The days are long gone when a 'Made in China' badge implied something flaky, but even by 2006 standards, this is an impressive bit of machinery.

For a start, its considerable weight suggests care has been taken with assembly, and while the very thick front panel is arguably more to do with cosmetics than sound, the construction should do no harm when it comes to suppressing mechanical vibrations in the player. The way it's all designed, with flat panels screwed to substantial side pieces, is very nicely done.

That theme continues inside the player, with a substantial metal case enclosing the transport. Removing the lid of this case reveals that the transport itself (basically a Philips model) has been beefed up with a metal bridge piece. Also, factor in the large and well made circuit board, which is glued into place at its edges, and it becomes apparent that physical construction is simply first class.

Bodywork apart, the player's particular selling point is its use of valves in the audio output. Elsewhere, the circuitry uses a familiar DAC chip from Burr-Brown followed by a familiar selection of op-amps, and then suddenly there's a valve, or rather (since the two bottles are in fact both double triodes) a pair of them.

Both sections are connected in parallel as a cathode follower, with the valve getting caned pretty hard in terms of power dissipation - over 2.5W per envelope.

In case valves aren't enough to whet your appetite, the CD-T80 also offers digital volume control and switchable upsampling to 96kHz, both accessed exclusively from the remote.

Sound quality

There's evidence from our panel's listening notes that they each tried hard to like this player but failed in the end to warm to it fully. Something about its sound just kept getting in the way of the music. How else to explain the frequent appearance of favourable comments about specifics - "nice tone on strings", "more detailed" and so on - followed a line or two later by words to the effect that there wasn't much sense of emotional connection?

It seems to tick all the boxes yet fail to fill in the big picture. All the frequency range is clearly there, with the bass consistently found full if occasionally a little uncontrolled.