Old-School Comeback

Narrowly missing our recent Group Test, David Price looks at this flagship silver-disc spinner to see how it compares

- David Price

Life comes at you fast. A decade ago, as the UK was cowering under the weight of the biggest financial crisis we’ve had in our lifetimes, British music fans were escaping the doom and gloom by playing their favourite music on compact disc. It was by far the most popular way of buying and listening to music, with the internet only influencing our buying habits insofar as we were beginning to buy CDs online.

How times change... It’s been a while since I got to review a silver disc spinner without so much as a digital input, but here it is in all its minimalist glory. There’s no need to connect Mitchell & Johnson’s new S800 CD Player up to your home network, and/or download an app to my already RAM-challenged iPhone, to get it going. No need to network it to your NAS, or go through an arcane start-up protocol that only the engineer who dreamt it up thinks makes sense. Instead, you pull it out of the box, plug it in, hit the eject button, put a disc in and press play – and suddenly music starts coming out of your hi-fi system. It’s so easy that you wonder why so many people have left the format behind.

The machine’s connectivity extends only to a choice of optical or coaxial digital outputs and balanced XLR and unbalanced RCA phono line-level outs. There’s also a fascia-mounted headphone socket with its own stage and volume control. The power switch is a largish toggle that’s different to the other switchgear, so you instinctively know how to switch it on and off. Disc loading is decently swift and the tray itself is par for the course in terms of smoothness of operation at this price.