant killer that might make CD-25 shoppers lose some of their pig-food peanuts. But, I don't really expect it. The Cairn player is universally acclaimed as an excellent performer in its <$2,000 range and was, in fact, due to be incorporated into Unison Research's new Unico Player -- with the Italians adding their own tube output stage, display and transformer -- until a shortage of necessary drives forced them to change plans. The point is, the maker of our Component of the Year thought enough of the Cairn's basic circuitry and upsampler implementation to pick it over any number of pre-existing digital solutions.


Now hairy Scot Roy Hall comes along to sock it to us unsupecting music lovers with an elegant, well-made package for an implausibly low price which, performance-wise, manages to slightly upstage my beloved Cairn. How much responsibility for that is due to Chris Johnson's mod? I don't know. But based on the case evidence, I strongly suggest that those buyers who can stretch from the $600 base price to the $750 Graham Company special (when the upgrade is purchased at the same time as the player) would be foolish not to go for the hotrodded version.


How good of a transport does the CD-25 make? A quick comparison to the Jolida JD-100 -- both hitched up to the Zanden Audio DAC in typical reviewer's tomfoolery-- would answer that question in an unusually revealing while of course utterly unrealistic way.


Far smaller in scope than observed when comparing the JD-100 with the 47Lab Shigaraki 4716, the Jolida again was softer in focus and timing exactitude, giving the CD-25 a narrow but welcome performance edge to suggest that it holds more than its own even when merely used for its transport functions.


With price/performance heavily imbalanced but in obvious favor of the consumer, the Music Hall/Shanling CD-25 is a truly outstanding value gussied up in high-class, solidly put-together livery. Were it not for the omission of common time display options and the very lackadaisical cue-up times, I'd be melting some of our royal blue wax for a smoking award seal. This underdog is the real deal, folks. It won't at all embarrass itself in comparisons with $2,000 machines. And while reviewers are supposed to be picky and test all the controls and buttons, most prospective buyers probably could care less about our few nits. So, what can I add?


The times are a'changing. If rumors are correct, made in China today (if you contract with the right people!) seems good enough even for dapper Mark Levinson. When the sky-rocketing know-how, fit'n'finish and reliability prowess of our neighbors in the East arrive in this country without being invalidated by excessively capitalistic markups, the savvy music lover has reason to break into a shit-eating grin. Add domestic warranty service and custom modifications. Can you say cheeeeeze?


Chris Johnson of the PartsConnexion comments: The stock units do not come with the B-B OPA-2134 op amp but rather the next level down version called OPA2604. The OPA2134 (the best of the plug'n'play dual op amps) is part of the LEVEL 1 upgrade, however. The PartsConnexion now also has an "adaptor" pcb that enables integration of the world's best op amps (single, not dual, B-B OPA627 and AD825) into units which are designed with duals. It's a major plug'n'play retro fit upgrade! The long and short of it? Both the CD-25 and CD-T100 can be further improved either as a simple à-la-carte upgrade or as part of a more comprehensive future LEVEL 2 mod.


Music Hall website
Graham Company E-mail