I visited Essential Audio for a demonstration of the AMR units, so as a potential customer I can speak for the sound of the CD player. It really was everything you would want in sound - detailed, smooth, deep. Don't want to get out my dictionary of audiophile terms, but it was very nice - recognizing that it was put through extremely high end amplification and speakers. Brian, you can fill in the accompanying equipment.
Other highlights included changing the 6 different sampling modes, allowing for optimizing the experience for different recordings, and the outstanding performance of the USB DAC port. On the spot, I ripped a cd to my laptop, attached a USB cable and it played through at a quality as good as you could hope. The DAC was not quite the same as using the CD-77's own transport, but not far off (using a lossless file).
To the issues: The amplifier never worked. There is an ambitious feature to protect the machine from voltages out of range. That feature was being over-protective and would not let the amp boot up (Srajan's review of the cd player in 6moons talks about this issue as well, although he got it working by using UK voltage).
The cd player had issues recognizing new discs. The sliding door to the transport had to be opened and closed several times and sometimes the cd player had to be rebooted in order to recognize a new disc. It also skipped on several tracks on different CD's.
Still, the promise of these machines has me on the fence. I consider these issues to be associated with well traveled, pre-production units that need to get the updates that will be in the production units.
I was impressed with Brian's ability to get Thorsten on the phone to troubleshoot (at an hour that would have been very late UK time), but I wish I would have been notified of the issues prior to traveling out of state for the demo.
Those are the highlights and lowlights - AMR's stuff will be great I think. How quickly they will be great is the question that has me on the fence.
