Harman Kardon HD990 CD Player with RLS III (Black) Review

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(More customer reviews)I bought this over a month ago, from another online retailer. Some friends think I'm crazy for investing this much money into, of all things, a CD player at this point in time, but I've never been one for compressed MP3 music. Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer physical media. The HK 990 does not disappoint. Finally, my CD's sound just as lush, warm, and rounded as my vinyl, without any of that cold harsh metallic sound that plagues most CD players! Paired with my HK 3490, the sound quality is stunning. What more can I say? Controls are easy enough to handle on the machine, yet standing a just a few feet away, no buttons are visible at all on the front face of this marvelously minimalistic design. (I use a universal remote, so I can't comment on the ergonomics of the HK-supplied remote.) To date, the machine has played every kind of CD I've thrown at it with ease; even CD's that skip on other players due to scratches don't skip on this one. The extra bonus of the HD 990 is that there are digital in and out jacks so that you can route the sound from a bluray or other player through its audiophile quality DAC in order to benefit from the upgraded sound (which insures that this machine will still be relevant and useful long after CD's are no more). When I bought my HK3490 two years ago, I wanted this CD player but Harman didn't sell it in the US. At one point, I even thought about importing it, but dealing with the voltage converters would have been too much of a hassle. I'm glad Harman Kardon finally decided to bring more of their audiophile quality music equipment to the US market. Even if it doesn't sell as well here as it does in Europe, it reminds customers of Harman's commitment to good old-fashioned, never-out-of-style stereo music.

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To build a CD player without equal, there are no shortcuts, no compromises, no easy answers. Optimized for precision playback above all, the HD 990 employstwo high-performance stereo digital-to-analog converters to deliver third-generation Real-time Linear Smoothing (RLS III), creating a spacious, richly detailedsound that other players simply cannot duplicate.

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