Cambridge Audio surely has the most technologically equipped player in its class. It's the only one to offer 384kHz upsampling - indeed, few players at any price offer such a feature.

Cambridge introduced this a year or so ago in the Azur 840C player, and cajoled it into the cheaper 740C thanks to a few small economies in the DAC department and the omission of balanced output.

We've stated before that upsampling is no kind of magic formula - but if you're going to do it, then the higher the better.

The possible pitfalls are the same whatever the chosen output frequency, and since part of the exercise is to facilitate near-perfect analogue filtering by assigning more of the total filtering task to digital circuits, one might as well follow that road as far as it goes.

The other significant part of the exercise is jitter reduction, but there are plenty of different approaches to tackling that.

Cambridge employs upsampling know-how from Anagram Technologies, a Swiss firm more often associated with upmarket pro audio.

The twin DACs are from Wolfson and are followed by analogue circuits made of good-quality parts, both active and passive. Ingeniously, the 740C adds digital inputs so its upsampling can add quality to other digital sources such as DAB/Freeview and MiniDisc.

After the upsampling, you have the choice of the internal DACs or the digital outputs - which can't handle 384kHz, as the S/PDIF interface doesn't support this. The player offers very quick loading of discs, and about the only feature we can't warm to is the display, a rather bland grey-on-grey affair.

For some reason, this player didn't entirely chime with the tastes and expectations of our listening panel. As always, its output level was matched to that of the other players in the group, but two listeners felt it was louder than the rest.

One even felt as if a 'loudness button' had been pressed somewhere, accentuating the top and bottom at the expense of the midrange. Later, during the classical selections, he withdrew or at least qualified that statement, but he still didn't entirely care for the player's presentation, finding it flat and uninspiring.