THE NBS UNIVERSAL CD PLAYER

The NBS Universal CD player is universal in a number of ways:

It can be operated from AC mains anywhere in the world without adjustment.

It delivers both balanced and unbalanced audio outputs capable of driving very long cables if necessary.

It will play almost all audio-only optical disc formats including CD, SACD, DVD-A and ISO9660 CDROM containing .mp3 files, although we definitely don't recommend .mp3 files for high quality.

The player is constructed in two sections of machined aluminum. The lower section contains full NBS power conditioning feeding a universal-input, power factor corrected power supply as well as a mains entrance connector and breaker/power switch. The upper section contains the disc drive, decoding and signal-processing circuits, DACs and output amplifiers. The local operating controls and track display are also in the upper unit.

The two units are separated physically to prevent any possibility of power supply interference to the operating section. However the units are not separable in the interest of avoiding unnecessary external interconnections. No fragile signals such as clocks or data are brought out of the box. Left and Right audio outputs are available balanced on gold-plated XL type connectors, or unbalanced on gold-plated RCA type connectors.
The balanced and unbalanced outputs may be used simultaneously.

A major technical feature of the unit is a deep-buffer time-base corrector with an ultra low phase-noise clock. This is effectively like transferring the data to a hard drive, but without the wait. Think of it as an electronic hard drive. This combined with special dual-differential DAC architecture reduces jitter to vanishingly low levels. This is complemented by proprietary servo-controlled I/V converters, low pass filters and output amplifiers.

The listening quality is quite extraordinary. You will hear an ease of presentation and a clarity of sound-stage seldom encountered in CD playback. If you have a big collection of CDs, this unit will allow you to rediscover what you have.