Quote Originally Posted by Pigmy Pony View Post
How would you say the Revox sounds and operates compared to modern players Barry? Are they reliable? Are the parts readily available? I would imagine back when it was made there wasn't much variation in the way they worked. Either Sony- or Philips-based, though I stand to be corrected.
The C221 uses a Philips CDM-4/19 swing-arm laser disc mechanism. Not surprising that a Swiss/German company would use a disc reader made by another European manufacturer.

The performance of the C221 was very good, but it did have a number of quirks when it came to use in a domestic setting:
(a) as intended for broadcast use, it will only play the track selected and no other.
(b) to override this setting, some of the unwanted features need to be switched off.
(c) to maintain the removed features setting configuration, the player has to be kept switched on, and to do this a CD disc has to be left in the drawer.
Finally the player is fussy about the discs it plays: it can get upset with CD-R discs.

One of the reasons I chose it, despite its quirks, was it was a professional studio player and hence expected to be reliable, and it had XLR balanced outputs.

I changed it to a Mark Levinson ML390 as it was an ambition of mine to have a complete Levinson system (apart from the speakers), and I was starling to tire of the above listed quirks with the C221.