Despite vinyl’s ability to seemingly never die, the fact remains that we are most definitely in a streaming era. With quite literally millions of songs at our fingertips, accessible from the cloud, potentially in resolutions higher than those of CD, it’s understandable. That instantaneous connection to our favourite songs is something now that many people will likely never be able to live without.
Yet there is still a strong demand for compact discs, and rightly so: we recently spoke of our continued love for the format in an opinion piece in our sister publication Australian Hi-Fi (issue 534, p52). Prices for new CD releases have never been lower, while stocks in charity shops have never been higher, so they’re easy to come by, easy (relatively) to store and, unlike vinyl, you can jump, skip or program tracks to your heart’s content at the press of a button.
Meanwhile these shiny little discs harbour enough data to allow your system to truly sing, and on paper at least, to sing more than any ‘standard’ stream from most streaming services, if less than high-resolution audio files might allow.
So, then, how about a CD player that’s also capable of streaming and playing high-resolution audio, if you can lay your hands on some? Might that be the ultimate source component for our streaming age?
Well, that’s exactly what the Marantz CD50n aims to be: the only source you need to front up a modern component system.
You will still need an amplifier, of course, and that’s the area in which Marantz built its reputation, so the CD50n is matched with the Model 50 integrated amplifier, these two components forming part of Marantz’s solid hi-fi components using the established brand’s modern
