music hall CD players

[02audionoob]

Any thoughts on the music hall CD players...especially with the mod's from Parts Connexion? Which other players it sounds like, can compete with, etc. Personal experiences?

[elapsed]

Here's an email conversation I had with one of my close friends about a year ago on this topic. His system is a Music Hall CD-25, Rotel RSX-1057 receiver, Monitor Audio Bronze 2 speakers. I'll have to follow-up with him to see if he eventually purchased any mods

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Friend: "woah... was actively listening to some cd's tonight and thought i'd play with the outputs. plugged in the coax on the CD to the Rotel and but left the analogues in for comparison.

started switching back, both sound really good. but the Rotel DAC just totally opened up the sound stage. it was like andre bocelli was somewhat squashed into a point in the middle of the room to filling the room.

then i started reading up on my cd player and checking a DB of known HDCD disks against our collection, turns out we had several that i didn't know about. threw a Beck CD in(Sea Change - brilliant stuff) and the HDCD light came on the cd player and the rotel started streaming hdcd across the display. pretty sweet sounding. gotta get you over here for some music and scotch. "

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Me: "Seriously I love finding HDCD's in my collection by accident! Some of them don't even have an HDCD logo on them. Always a pleasure to see that HDCD light come on

Surprised the Rotel DAC is superior to your CDP though"

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Friend: "It's an interesting thing between the two DAC's. Both sounded good, but certain sounds just opened up using the coax connection.

I'm thinking of ordering a couple new chips for the internals based on this review of it:
http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/musichall/cd25.2.html

or just ship it to these guys for a small tweak or three.

http://www.underwoodhifi.com/mod_musichall.html#Anchor-Musi-34155

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cheers,
elapsed

[02audionoob]

Surprised the Rotel DAC is superior to your CDP though


Me, too.

On a similar topic, I'm intrigued by the upcoming music hall tubed DAC. I wonder how that combo would be...the mmf CD-25 and the DAC.