Ruark's super-chic CD player wants to bring out the best from your music collection

[What Hi-Fi?]

Ruark's new R-CD100 CD player offers an isolated enclosure and teases "whisper quiet" operation for your CDs.

Ruark's super-chic CD player wants to bring out the best from your music collection : Read more

 

[PJB]

Ruark's new R-CD100 CD player offers an isolated enclosure and teases "whisper quiet" operation for your CDs.

Ruark's super-chic CD player wants to bring out the best from your music collection : Read more

This player, sadly, is a huge disappointment. It generates two prominent whirring noises every time it moves from track to track. This happens in normal play, not just when skipping forward or back between tracks. Annoying generally, infuriating on anything continuous or with a quiet open. Mystifyingly Ruark have told me this is 'normal'. It really isn't. If this is Ruark's only way to play cds on its more premium range it's a real problem.

Absolutely don't buy without demo-ing to see if you can live with the noise.

 

[GSV Ethics Gradient]

This player, sadly, is a huge disappointment. It generates two prominent whirring noises every time it moves from track to track. This happens in normal play, not just when skipping forward or back between tracks. Annoying generally, infuriating on anything continuous or with a quiet open. Mystifyingly Ruark have told me this is 'normal'. It really isn't. If this is Ruark's only way to play cds on its more premium range it's a real problem.

Absolutely don't buy without demo-ing to see if you can live with the noise.

And as you've pointed out elsewhere, Ruark are towing the 'they all do that, sir' line.

 

[PJB]

Update - having commented above, I wanted to let anyone interested in this product know that the issue has been resolved. I was eventually able (to be fair, with some help from Ruark customer services at this point) to persuade Ruark's tech team that this wasn't acceptable and that they were undermining their consumer proposition entirely by not addressing it. Turns out the 'parent' R410 unit was forcing the transport to re-index the disc at the beginning of every track. They've fixed this via a firmware update, and the transport now performs as expected.

Obviously should have been picked up before launch, and probably the tech team should have given their customer facing colleagues a more constructive line to take. But they have fixed it, so I wanted to put that on the record