I heard the Nagra in a friend's system. While we, a group of three listeners, spent a whole afternoon listening to it, we did not do critical comparisons with a lot of other machines. We did compare it to a Naim CD555 player. All of us agreed that the Nagra was a very good sounding player. All of us preferred the CD555, but, there is a VERY substantial difference in price in favor of the Nagra. I thought that the Nagra was quite close to the CD555, except in the sense of weight and "scale," particularly large orchestral and choral pieces. The Nagra is lighter in weight. We were all impressed with the Nagra (two of us, myself included, own a CD555).
There were some operational quirks with the Nagra and its remote control. I can recall only one of these quirks, but, I do recall finding several minor annoyances. The one I recall is that if you load the machine and use its controls to start play, then the remote is totally disabled (this is a temporary annoyance because I am sure an owner will get used to doing everything through the remote).
I personally like the idea of having both the Nagra linestage and CDP. The combination would look good (and take up little space), and probably sound very good together (most manufacturers attain some synergy when their components are used together).
