Launching a new hi-fi brand just now may seem a trifle rash, but Saxon isn't entirely a newcomer, as it's allied to an established brand, Talk Electronics. Saxon's products are intended to sit beneath Talk's own, and among them this is the most basic CD player.
Basic it may be, but it's finished nicely enough with admirably clear labelling. The front panel itself is a decent chunk of aluminium, the rest of the case being the usual thin sheet-steel tray and aluminium lid. Inside is a Philips CD mechanism, flanked by a pair of neat and tidy circuit boards.
On the left is the power supply, using an encapsulated (apparently toroidal) mains transformer and the usual smoothing and regulation components, with the audio board on the right, bearing a Wolfson DAC as well as a sample-rate converter chip.
Saxon doesn't mention upsampling, and it's possible this is just functioning as a jitter-reducing buffer, a perfectly legitimate way of performing that task. A pair of fairly upmarket op-amps aided by good-quality passive components handles analogue output.
Saxon has fitted no digital output to this player, though dearer models do have one. That's really the only obvious economy, though another omission raised our eyebrows - there's no 'pause' function, on the front panel or the remote.
We queried this with Saxon and were told this will be rectified in future players. We found the layout of the buttons a bit annoying: shouldn't 'stop' be next to 'play' and 'open' on the other side of the drawer? Never mind!
Sound quality
This player is clearly not entirely devoid of character, and as usually happens in such cases, opinions of the model hinged on the effect this has on various types of music, and how each listener perceived the result. Its character is lively - 'fast', even - and seemed especially pronounced in the solo piano track.
Piano is notably tricky to record and reproduce, and of course one instrument varies from another, but in this case one listener liked the result a lot, another found it a little overexcited and even messy, and the third spotted the difference, but didn't express a preference either way.
