Reviving Nostalgia: Our Journey with the new Denon DCD-1700NE CD Player

Last Christmas we bought a new record player to enjoy once again some old records that had been sitting on shelf unused for years. Listening to albums on the record player triggered us to put on a few CDs again. This turned out to be a disappointment. We had an old Denon Universal Disk player which we bought 20 years ago and which we used to watch movies on DVD and to listen to music on CD. We had stopped watching DVDs on the player already some time ago because it simply refused to load many discs. But now we discovered that playing CDs there were often gaps in the sound and overall the sound quality was lagging behind what we could get on the record player. Of course the old beast could not be repaired anymore because the laser system was no longer available anymore. And in came a new Denon DCD-1700NE. This only plays music but we now watch movies either streaming or on an old PS 3 that isn’t used for gaming anymore. The price is quite hefty in my opinion and it is substantially more expensive to DCD-900 but in terms of specs it is closer to what we had and I didn’t feel like taking a step back in quality. I have to say I don’t regret having spent the money. Putting in the first CD after connecting the CD player I was pleasantly surprised with the performance. I could hear details again in the music that had disappeared on the old player. And now we take the time every now and then on a weekday evening to sit down on the couch and simply listen to a CD doing nothing else. It sounds old fashioned but it is a really relaxing evening activity. It slows down time and helps to get away from the ‘I have so many things to do’ mindset. Plus, you pay more close attention to the music and discover lots of detail in it you might otherwise miss. And you listen to an album as a whole as it was conceived by the artist, not one song at time.