It's also important to remember that even in an age of seemingly infallible technology and "digital perfection," choosing a high-quality CD player is first and foremost a choice made by the ears. Technical specifications are only one part of the story; not all players are created equal.

It may surprise you that some systems don't pass even the most basic test of musicality, despite their high prices and supposedly optimized spec sheets. Rhythm and melody are the two essential parts of that test. In the maze of hardware that converts the zeroes and ones on your CD into analog signals that can be routed to the amplifier, some players fail to preserve an accurate and steady rhythm, or end up slicing the notes into bits. Others sometimes disrupt nuances in the melody by influencing the pitch.

And where do the musicians figure in all this? Obviously it's not up to the CD player to turn bad performances into masterpieces. But it should do justice to what the musicians actually played. And the composer's honour is also at stake! It would be a shame to criticize a piece for faults not its own, or to lose the complex design of a composition through poor reproduction.

Music and sound are tested in different ways. Thus, a dedicated music-lover might adore recordings that an audiophile considers a disaster. Recording the complex structures of music with fidelity is a serious challenge, and the technical specs listed in the manual won't tell you the most fundamental thing: whether or not the system reproduces music faithfully. If the musicians' performance seems lifeless, it may not be their playing which is at fault but the system designed to reproduce it. If, on the other hand, you can hear and follow each instrument (or group) with ease, and the music strikes you as more vibrant, then you've probably found yourself a reliable system.

Despite their high price tags, some CD players are poorly designed and will not read the data on your CD properly. Your impression of the musicians' performance will suffer as a result. But how can we check the quality of our system? Three reviewers from La Scena Musicale (with three different tastes in music) got together at the Audio Club boutique to give it a try. In this corner, wearing the red trunks: Wah Keung Chan, Réjean Beaucage and Marc Chénard. Their opponents: CD players #1 and #2. (Brand names have been changed to protect the innocent.) These players were connected to the same amplifier and the same set of speakers. Réjean Beaucage gives us the blow-by-blow description: "We met up at the Audio Club on January 16th for a comparative listening of four different CDs, two of them classical and two of them pop. At first we thought Beethoven's Sonata for Cello and Piano (played by Mstislav Rostropovitch and Sviatoslav Richter) sounded very good in player #1, but player #2 was the clear winner. The sound was much, much deeper and Rostropovitch's playing seemed a lot more intense than before. We could hear all the details of sound distinctly, with none of the fat blurriness of #1. Player #2 had warmer textures and nice stereo spatialization that allowed us to hear even the smallest differences between the musicians. And we're talking about instrumentalists whose playing differs only by milliseconds. These minute varieties were obscured by player #1. I was actually quite astonished to find such a huge difference in performance between two high-end machines. The first was priced at $1000; the second at a whopping $10,000."

Well, there you have it. Our critics can confirm that not all CD players are created equal, and that the same CD can produce two quite different opinions if the reviewers aren't using the same machine. There's no ISO 9000 for standardizing audio components, but maybe that's for the best. You'll just have to keep your ears tuned! p