Just in case you've been out of the hi-fi scene for a few years and missed it, the story with Audiolab is that it was a very successful amplifier brand, taken over and turned into TAG McLaren Audio, which, sadly, failed and sank.

The Audiolab brand was salvaged from the wreckage, though, and lives on with a product range that is (externally at least) similar to those of old. This CD player sits alongside an integrated amplifier, preamp, stereo and mono power amps, home cinema products and even loudspeakers that hark back to earlier Audiolab and TAG McLaren products.

In its literature, Audiolab (redux) comments that amplifiers of today are similar to those of a decade ago while CD players have changed significantly. Indeed, it's certainly true that new digital-to-analogue (DAC) chips and generally higher levels of integration made designing high-quality digital audio devices easier.

A pretty good hint at that can be got by looking under the lid of this neatly presented player, for the audio board is very modest, bearing a recent DAC from Cirrus Logic, analogue filtering and buffering components, power supply regulation and a few bits associated with digital output (on both phono and BNC connectors plus Toslink), all in an area of around 65cm2.

The reduction in area from a much larger equivalent board in older products is mostly down to the use of miniature surface-mounted electronic components. The main sound production blocks are still conceptually similar to those of 20 years ago: the filtering is done partly by oversampling and partly by analogue filters and the analogue stages in particular have changed very little in layout.

The biggest change is in the internals of the DAC, where modern design techniques allow considerably higher performance with respect to such features as low and high-level distortion and jitter than were common in early players.

One interesting feature of the DAC used here is that it has two filter settings available, 'slow' and 'fast' attenuation types with the former allowing more ultrasonic distortion through. Audiolab has taken the opportunity to offer both of these to the user of the 8000CD.

Audible difference

Most people who have experimented with filter selection will agree that the differences between them can often be quite significantly audible, but strictly speaking, the slower roll-off types are less accurate.