"Five Stars" from What Hi-fi? Magazine
"Clean, Detailed, Sophisticated"
Musical Fidelity's M3scd CD player has been designed to give outstanding CD reproduction and to be a digital hub. If it just did an outstanding job coaxing superior performance from CDs, it would earn its keep. But this little gem is far more than a CD player.
In a joint review of the Musical Fidelity M3scd CD player and M3sci integrated amp, England's What Hi-fi? magazine gives the duo its top rating of Five Stars, praising the components for their "clean, detailed, sophisticated sound, styling, build." The magazine calls them a "classy, midpriced combo with genuine appeal."
Highly Capable Stand-alone DAC
One reason that CDs sound so great is the M3scd's superior DAC. It uses 24-bit Delta-Sigma (bit stream) dual differential chipset with 8x over-sampling. And you can harness the musical power of the M3scd's circuitry with your other digital gear, because it also functions as a highly capable stand-alone DAC.
The Ins and Outs You Need
In addition to CD it has three digital inputs: coax, optical, and asynchronous USB. This makes it particularly useful for set top boxes and/or TV sound improvement. Music streamers and Blu-ray players love the M3scd. The technical performance is excellent. It has very low distortion, extremely low jitter, excellent signal-to-noise ratio, extremely flat frequency response, exemplary linearity, and excellent channel separation.
Outputs consist of one line level unbalanced analog stereo RCA out, one RCA coaxial digital out, and one Toslink optical digital out. There's also a trigger in and out for convenient integration with your other gear.