The Antila is the first CD player from British brand Leema Acoustics, a company that came to the fore not so long ago with its own take on the compact monitor loudspeaker.

More recently, Leema has expanded its range to include a floor-stander, subwoofer and five electronic components. The last-mentioned feature excellent standards of finish and more than a few have a different take on curing the condition that is 'audiophilia nervosa' - the inability to sit back and just enjoy the music.

Leema's electronics are all named after constellations - these include the Cygnus phono stage, Tucana integrated amp, Hydra power amplifier and Corvus centre amp and stereo sub controller. This last appears to be an alternative way of adding multichannel capability to a stereo set up.

The Antila itself was named after a small constellation in the southern hemisphere, and looks unusual in that it has heat sinking down either flank. This seems a little out of place on a unit that doesn't run particularly warm, as it doesn't do a great deal of amplifying. We suspect that this arrangement suits the rest of the Leema electronics range in production terms as well as keeping the look consistent throughout.

One possible reason for all those fins is the so called MD2 'Active Differenial Multi-DAC'; not for Leema a mere converter per channel, or even per phase of each channel, but rather there are 20 DACs splitting the phase between them. This boils down to 10 stereo DACs, which means that each phase of each channel is converted by five 24-bit/192kHz chips.

Reducing jitter

Prior to conversion, the bitstream is buffered in Leema's data pipeline, which is a way of reducing jitter in the incoming signal. This is popular with outboard D/A convertors but is novel in a one-box player.

The Antila uses a Philips VAM transport, which is one of the only audio-specific mechanisms still in production. Under such circumstances we can forgive its slightly clunky drawer mechanism, while reminiscing about Japanese-made drawers that seemed to glide on air.

This drawer is at least fast, which is handy as the remote does not include 'eject/open' among its simple array of keys. In fact, there are only the basics on the handset and even these are spelled out rather than symbolised. Consequently, when operating the unit in low light, one tends to stab randomly in the hope of hitting the correct button. This is a learning curve that owners should inevitably scale in the medium term.

As with the rest of Leema's electronics, the Antila includes something called LIPS (Leema Intelligent Protocol System), which acts like a sophisticated bus system that allows connected Leema components to operate with the simplicity of an all-in-one 'stereo'.

The player can either be a 'slave' - remotely controlled by a Tucana amp for, instance - or a 'master', in which case it can be used for input selection and volume adjustment, showing the current settings on its display (useful if you want to keep the amp hidden away).

On the back panel you'll find a pair of LIPS connections alongside analogue outputs of both single-ended and balanced persuasions and digital socketry in electrical and optical flavours. It all looks very professional, which is as it should be but occasionally isn't with small companies and early production samples.