We love to give practical buying advice on the latest gadgets here at TechRadar. But sometimes what we love even more is to indulge in the most ridiculous, high-end, cutting-edge, luxurious tech on the planet. That's what we bring you in these Money No Object columns – you can read the whole series here.
Look, it's not every day you get to listen to the all-new, just-unveiled elite Rotel Michi $6,999 / £5,500 CD player and transport DAC – and anyone who knows me knows I'm a sucker for the now seemingly-humble compact disc.
Rotel's Chief Technology Officer, Darren Orth, tells me: "I thought I might outlast CDs; not at all. I stand here because I was wrong." And if Rotel's going to make a CD player, the company's flagship Michi range is proof that it's going to do it very, very well indeed.
What you're look at is the Michi Q5 Transport DAC. Correct, it doesn't actually have 'CD player' in the name. Why not? In fact why not just make a great CD player, without adding truly high-resolution conversion and all the ports to make it a digital music hub, in a box whose chief purpose is to play something at 44.1kHz / 16bit?
Orth laughs at the question: "To make it just a CD player would be disrespectful to the DAC; the DAC's just too good here."
The digital-to-analog-converter he's talking about is the ESS ES9028PRO DAC, an eight-channel beast – that's four channels to each of the left and right audio signal paths.
Orth's approach with the team when creating this product becomes clear: find an incredible laser, select a superb DAC, create a bespoke housing for it all. The Michi Q5 Transport DAC includes a precision optical laser pickup – Orth describes finding the perfect laser as a "tremendous amount of work" – but the carbon fiber and CNC-machined aluminum chassis housing it is all Rotel-made.
'I'm not sure we could put a drawer on a Michi product' – Darren Orth
Shall we talk craftsmanship and design? The Q5's top-loading CD mechanism is easily my favorite aspect of this product. It feels expensive (it is) because it's so brutalist and heavy; so far removed from those six-disc changers I loved in the noughties. It is mounted on a custom floating spring assembly, to reduce unwanted vibrations and provide a stable platform for flawless CD playback.
Why not a slot-loader or tray? "Slot loading is noisy. Trays? Trays are better, but there's still the motor noise," Orth says, adding, "I'm just not sure we could put a drawer on a Michi product".
Indeed, it is a sleek and beautiful thing – it's big for a DAC/CD player and even for a digital hub to hook up devices such as a network player, which it certainly can do – although it doesn't have built-in streaming services; Rotel is "treading carefully" there.
The design is so square and singular, you might wonder what it did if you didn't clock the circular top plate. The Michi Q5 Transport DAC's footprint could have been a third of the size, Orth tells us, but the team wanted the space, to isolate sensitive electronic circuits from physical disturbances. For me, it's real-estate well-used.
Also, while there's a full-color TFT display to showcase your CD album artwork (you can dim it or turn it off, don't worry), there's no touchscreen. Instead, there's a weighty remote, or the physical buttons hidden along the bottom edge of the front panel.
It creates an undeniably chic, mysterious aesthetic and one that one member of our group laughs is "sure to confuse partners". Why no touch capacitive buttons? You've guessed it – noise. Know this: it's all about sound quality and noise reduction with Rotel.
Rotel has fitted the Q5 with both XLR and RCA analog outputs, but for extra flexibility, it can also deliver CD audio to both coaxial and optical outputs to act as a CD Transport. Beyond the superior stuff it can do with your CD collection, the Michi Q5 is a versatile digital music hub.
Its audio inputs include PC-USB (up to 32-bit / 384kHz) with MQA and DSD 4X support, plus 24-bit / 192kHz coaxial and optical inputs. This makes it compatible with all your favorite digital sources, and/or as an ultra-high-performance DAC for your entire audio system.
Typical CD resolution is the absolute base-level starting-point for hi-res audio, where 24bit / 96kHz and 24bit / 192kHz are much more common for those who really care about musical fidelity, so it's almost divisive to see a CD player in this hi-res giant of a product, albeit a gorgeous one. So, surely it can play my mom's wonderful SACDs, the 1-bit format that can stream data at an uncompressed rate of 5.6Mbps, four times higher than the rate for Red Book CD stereo audio? No. "Adding SACD support really limited our choice of laser, the mechanism and decoder – and we found them all too noisy," Orth tells me.
The sound of Rotel: engaging, real, and never too much
How does it sound? We listen to Leonard Cohen, Muddy Waters, Lady Blackbird, Daft Punk and more, using Rotel's own integrated amp and Bowers & Wilkins 800 Signature Series speakers. The moment of anticipation after loading a CD still gets me, but the neutrality, realism and reverence the Q5 gave to higher-resolution locally stored music was a delight.
Orth tells me, "When the guys fine-tune, you can often add too much – make it too enthusiastic; too exciting. In the tuning process, it's important not to cross that line. Sometimes we go back, after hours of tuning, and we realize we had it perfect three hours ago."
I agree; what you're getting here is Get Lucky as I've rarely heard it; fun, agile, balanced, entertaining, but as real-sounding as I've heard aside from having an act perform in front of me. Despite all of its higher-res credentials, I think I'd still stick to CDs.
With hi-res audio now squirrelled into even the tiniest dongle DACs to hook up to your smartphone, you might think CDs are falling out of favor. I disagree – and anyway it's not true; despite the format turning 40 in 2022 (yes, I remember its arrival and yes, I now feel archaic), Rotel says it sells more CD players now than ever.
My 2011 Mazda has a CD player fitted in the dash and I adore it. I'm currently working my way through all of Dylan's back catalog (thank you, mom) but believe me, if I had the Michi Q5 Transport DAC in my house, you'd find me right beside it, carefully lifting that heavy top-loader, loading the next shiny disc and hitting 'play'. So, if anyone's got a few thousand spare they want to see go to a good home, let me know…
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