The following is a letter received from a well respected UK Hi-Fi reviewer and is completely unsolicited:
After further listening - including inserting it in several other systems - I thought I'd better let you know that I have come to love the CD player. Not only is it better than I first thought, it is unequivocally better than the Densen and, indeed, every other CD player I have been able to lay my hands on, including the very highly regarded £4000 Musical Fidelity kW SACD player.
Don't ask me what made the difference - me, great products getting better the longer you listen to them...I don't know. Interestingly, the laminations on the power amp's transformer have stopped humming, too. In fact, the whole system sounds better than ever, i.e. quite astonishingly good.
Our Integrated amplifier has been a tremendous success, it has sold the world over to delighted customers and many have contacted us to enthuse. It has also won quite a few awards, however it is nothing like as good as our new pre/power amplifier combination and the Brio loudspeakers – Their extraordinary clarity reveals detail that most have never heard and this means our CD player needs to be as perfect as the best technology will allow.
The Laboratory Series CD player is the result of months of painstaking development and meticulous attention to detail. The artefacts that spoil the sound of CD players are at such low levels, they are incredibly difficult to detect. Only with time and patience can they be found and eradicated. So often do we see emphasis placed on the technology whilst scant regard is paid to its application; yet this alone explains the difference in sound between competing players? It just shows that you can give half a dozen Cooks the same ingredients and they will all produce a different cake!
For AVI it is a labour of love and a matter of pride to achieve the very best possible performance from anything that we make. We will never be a high profile company because we do not produce enough new products, but what we do is engineered with a precision and care that few can match – AVI is for the discerning few who recognise and appreciate true craftsmanship.
Our new CD player matches the other products in the range and is incredibly solidly made. The front panel is 10mm aluminium and the rest of the case 1.6mm steel plate with stiffening bends to ensure complete rigidity and damping of moving parts. There are no less than 14 screws holding the lid on!
Specially selected buttons are mounted just below the surface of the front panel in ergonomically designed, close tolerance, oval holes. The blue vacuum florescent display window is an optical filter to give just the right brightness for relaxed listening. Quality is immediately obvious from the look, feel and weight of the Laboratory Series CD player.
The resulting sound is smoother and more detailed with a greater sense of ambience than one normally hears. This can be a problem for some that mistake a slight harshness caused by distortion in lesser designs for “dynamics or extra detail”. However for those well versed in the assessment of such things, our CD player will be obviously superior, especially on complex material and flowing tones.
AVI CD players, like all our products, are extremely durable and reliable, however laser assemblies eventually need replacement and we have chosen one that is readily available all over the world and very easy to fit. In fact the whole player is of modular construction so that, in the event of failure, complete PCBs can be sent to facilitate repair. All service information is also supplied to accredited service personnel whenever it is needed.
