I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand, my office system driven by a Yamaha CDX-496 has run for years and years. A best guess is that this budget Yamaha CD player has at least 10,000 hours use. Other than occasional dust on the lens, faultless. My Meridian 602, state-of-the-art years ago, would had the mechanism broken, needed to be scrapped. A bit strong for a £1.5k machine. No fault of Meridian though. No spares.

It seems to me that regardless of price it's probable that the mechanism in upmarket machines are not designed for longevity, and meanwhile the mechanism makers don’t offer repair facilities. This in turn means, to my way of thinking, that the mechanism makers (who I guess look only at production quantities and return on investment rather than reputation nor customer loyalty) see their products as "throw away.”

The mechanism makers are in the main utterly distanced from customer annoyance. If your (say) Musical Fidelity or (say) Naim machine becomes inoperable, blame will surely be directed at those high-profile makers rather than the distant suppliers of the mechanism. This is not, as far as I am aware, a situation reflected in other sophisticated purchases such as DSLR cameras, state-of-the-art wrist watches and so on.

As for me at Stereonow, I no longer sell digital replay sources. Not because of unreliability – because my North Star 192 system and North Star Sapphire have been utterly reliable. Rather because I think the writing is on the wall for CD replay.

It’s likely that I’ll be replacing my demo units with a Cambridge Audio Azur 840C (bought at RRP as Richer Sounds have the exclusive on this) and as a backup, a heavy duty TEAC ex-studio transport into a Benchmark DAC-1 pre. Thus Stereonow is, and it’s a strange sensation for me, now representing only speakers, amplification and vinyl. Well well.

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