Rotel RCD-975 CD-player

High sound quality at an affordable price is a "family feature" of all audio equipment from the Japanese company Rotel, so its products are often unofficially classified as "affordable High End". And this is not surprising, since the design principles of audio equipment from the developers of Rotel, which they called the "balanced design concept", largely coincide with the ideology of creating High End equipment. So, for example, the ROTEL toroidal transformer with low stray fields is used in the RCD-975 and, in addition, separate power supplies for the analog and digital parts of the player circuit. The highest demands are placed on the electronic components installed in the analog audio signal paths, which at Rotel have been rigorously selected for natural sound through numerous auditions. The Rotel RCD-975 has gone to great lengths to create a high-linear, high-dynamic-range output amplifier that effectively decouples the player's output from the rest of the circuitry, virtually eliminating interconnect cable capacitance from affecting sound quality. This is a big advantage of the Rotel RCD-975, as today's high quality interconnects can cost hundreds of dollars. So the savings from buying the RCD-975 can be quite tangible. In choosing the turntable's transport mechanism, Rotel showed a healthy conservatism, choosing the time-tested Philips CMD-9 single-beam transport with a glass lens in the optical head of the laser pickup, which ensures reliable data reading from the CD. The Rotel RCD-975's digital-to-analogue conversion electronic circuit uses 4 Philips TDA1305 multi-bit DACs connected in pairs in each channel according to a differential circuit. With a differential circuit, the inclusion of a DAC compared to the usual inclusion of a Bitstream type DAC achieves a significant reduction in conversion noise. The RCD-975's Multiplebit Biatstream Continuos Calibration DAC, combined with a 20-bit, 16x oversampling digital filter, gives Rotel the exceptional sound quality of the RCD-975, according to Rotel. The Bitstream hybrid multi-bit DAC, which performs single-bit conversion of digital data, previously divided into blocks of 5 bits by a special scheme, combines the advantages of both single-bit DACs (high linearity and low distortion of low-level signals) and multi-bit DACs (high signal-to-noise ratio ).

The design of the Rotel RDC-975 player is strict and concise. On the rear wall there are only two gold-plated analog audio output connectors and a coaxial digital output connector. The low height of the player's body gives it an elegant appearance.

Rotel sounds masterfully: uninhibited and free, almost visibly drawing an impressive soundscape. From the first minutes of listening, you immediately feel the extraordinary level of this device. Particularly admired are the ultra-high resolution and detailed sound at high frequencies and the excellent reproduction of the volume of the sound picture. Here Rotel showed a truly exemplary sound We emphasize that the RCD-975 equally confidently reproduces both light orchestrations and serious classical music. The sound is remarkably tonally balanced: against the background of a powerful bass, mids are very clearly and legibly served with exceptionally transparent highs. And when it came to jazz, then here Rotel played out in earnest, giving out very incendiary melodies and rhythms. At the same time, his sound did not suffer from excessive academicism, skillfully balancing on the golden mean between excessive brightness and spectacular sound of simple Hi-Fi components and excessive analyticity and detachment of High End equipment. Fans of good and "correct", but at the same time bright sound, can be satisfied - Rotel RCD-975 will not deceive their expectations.