I’m thinking of changing my Uniti Atom to Uniti Star.
I’m interested in the CD player and I also want to compact the system, avoiding an “external” player.
Besides the CD, are there any other differences between the two machines?
It seems to me that the Star is more powerful, for example.
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From a functional standpoint, you get more power, 2 more digital inputs, 1 more analogue input, an SD card slot and the CD player / ripper.
And, but that might also depend on speakers, a big step up in sound quality. I found the difference between the Atom and Star much larger than between the Star and Nova. (with B&W 702s2 & Revel F206)
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I was going to say much the same as n-lot (in respect of inputs) . It makes the Star a lot more “connective” than the Atom.
I would also add a Powerline , I had a Nova and this gives a big uplift
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I have B&W 707 S3
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I think ( but you can only judge by listening ) that you won’t be disappointed.
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It’s important to note that the Star is a CD ripper. It can certainly play CDs directly but that is not its main intention. It’s got a CD-ROM drive that spins up fast even when you “play” CDs. This may be very audible during playback.
If playing the physical discs instead of the rips is what you want I would not recommend it.
I have a Star, bought because it had a CD player over the Atom. I think it sounds very good and I don’t use it as a ripper. Absolutely quiet in operation. Makes a bit of noise loading and unloading a disk but otherwise silent. Would say it is a bit painful having to use the remote to eject the disc but a minor issue. I did connect an old Marantz KI signature player once to see how it compared but I preferred the one in the Star
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That’s a bit harsh. You could have said that there might be better options out there, but many will have bought a Uniti because they wanted an all-in-one. The CD player is absolutely fine in my experience.
Or one could argue it’s quite bizarre that the one feature which requires you to physically approach the device isn’t controllable from the device itself, you can’t even select the input.
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That was my experience. Harsh or not. When I played discs it started spinning like crazy. But I mostly used it to rip. YMMV.
That’s really interesting as I don’t think many have gone from Atom to Star, mainly Atom to Nova or other.
I got an early Atom before Star or Nova were available - Atom had an early hardware fault so instead of replacing I demoed an Atom vs newly released Nova and there was a huge benefit to Nova. I’ve often wondered if I should have tried the Star, though it may not have been stocked/available to demo.
You can eject the disk by pushing the play button for a few seconds!
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Thanks. That is a new one on me and makes life easier. I do think the CD player sounds great so am pleased to have it.
I didn’t, we just auditioned all three. Hence two sets of speakers (we were buying speakers at the same time).
Same here, I don’t use it very often, more of a streaming guy, but it’s nice to have.
The cd player in Star is very nice. For example I found that the new Peter Gabriel album sound much better when played from a cd disc than from Tidal (also played via Star).
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It’s great 
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That might very well be different masters, it’s impossible to compare like that.
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Um, not quite sure what you mean here. You use the select button on the unit to select sources and hold the play/pause button for a few seconds to eject the CD. It also plays quiet.
From the amount of comments on this I probably got that one wrong. Perhaps it was an unbalanced CD or an earlier firmware or whatnot. I only really played from rips so my comment earlier in the thread should be ignored.
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Also bear in mind that ripping spins the disc at (potentially) much higher speeds than simply playing (which will spin at 1x), and higher speeds are noisier. Even then, I find the amount of noise varies quite a lot between discs, some are just noisier than others (probably something to do with slight variations in the discs’ dimensions).