I mulled over the choice between the Cambridge Audio 540C and NAD C521BEE for a long time. The NAD was more affordable, but in the end I couldn't get over its plastic construction. It just felt a little cheesy to me, especially the remote control, which resembles one of those nubby all-in-one VCR/cable box units. The Cambridge Audio Azur is tons more solid and classy looking, with all aluminum paneling and a heavy remote control. So, yes, I chose on aesthetics, but luckily the sound hasn't let me down. Very detailed and rich, though it does tend to burn in a touch more metallic than the NAD.

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NAD C521BEE Philips

Nice before play-in: that gives you about one good week.

Ugly, aggressive top, recesed midrange, boomy bass. Idiotic design flaws in every area. Over-priced.

I hope this can replace my earlier, premature positive review. My initial response to the 540C was a good one. As it played in, the sound became grotesque, with a painfully metallic, aggressive top, a sucked-out midrange, and an unnaturally over-present bass. The transformer hummed "like an old fridge" as one critic put it; the remote is huge, unwieldy, slow to react, and too narrowly focused; the 540C can only be shut down in a specific order or else the motor keeps spinning. I went through three units before finally giving up and getting credit. The CA 640C is similar, just a bit cleaner sounding, though the aggressive top is also exhausting. I ended with the wonderfully musical, better-built, cheaper NAD C521BEE.

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NAD 521BEE (lovely) Harman Kardon HD-710 (excellent) Harman Kardon HD-720 (avoid) Teac 1250 (avoid even more cautiously) NAD 521i (unimpressive) Toshiba SD-1800 (surpisingly good)

A pretty perfect sound: focused, clean, involving, sweet, with extraordinary imaging and detail but no harshness. It will apparently read CDs, CDRs, CDRWS, unlike the previous Cambridge Audio line.

[1] The remote is just too big. [2] The power-indicator LED is blindingly bright, while the display is a little too muted. [3] The CD drawer is a bit fast and aggressive. [2] and [3] seem to vary from unit to unit.

After almost a year of trying to replace a sweet old Philips/Magnavox single-CD player that finally quit after 15 years, the Cambridge Audio Azur 540C is a relief. Decent dedicated single-CD players are very hard to find. There have been a number of raves about the more-expensive 640C in the British press, so I took one home and auditioned it. And really, the British like everything made in the UK, so it's hard to use their reviews as a guide. To my ear, the 640C is over the top in detail compared with real music. The 540C was also well-received, but without the wild enthusiasm that greeted the 640C. Nevertheless, it is a more accurate performer: great detail, excellent imaging, controlled bass, but also a feeling of repose as well as excitement, closely reproducing the contours of the music without exaggeration. While the 540C gives the listener the best seats in the house, the 640C puts one on stage with the performers, which is really too close. The 640C is very exciting, but ultimately a bit tiring--at least with my system. The 540C seems the best balance of sonic ingredients. I should mention that the demo 540C I took home to audition had a little hardness in the top register--though the 640C I tried was even more pronounced in this regard. My new 540C, which seems to have played in rather quickly, has not a trace of hardness, so there is evidently some unit-to-unit variation. On that subject, the demo CD drawer opened and closed in a much less aggressive fashion, and the power-indicator LED wasn't as intense (you may find yourself wanting to cover it). The remote is functionally very flexible, but enormous, heavy, and a little unwieldy.

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Harman Kardon HD-710 (ca. 1995-8)--a beautiful player, but the Cambridge 540C has finally superseded it in quality for me. Harman Kardon HD-720 (ca. 1998-2000)--looked like a plasticized version of the HD-710 and sounded good, but the all-soft-plastic transport and hair-thin, virtually unshielded wiring caused a complete melt-down after four months; despite the sound, it was junk. With idiotic compromises like this, no wonder HK is hard to find. Toshiba SD-1800 DVD player (ca. 2002)--optimized for DVDs so it is tricky to operate as a CD player, but it has a decent, sweet sound; oddly, it has a 24-bit/192 kHz DAC (though not the quality of the ones in the Cambridge Audio players). It's also the sort of unit that lives forever. Teac CD-P1250--sweet sound, but self-destructed quickly; plastic junk. NAD 521i--built like a tank but sounded antiseptic and nasal, despite all the typical British hype around NAD. Cambridge Audio 300SE--beautiful sound, but so picky about the CDs it would play as to make it useless. Philips/Magnavox CDB-482--a sweet-sounding 1-beam laser dinosaur with nearly no error correction, but it did last for 15 years.