It's not easy to do something really new with CD replay, especially at a sensible price, but Cambridge seems to have achieved it with the 840C.

The big feature here is 384kHz upsampling. Usually upsampling is to a more modest frequency, generally 96kHz or 192kHz, but Cambridge's implementation of 384kHz is a first outside the rather esoteric reaches of the high-end stratosphere.

The company has worked closely with Swiss digital signal processing specialist Anagram Technologies. Anagram's approach to upsampling is different from the norm but the differences are in details, which are arcane in the extreme unless you're a DSP expert - basically it does the usual upsampling thing and simplifies analogue filtering requirements while making the most of 16-bit/44.1kHz audio.

Not wanting to waste all this high performance digital stuff, Cambridge also offers two digital inputs so that the 840C can function as a DAC, too, applying the upsampling benefits to any other digital source you may have around the place.

What with digital outputs (no, they don't function at 384kHz, and you couldn't find anything compatible to connect them to if they did!), remote control in/out sockets, RS232 for firmware updating and balanced audio outputs in addition to phono sockets, this unit has a particularly busy back panel.

The front is more modest, with buttons for essential functions and a comprehensive display to show what's going on.

It's surely significant that our 'blind' listening panel greeted this player with an almost complete absence of superlatives but still had almost entirely positive things to say. Superlatives are nice and make good advertising copy, but in relatively quick-fire listening (which, of necessity, our panel sessions are) can sometimes be indicative of an imbalance in performance.

But the feeling here was that everything is very neatly slotted into place and in a sense the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In a single word, the sound is satisfying. It makes sense of the musical structure and contains all the necessary elements but it never assigns its own sense of priority to them.