> devices, all over-engineered and gold plated, while the XLR balanced analogue audio and co-axial digital audio sockets are held in place by professional-style mounting plates. Such build quality doesn't come cheap and this stacks on the pounds, both Sterling and avoirdupois; there are many transistor power amps that are smaller and lighter than this player. Apart from the nice-but-unexceptional remote control, this is one of the very few products that would satisfy the person who just placed an order for a pair of Purdey shotguns.
Over-engineering and a build quality to die for doesn't automatically produce a CD player that can pass musical muster. In fact, it can be a real albatross around the neck of the audiophile, as a product that sounds dreadful but has a wonderful build quality is likely to go on forever. Fortunately, the CDP-777 isn't just good, it is a truly transforming player. It makes your CDs sound like you always secretly wished they did. It doesn't make them analogue-sounding, so it isn't a wannabe record player. Nor does it make them sound like the very best digital audio. It just makes CDs sound like music, removing not just the player from the sound, but the carrier and the studio too. We audiophiles instinctually liken such rare qualities to the best in vinyl because

only a handful of CD players get this close to the music.
It takes CD listenablility to new levels. You could sit in front of this CD player, feeding it discs for days on end without the least listener fatigue. But it's not soporific; music will excite you and drive you to play the next disc, exploring deeper and deeper into your music collection. All those fads that languish in your collection begin to sound interesting again; the brief fetish for baroque harpsichord twiddling, that oh-so-brief dalliance with Mexican Techno-Folk-Punk, the month you bought nothing but novelty records and cheesy listening... they all come out to play with the CDP-777. And, when you play them, you remember why you bought the disc in the first place.
This player takes a refreshingly non-interventionist approach to music, even if some may have a knee-jerk criticism of the K2 process as adding an unnecessary level of extra processing between disc and listener. Forget what the CDP-777 is doing on a technical level, however, and listen to what it does to the music. It does practically nothing; no addition of fizz, tizz, glare or blare, no lengthening, widening or foreshortening of the image, no enhancements or deletions to the detail on the disc. Nothing, zip, nada. It just gets on with playing what's on the disc as accurately as possible,

and in the process demonstrates just how few players even attempt the same goal. It joins the very select handful of CD players that challenge your conception of what CD is all about. It's clear that, although from a technical standing the CDP-777 is extremely competent in its own right. The player has been built from the ground up with the sophisticated ear of a musician and an instrument maker instead of the engineer. As a consequence, this makes the vast majority of CD players sound like an exercise in electronics first, a musical reproducer second. Instead, you get the impression that the CDP-777 is made by people who actually enjoy listening to all kinds of music with a real passion and it pushes the right and proper musical sound to the fore.
What you are left with is an uncanny naturalness (uncanny because any CD player is essentially a small music computer, and this sounds nothing like computing at work) and a sense of scale that fits any type of music at any volume level. You can play whatever you want at any level and you get plenty from it. This sometimes appears to go against the grain. Playing The White Stripes at polite background levels and Damien Rice at thrash volumes seems somehow wrong. Yet, the faithful >