I think Naim focus now on streaming and anplification. They are partnered with Focal who make speakers.
It seems to me that Japanese brands such as Marantz, Accuphase , Luxman and Esoteric are at the forefront of CD player production.
They are all regarded as reliable and offer high specification products.
I have 2 Marantz CD players. One is 35 years old and works perfectly.
Japanese build things to last. Just like their cars.
I think their is a resurgence in vinyl and CDs. My daughter who is 20 specifically wants CDs. She enjoys the physical media. Some young guys at the record shop are all in to physical media also.
CDs keep selling, as does vinyl.
Some like the packaging and want to support the artists more than streaming doesâŚ
Never had a CD fail (due to cd ârotâ or anything along those lines)
I wish I had taken pictures of the ones Iâve seen but they were thrown away.
I myself will probably have degraded and failed long before my cd collection starts to! ⌠(Unfortunately)
If Naim cared about the cd as a source, then Iâm sure they could make a cd player again if they wanted to⌠Do the likes of Atoll, Luxman, Cyrus, Rega, Marantz, Accuphase, Burmester or Michi to name but a few not use mechs then, and I thought Naim felt theyâd taken the cd as far as they could anyway especially with what the Uniti Core was able to do!
To be clear, I NEVER said Naim donât care about any of the stuff youâve decided to rattle on aboutâŚ
CD was one of Naimâs historical strengths, like vinyl. So naturally they have abandoned it.
Considering Naim have always been a hifi âassemblerâ rather than manufacturer (designs using entirely COTS products), what exactly would they build a CD player with?
Considering they donât manufacture components and there are very few third party mechs available for OEM these days.
Bloody hope so. Preferably palm sized.
From AVCAT site :
â Currently, the D&M SACD/CD mechanism is the only mechanism sold to external parties in the world and is used by many manufacturers.
D&M has notified all manufacturers that production will end with orders received by the end of July 2024.
This will have a major impact on the audio industry, and is likely to affect models that currently use D&M mechanisms, such as
dCS
CH Precision
WADAX
METRONOME TECHNOLOGIE
GOLDMUND
Soulnote
McIntoshâ
Well, Naim did make the Solstice turntable so you never know. It would probably be expensive and limited in quantities, like the Solstice.
Its very strange Naim spend so much effort on Solstice and not follow it up with something less pricey. Waste of resources.
AccurateRip use a manufacturing id (dependent on when and where the CD was manufactured) and there are only a few rip-softwares that report to AccurateRip and update. So in these days of low CD-usage it is less reliable - please use it but it no longer is as reliable as 20 years ago.
Pioneer made drives for âvideophiles and audiophilesâ but it seems they recently have been discontinued, I donât know if there is a new model coming.
These were the blu-ray writers and there was even a premium model with audiophile components and low-noise power-supplies which was very expensive. These drives checks the actual disk and can refuse errors and give a quality rating of the disk quality. The drive firmware did all the error checking for you and would do all sort of tricks with laser angles/strength and read-speed to try and get an error-free read. And you can set it to refuse any disk where it canât get all the right bits, not allowing interpolation. The finer models used low-noise power-supplies etc. to be able to read through problematic disks.
Look for a drive with âPureRead+â (I think âPureRead 4+â is the latest). They came with a small utility (available as download) that can set the mode before you run your rip-software. I use one of the smaller portable models (BDR-XD08EMB-S) and modified the XLD-source for macOS to set the drive up and even get the quality-rating the drive gives any CD and refuse any disk that canât give an error-free result.
Let me add that I buy s/h CD:s and all have been o.k. Only a few have ever got lower quality rating and all could be read without errors.
Itâs not me using it, we ripped all our CD a few years ago!
Itâs vendors like Innuos who are building it into current products.
its a bit expensive, I think only Melco use those drives and they also build a very good enclosure to reduce vibrations.
They didnât. They worked with Clearaudio who both had significant input on design and handled the manufacturing for them.
Nope. Pioneer are completely out of the optical drive market. End of an era.
I had to replace a 10 year old Pioneer BDXL drive with a LG one (well Hitachi and Logitech all are using LG drives). I had an LG DVD drive 20 years ago and it was sh%%%%%t. And this new LG BR drive is exactly the same.
If you canât find it yourself I can give you a link to the CBeebies web site 
They didnât, this was made by Clearaudio on their behalf.
DGâŚ.