Impressed by the Cairn electronics setup in Beautiful Systems a few months ago (HFC 297), we thought that it would be a good idea to take a closer look at the heart of the system, the bizarrely named Fog 3.

Just to recap, Gilles BĂ©lot started Cairn in 1994, when he left speaker maker Triangle. Six years later, he teamed up with Benoit Rabozzi to form Ezo designs, which manufactures the Cairn range. This includes a more affordable CD player, alongside integrated and pre/power amplifers that share a theme of modularity. The company is also big on software as well as wireless systems, its latest products being transmitters and receivers for wireless audio systems.

This is, therefore, not one of your run-of-the- mill hi-fi companies, a fact that's evident in the Fog 3, Cairn's top-ranking integrated player. As well as being a disc spinner, it is also a digital preamplifier, with three digital inputs and analogue outputs in both single ended and balanced forms. The latter, reflects the balanced digital to analogue converter inside the machine, rather than being a pair of XLR sockets for the sake of market appeal.

Nice to look at

The Fog 3 is very nicely made, too, the aluminium front panel is 12mm-thick and the steel chassis has square perforations, which suggest the influence of Philippe Starck. It is finished in grey Nextel as per Meridians of yore. The remote is a system type and rather confusingly, has big volume control buttons, which do nothing for the kudos of the player.

If you want to change the output level, look for the smaller level plus/minus buttons: these allow direct connection to a power amp, which is an attractive option if you don't have analogue sources to hook up.

Operationally, this is the most idiosyncratic player we've come across in quite a while. There are no legends on the front panel, so that switching the player on requires a double push of one of the buttons. To activate the disc drawer, you also have to press the right button for a little longer than average. It's worth persevering with the controls, however, as the Fog 3 is a cracking player. Just make sure that other members of the household use the remote instead, which functions in a far more conventional way.

The largest button on the fascia gives access to the various set up options available, most importantly the alternative filter settings which make a small, but significant difference to the player's sound. There are two variables that modify the anti-aliasing digital filter: group delay can be set as 'long', in which, "most of the time sound is precise but can be unnatural" or 'short', described as "a specific filtering method to avoid harshness at high frequencies".

It's not hard to tell which one Cairn prefers. The other choice given to users is whether to optimize frequency or time domain performance. Here, Cairn's preference is clearly for the latter, because it describes frequency optimisation as 'seeing the music', but the time optimisation as being 'in the music'.

You can change these settings but it's a rather slow process, using the large fascia-mounted button, or the filter button on the remote - the only drawback being that the display merely shows filter numbers for each of the four settings available.

Cairn's designers have selected four Crystal CS4398 D/A convertors in the Fog 3, which are 24-bit/192kHz devices that are fixed at these bit rates and sample rates (despite the alternative settings for these features as shown in the specifications).


Sound quality