I listen to music almost all day long — as background while working or sitting at the computer like this — but changing CDs is such a bother that I often don’t even notice when a disc has finished playing. For that reason I’m always on the lookout for a good-sounding CD changer, and today, wandering into a HARD OFF, I found something rather unusual.
It’s the Nakamichi CDPlayer2, a 7-disc Music Bank-type CD changer. Made nearly fifteen years ago, at the tail end of the bubble era, the CDPlayer2 (¥100,000) was the centrepiece of Nakamichi’s CD player lineup at the time, sitting just below the high-end separates CD changer Nakamichi 1000mb (¥550,000 + ¥550,000) and the CDPlayer1 (¥250,000). ※ Below this model were the CDPlayer3 (¥80,000) and CDPlayer4 (¥50,000). Back when I used to haunt Akihabara as a teenager, the Nakamichi CD changer was always playing on the shop floor at Yamagiwa, and I always thought how much I wanted one — yet Nakamichi products were rarely discounted in those days, and for a student they were simply out of reach.
Bought a Nakamichi CDPlayer2 Second-Hand
Nakamichi was an audio manufacturer that even maintained its own small concert hall in-house, and its music-first philosophy set it apart from other domestic high-end audio makers. Sadly, the prolonged economic downturn forced the company into bankruptcy three years ago, and it now continues in a different form, offering after-sales service and selling car audio, all-in-one system components, and professional equipment. As it happens, my own car’s audio system — from the head unit right through to the speakers — is entirely Nakamichi.
The Nakamichi CDPlayer2 has a rather elegant, modernist late-1980s aesthetic — a soft, plain design quite unlike the angular, mechanical-looking equipment typical of that era. The succeeding model lineup, Nakamichi’s final range, was released in 1993, and reverted to a solid, angular design inspired by the legendary cassette deck the DRAGON. I remember being genuinely astonished at the time — I had assumed Nakamichi meant modern design, and the sudden change came as quite a shock.
Now, as for the sound of the Nakamichi CDPlayer2. True to the Nakamichi character, it is extraordinarily delicate and refined — a quiet, elegant tonal quality that is the very opposite of coarseness, well suited to classical music, and chamber music in particular. The distinctive way a high-speed, slender, clear tone extends smoothly upward into the upper registers, trailing off with a particular sense of reverberation, is a remarkably sensitive expression that makes Nakamichi’s high-end aspirations clearly felt even at this price level. And being a multi-bit DAC machine with a Burr-Brown chip, it reveals a range of tonal colours that a 1-bit DAC would struggle to reproduce.
This kind of delicate, high-end tonal character is a demanding one that puts the quality of the partnering equipment to the test, and it reminds me — to draw a comparison from overseas — of the similarly exacting direction of something like Mark Levinson by Red Rose Music. On a first listen, the bass registers are quite restrained, so those whose ears are drawn to quantity of sound rather than its sonority may find it difficult to appreciate what makes this player special. The Nakamichi CDPlayer2 is a CD player for savouring the dying away of resonances in a quiet room. Even at lower price points, Nakamichi consistently presents a dry, high-end sound, and when paired with mass-market equipment from other manufacturers, it seems likely to struggle to show its true worth — it is, in that sense, a sound that is acutely selective about its listener.
For me, the Nakamichi sound I had heard all those years ago at Yamagiwa came flooding back in the most literal sense, and I found myself lost in nostalgia for a while. Although it is technically a CD changer
, Nakamichi uses its patented 6+1 MusicBank mechanism, which virtually every model in the range employs, and there is no reason at all not to regard it as a standalone single-disc CD player in terms of sound quality. To slot Nakamichi into the “changer” category outright would frankly be rather unfair to it.
The same tendency is apparent in Nakamichi’s car audio as well — rather than an approachable, broadly likeable sound, it seems to be a sound suited to those in earnest pursuit of delicacy and transparency of tone. And yet, sitting with the Nakamichi CDPlayer2 for a while, a rather indulgent thought begins to take shape: having heard this sound, I find myself wanting an even higher-class CD player. What on earth is one to do…
April 06, 2005
Nakamichi CDPlayer2… It Was a Brief Acquaintance.
Having only just got hold of the Nakamichi CD changer CDPlayer2 yesterday and been thoroughly delighted with it, something seems to be wrong with the MusicBank mechanism. When I stock all seven discs and use it as background listening, it ejects the CD from the tray after each disc finishes playing. Sometimes it doesn’t eject properly and moves on to the next disc instead, and at first I thought — well, that’s an odd way for it to work — and simply pressed play again each time. But this morning it stopped dead in the middle of a disc without warning. When switching discs manually, sometimes the internal mechanism makes the proper exchange sound and changes correctly, and other times there’s a whirring noise, a brief pause, and then the tray comes out… ???
Thinking something was wrong, I phoned Nakamichi’s service department first thing in the morning, and they said, without hesitation: “That shouldn’t happen — it’s a fault.”
They also mentioned that replacement remote controls are no longer available for this or any other model in the range. Since this renders it useless as a changer, I had no choice but to return it to the HARD OFF where I bought it. This is actually the first time a second-hand piece of audio equipment from HARD OFF has turned out to be faulty. I suppose the problem only showed itself after some use, so they wouldn’t have noticed it either. There was also a CDPlayer2’s successor, the MB-2, available there, but not wanting to end up in the same situation again, I decided to give up on Nakamichi CD changers for the time being. I do wish I could get hold of the CEC CD changer CH-5000R I used to own… The search for a high-quality CD changer to use as background listening is back to square one.
Soundhouse [PR]
Auto Translated by CS4.6
