Beyond the disc
It’s a what? A CD player?? Since the revival of vinyl, CD has to be the format of least renown for the younger generation of streaming Bluetooth-connected listeners, who will be focused on our group tests of headphones and wireless speakers this issue. We could try to explain that back in the 1980s we couldn’t stream anything, because there wasn’t anywhere to stream it from, and high-quality music took up more space than our floppy disks could possibly handle, so instead we had to burn holes in a layer of silver and then read them back with a laser, and pretty neat we thought it too. But they’d just look at us strangely.
Yet the CD player delivers CD-quality music (oddly enough), better than Bluetooth, better than Spotify. And besides, the new Arcam CDS50 can play not only digital music stored on CD, but also SACD (where that new-fangled DSD format
