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Under the hood it is certainly Musical Fidelity sharing similar circuit ideas from products such as the Tri-Vista 21 DAC, X-DAC V3, and using the same parts bin of regulators, op-amps, capacitors, etc. A Philips VAM 12 takes care of disc spinning, a single toroidal transformer feeds multiple regulated power supplies for the DAC, upsampling circuitry, active op-amps stages and buffered valve output.

Sonically the A5 shares more in common with the X-DAC V3 with matching X-PSU, sounding open, balanced, fresh and expressive. The sixmoons.com review stated; ‘the A5s got all of the nuts and bolts of the recording right, it was a very nice sound, easy on the ears and... well, a little unexciting’. This was our take on the A5 CD player, its presentation is a touch recessed, the sound rarely gets adventurous but does remain even keeled. The auction does not include the Musical Fidelity A5 or A5.5 CD player which must be purchased separately.

Now the A5 turns in a very good if not exceptional performance as stock, but in its OEM guise is only sonically flying at half mast. By upgrading the general purpose parts used in the A5, capacitors, op-amps, regulators, clock, etc, the A5’s gains massively in the sonic department and the true potential of this player is realised.

Audiocom have developed two levels of upgrades that convert the A5 to a top class CD player way beyond its price point. The level-1 upgrade focuses attention on upgrading the wealth of capacitors for power & signal. We use Panasonic FC capacitors to replace the general purpose types for the main reservoirs in digital & analogue power supplies. Sanyo OS-CON SP to drive noise down at de-coupling points across the digital & analogue circuits, Black Gate N for signal coupling. Next the active op-amp circuitry is upgraded, we install high-grade DIL sockets so the op-amps so future upgrades can be made. Here the OEM choice of NE5532 does not exploit what the high grade 24 bit/192 DAC is capable of. We use the latest LME49720 op-amps for I/V conversion, and for the following filter stage we enrol the excellent ADxxx. Our attention now turns to the A5’s master clock where the TXCO is removed and replaced with the Ultra-low jitter Superclock 4-S. The price of the A5 level-1 upgrade is £350.00 inclusive.

The level-2 upgrade builds on the performance of level-1, a dedicated very low noise, high speed clock PSU is added to Superclock 4-S. Power supply regulators for the digital 3.3V (DAC) and analogue 5V are upgraded with the Invisus 2 discrete regulators which achieve ultra-low noise, wide bandwidth removing noise from the system. The choice of op-amps for the analogue filter stage uses the higher performance AD825 op-amp modules.