Moon has managed to make this player less expensive than its predecessor, the Equinox, which given exchange-rate fluctuations of late is quite a feat. They tell us that the CD3.3 pricing benefits a lot from the hard work the company undertook on the "lean chassis design" for its more affordable 1-Series. This was achieved by designing parts that would be cheaper to manufacture and faster to assemble.

Since all its products are hand-assembled in Canada, assembly time is not a negligible portion of the cost. The other thing Moon did was to use a conventionally shaped case for the CD3.3, the Equinox had an unusually shaped facia and casework with the transport mechanism under a bump in the hood, so-to-speak.

Sound quality

The work that Moon has done to refine the electronics in this player and the attempts to keep mechanical resonances away from the disc drive pay off with a refined and revealing sound. The CD3.3 makes other players at this price point seem slightly crude, a little bit more electronic and digital by comparison.

For some this will not be welcome, a gritty, hard-edged sound is quite popular in some quarters because it feels more alive and definite. This is partly because a lot of refined-sounding CD players lack energy and have a softness to them that smothers the life in the music.

That is not the case here – with this player, Moon has chosen its path very well, bringing out the energy in the music by virtue of resolving the fine detail. When we first started listening to it the amplification used was the classé CP-700 and CA-2200 pre/power, which is considerably more expensive and has a similarly smooth, clean sound.

This revealed how much subtlety the Moon could pull out of the pits and lands in a disc, but the combination stayed a little too close to the smooth side, overall.

By substituting a Bryston BP-16 preamp and 2B SST2 power amp, a combination that's more appropriately priced and has a character that's more warts 'n' all, the result is a good balance of finesse and grip. Such balances are, of course, a matter of taste and will be affected in no small way by the loudspeakers, cabling etc, but with Bowers and Wilkins 802D speakers on the end, this system delivers clean highs and punchy lows with an open and precise midband.

There are more than a couple of references to the timbre of the bass in our notes, this end of the spectrum being particularly well served when a suitably meaty double bass line or kick drum came along. Both of which are in full effect on the Avishai Cohen Trio's Gently Disturbed album.

In the track Eleven Wives, the drums are placed well behind the rest of the band and in a very distinctive, live acoustic. They sound superb and very real when the volume is up. Then Avishai leaps in for a solo on the double bass and takes up the front of stage in no small way, his instrument sounding solid and real thanks to excellent stereo-imaging.

We gave the onboard DAC a spin by comparing the outputs of two audiophile iPod docks, Wadia's i170 in the affordable corner versus MSB Technology's iLink in the no-holds barred department. The converter onboard the Moon proved equal to the task of differentiating these two devices, revealing that the dearer option delivers a considerably richer, cleaner and more three dimensional result. A result that came extremely close to that achieved by spinning a disc of the same material on the player itself.

The Moon reveals the sampling rate of the incoming signal on its front panel, a figure which will be limited to the 96KHz ceiling of the RCA phono connection. Next to an elderly, but refined, Sony XA333ES the CD3.3 sounds upbeat and on the ball.