Astin Trew is still a pretty new name on the hi-fi scene, though the company's products are starting to enter the general consciousness. Designed in the UK, they are built in China and as a result offer the typically generous parts and build quality of their kind.

The AT3000 is built into a case constructed largely from aluminium channel sections, suitably cut and bolted together. That may sound industrial, but it's all very tastefully done. Inside, the workings are based on a CD-Audio mechanism surrounded by neat circuit boards populated with almost entirely through-hole components of good quality.

Of those components, the most striking is a lone valve, which buffers the output. We wouldn't want to accuse Astin Trew of valve tokenism, but the audio signal has already been through plenty of op-amps (good ones) in the filtering stages of the circuit and it's hard to see what one valve will contribute apart from a little local colour.

In common with many current players, this one offers upsampling to 96kHz, switchable so that one can listen without it if preferred. It's a satisfyingly quick loader and has very low mechanical noise levels. You need the remote to search within a track, a pet hate in these parts, but otherwise operation is pleasant.

Our listening panel heard this player in upsampling mode, our logic being that most listeners will use it that way. Subsequent experience showed this to be a wise choice as upsampling added a considerable degree of refinement to the sound. All the same, it's a sound with a degree of character that doesn't suit all tastes.

That character makes itself felt principally in the midrange, not surprisingly affecting voices more obviously than most instruments, though the precise details of how it hits you may vary. One of our listeners described the sound as 'plasticky' and lacking body, although he was happy enough to concede that in some specific areas, including detail, the performance was highly satisfactory.

At the other extreme, one of his colleagues rather liked the player's subtle highlighting of the female voice in particular, finding that it added to the definition and clarity of presentation.