Pioneer used to be a major player in the budget and mid-market with some scorching amplifiers, like the A400, and some equally impressive disc spinners with distinctive stable platter transports.

Somewhere in the late nineties, however, the company was diverted by home cinema (not surprising given its early start in the plasma market) and it appeared to lose interest in two-channel audio. Last year it changed all that with an SACD player and two nicely built amplifiers. One of which, the A-A9, turned out to be quite a sonic star as well.

And now Pioneer introduce the similarly priced PD-D9, by far the industry giant's best ever audio player with high attention to detail and quality of build. Rather than placing an attractive-looking facia in front of a pressed steel case, Pioneer has created a triple layer chassis for the D9 with top and side panels in aluminium and 'rigid underbase construction'.

The front panel has the same two-piece styling (as the A-A9) and a badge to indicate that its sound has been tuned at the famous AIR studios. Pioneer UK product managers used to lend their ears for this purpose, but following a tie up with George Martin's converted church, the job is now handled by people who really know what they are listening for.

Inside the PD-D9 you will find twin Wolfson DACs: the same digital-to-analogue converter that EAR/Yoshino uses in its £2,700 Acute CD player. As the Pioneer is both a CD and SACD player, it has a version of this chip that avoids turning the DSD bit-stream into CD-style PCM before conversion.

The majority of affordable SACD players (and even some luxury models) compromise results with the high resolution format by converting it digitally prior to DA conversion. Essentially, what Pioneer has done is kept the signal path for SACD as straightforward as it is for CD.

The Wolfson converter upsamples CD's 16/44.1 data rate to 24/192 and you have the option of applying Pioneer's Legato Link processing to the signal. For maximum sonic bliss, one is encouraged to press the 'pure audio' mode button, this actually shuts down the digital output and defeats the backlit LCD, while illuminating a red LED on the front panel.