Cyclicality. I checked to insure that turning 'cyclical' into this noun is kosher. Be it our blue planet's four annual seasons or their equivalents in a human lifetime; the rise and fall of civilizations and businesses; the prevailing winds of fashion; the orbits of stars… things come, go and come back again in endless cycles. When my audiophile career kicked off, my tastes in 'world music' skipped right over vinyl to focus on polycarbonate exclusively. In the end I probably had ~4'000 CD. In 2010 I slowly began to rip my collection to a music-dedicated iMac's hard drive. iTunes handled the front end, PureMusic was the sonic brains of my PCfi outfit. Later Audirvana sprung me from the prison of iTunes by being format agnostic including native DSD. Now my local files hopped onto an external SSD where they still reside. With the rise of Spotify, Qobuz, Tidal, Apple Music & Bros., for many the need or desire to own music in a physical format waned. Free or low-cost cloud access became the new paradigm. The carriers of vinyl and CD were declared endangered. But cyclicality had other ideas. Today an audience which never sold off or gave away a sizable CD library as did my kind discovers polycarbonate for the very first time like Madonna's virgin. Vinyl too enjoys a renaissance. There are even occasional sightings of lowly tape cassette. What might be the hidden lever behind CD's resurgence? Is it physical ownership vs more tenuous cloud streaming? Is it the ritual of disc handling, even the occasional wiping to remove finger prints? Is it a concerted attempt to escape the flitty thumb scrolls which never hear a full album in the sequence its artist/s intended? Is it desire for a slower more considered life which is prepared to dedicate an undisturbed hour to one CD beginning to end? No matter your answer, hardware to play silver discs back on has followed Arnie's promise/threat: "I'll be back."

Were Ivette still with us in this gross plane, she'd have cast one glance at the smsl then uttered a single 4-letter word in all caps: cute. On her behalf, so did I now. Impeccably finished. Beautifully styled. Reduced to the bare minima without going itchy hairshirt. Whatever your focus, it all suits bespoke-like. In no time had I leashed up S/PDIF coax and Toslink to the Shanling's equivalent inputs. I even wired up a BNC clock cable to one of my LHY masterclock's 50Ω 10MHz ports in square-wave mode, set the smsl to the same external Ω/rate as confirmed by the square-wave symbol next to the word 'Play'. Arnie was in the house. CD made sounds. The past was the present; again. Cyclicality had earned its keep. My circle had squared—or more accurately, rectangulated. Though not far off, the smsl isn't an exact square. Whatever you call that, it's mega cute yet surprisingly substantial, the slim-line font perfectly legible without stressing the point. The shown brightness is 3/6. The plastic remote takes two AAA non-included batteries though a USB-C/A cable and generic power cord do come with.

With my lowboy's top deck getting too busy for my inner Fengshui, the electronic crossover slash master volume migrated to the lower tier next to the clock. Now prepare for the audiophile police's first red card. Enjoyment is strangely satisfying. Listening to plain 16/44.1kHz Redbook via laser optics was astonishingly satisfying and deeply pleasurable. Whilst self validating in pretty much a few bars, the strange bit was trying to quantify it in sensible hifi lingo. If it were a home-cooked meal prepared by someone who profoundly loved us and used their kitchen as a temple from which to serve us, talking about taste and mouth feel, ingredients and presentation misses the point. To be sure, none of it is superfluous. It all bakes in. The fundamental quality, prosaic though it reads, is love made manifest on our tongue. We don't actually taste it with our buds. Yet something in us knows. We recognize it plain as day. It sets the stage and framework for all the culinary bits. They're ordinary; common to the same dish cooked by someone else, possibly a fully accredited celebrity chef armed with all the tricks in the book. The real difference? A deeply loving someone poured their very heart into this dish specifically for us. Something of the sort now happened with this little disc spinner. At heart, its presentation was easy pleasure for deep relaxed gratification. It was the antithesis of complicated, fussy, elaborate or artificed—quite like love romancing our entrails. If an inanimate bit of €575 electronics can generate a milieu which has us feel spoken to most directly and personally to then respond like a contented cat curling up and starting to purr like the little engine that could… then we've really lucked out. Et voilà, my first red card for publishing prose which the measurement guild loves to hate. Tally ho whilst I attempt better with my next try. To be sure, this result caught me entirely unawares. Is that why the usual audiophile descriptors failed me just then? Or, just perhaps, is this reaction—arriving to a proper CD transport from file playback—very common and the real lever behind CD's renewed popularity?

I keep a top-quality Denafrips Avatar CD transport in my main system. Its primary purpose was as sonic yardstick for my streaming of first local later cloud files. Keeping things honest, it meant that iMac-based streaming with Audirvana needed network isolators, slaved LAN distributors and USB bridges. When my file playback's initial lag caught up sufficiently sonically, it retired said CDT which has seen nary any use since. Hence upstairs had never yet spun CD in this house over the last 5 years. Now given the smsl's suggestion of an innately different gestalt that's separate and distinct from raw sonics, I wondered. Might the downstairs Avatar warrant resurrection? If so, it'll be a story for another day. Today is all about spending far less on a truly lovely bit of bonsai audio with excellent industrial design, first-rate manufacturing and a special kind of aural pleasure which the next page attempts to describe better. You'll be the judge whether I managed.