The Advance Sound
Contents
Now we did a substantial test of CD drives the other day. Six of them no less. It showed us that CDs are anything but dead: they sound great! Different from streaming…. but in a positive way. CD has a certain, fine drive and rhythm that streaming has trouble delivering; then you have to stream at a very high level.
Flow and rhythm
What immediately stands out about the Advance Paris X-CD9 is its flow and rhythm. It also feels a touch soft, with the midrange remaining open and easy to follow. Hard s-sounds and sharpness the Advance doesn’t really know.
It is and remains a sub-1000 euro player, so don’t expect room-filling stereo imaging or super-resolution without analytical core characteristics…. but fine playing this player does. And sharp it certainly isn’t. Many will attribute that to the tube, but frankly I think it’s just clever tuning by Advance Paris.
Now we’ve played everything on this CD player. From rock and metal to trip-hop and singer songwriter. And basically the Advance plays everything. However, we find that singer songwriter and some acoustic work goes best. Portishead Roseland also had a good live feel. But we’ve heard the rawer rock/metal work a bit better. It lacks some impact and sub-bass (which should be there with A Perfect Circle).
Digital out
So analog out goes heartily with the Advance. What about digital out? We paired the Sonnet Pasithea with the Advance. At first we hear very little difference. That’s a bit of a shock! After all: the Sonnet should produce a good audible difference, right?
However, if we listen a little deeper, we hear that the Sonnet reveals more of the room in which the recording was made. A bit more acoustics are audible, as well as after sounds of instruments. We also generally feel a bit more air between instruments and vocals. However, it is not enough to justify this investment.
Why it is that so little difference is audible could have several reasons. With spdif coupling, the source is “master” when it comes to clocking. The clocking in the Advance is not bad, but not very good either. A NOS dac is quite sensitive to this. Oversampling dacs may have some more tricks to reduce jitter. So this may lead to different outcomes.
All in all, this Advance is not really suitable for use as a drive. At least: not in this case. Keep that in mind.