I am a DJ used to working with SL1200mkII's and I needed a CD player for the few times I'd actually play a CD.
I'm used to playing around with a Numark CDN-88, Denon DNS1000's, Pioneer CDJ1000's... and I just didn't have that much budget!

So out of the box we have the CD player, the manual, a standard (see cheap) RCA cable and a quick start patch cable. After taking the player out of the box and analysing it I conclude it is a simple layout with all the essential buttons. The overall look of the player is nothing more than ordinary and mundane. The CD loader is a tray instead if the more sophisticated slot load type found on most other table top CD players on the market.

After hooking it up I insert a CD. The loading time is slightly longer that higher priced players. The disc is loaded. First test with a regular store purchased CD. It plays well. The songs play almost instantly when I change the songs, and they play instantly after pausing or cueing. So far so good. The looping function works great! I didn't expect such tight loops from this player, I tip my hat to American Audio! It doesn't always do perfect loops but it compensates enough. The pitch is pretty tight as well and does not have a delay when changing the speed unlike some Pioneer decks which I have tried in the past. The pitch has selectable 4/8/16% varying rates. It is always deactivated upon power up so to change the pitch we have to unlock it. The pitch bend works smoothly as well. A little tap will give a light up or down kick, and keeping the finger on it will make it go to the max of the pitch range selected. The big jog wheel can also act as a pitch bend by giving it small nudges. Keep it turning fast clockwise results in a very high speed fast forward (sounds approx 100% pitch) and turning it fast counter clockwise results in a dead stop. Keep turning backwards slowly and the music plays really slow like manually turning a record slowly on a turntable. Letting go of the jog wheel brings the music back to normal speed. We can select 1 track playback or whole CD (default on power up) and the remain time has a very useful time graph at the bottom. Cueing is a breeze as well.
Next I tried an MP3 CD with songs of different bitrates and songs with constantly variable bitrates. It played flawlessly.

Here are the cons, and some of these are for my personal taste... here goes:
- CD player skips when discs have light scratches of light finger marks
- No rotary dial to select tracks (very usefull with MP3 CD with 150+ songs on it)
- Does not display CD text and/or ID3 tags (as expected from entry level model)
- No integrated effects (as expected from entry level model)
- A second cue memory would be appreciated
- CD tray instead of slot load mechanism
- No scratch function (as expected from entry level model, and I don't scratch)

Overall I am amazed at the performance of this machine and it is worth every penny I forked over to get it! ($200 CAD) It does what I want it to do and it does it better than many higher priced CD players I've played with from brands such as Vestax, Numark, Stanton and some old Denons. It is pretty tight and you can tell they put all the money inside the machine instead of giving a fancy faceplate with nice shiney lights. Consider this a very solid entry level performer and I recommend it to anyone who wants to start out, or for DJ's who don't need all the bells and whistles as it gets the job done flawlessly. Just watch out when playing scratched CD-R's!

- DJ Fuze, Montreal, CA