Classe Audio Introduces Touchscreen CD Player

Montreal, Canada–Aug. 2004–Canada’s Classe Audio, known around the world for its standard-setting components for high-end audio and home-theater systems, has introduced a new compact disc player as part of its exciting new Delta range. The CDP-100 joins seven other initial Delta-range intros (see accompanying releases) including five power amplifiers, a preamp, and an integrated amp, in the broadest and most significant line change in Classe’s 24-year history.

As the badge of its Delta-line membership the CDP-100 boasts the TFT color touchscreen display, elegantly integrated into its front panel, which is the hallmark of Classe’s new front-end components. This provides a quantum leap in ease of use, providing a user-interface unrivalled among audiophile designs today for direct, intuitive operation, and the dramatic appearance delivered by a fascia with just three hard-key buttons: Standby, Menu, and Load.

Of course, the CDP-100 also features the kind of CD audio design that has placed Classe players in the top tier the world around for well over a decade.

The CDP-100 begins with an ultra-stable, low-noise power supply and a professional-grade disc-transport/optical-pickup assembly integrated with Classe’s proprietary IMC (Isolated Master Clock) system; the combination ensures virtually perfect time-base stability, for jitter-free operation. The CDP-100 then exploits Classe’s PDXB Pure Differential Cross Balance digital-to-analog converter: multiple, high-accuracy differential delta-sigma converters in a fully balanced, complementary array that yields nearly immeasurable departure from linearity, idealized stereo separation, and a fully balanced audio output that begins right at the DAC section itself.

The CDP-100 employs high-performance 24-bit, 352kHz digital filter with oversampling and HDCD decoding capability. Equally important, this advanced oversampling and D/A subsystem empowers the use of a relatively mild, second-order analog filter with near-ideal time-domain and impulse behavior, and a rigorously auditioned, fully balanced, all-discrete output stage for musical purity, breadth, and dynamic precision that are rarely equaled from CD playback at any level.

The Classe CDP-100 Compact Disc Player is available in North America at a manufacturer’s suggested price of $3,500.