Is the CD Revival in full swing? Oslo, Norway’s Hegel Music Systems suggests spinning silver discs is still a thing with the pending release of their Viking CD Player.
The Viking replaces the company’s discontinued Mohican with a brand new and improved Player offering a slot-loading design, D to A conversion courtesy of the AKM 4493SEQ chip (no upsampling), and analog (RCA and XLR) and digital (Coax) outputs.
From Hegel:
“We named our CD player Viking because, like our Old Norse ancestors, we improve on existing technology. When the Viking era began, boats had been around for thousands of years. But the Vikings perfected the design. Their longboats could not only sail close to the coast, but also cross the open oceans. The improvements they made took the Vikings to new shores and even new continents. CD technology may be old, but we believe that when perfected, it is still the best digital medium available.”
The Viking houses a bunch of Hegel tech including their MasterClock (The master clock is controlling the rhythm of the CD player by telling the DAC chip exactly when to convert the audio signal from digital to analog), LineDriver (a linear phase low-pass filter), and SynchroDAC (SynchroDAC technology is used together with the Direct MasterClock technology to keep jitter error and digital to analog conversion errors to a minimum) while the industrial design is meant to match the Hegel P30A/H30A pre/power combo.
The Viking is expected to begin shipping mid-September for a cool $5000.
Company Website: Hegel
