Look around the mainstream brands, not to mention many of the high-end ones, and you might be forgiven for thinking that the age of the CD is behind us. Streaming seems to be not just in the ascendent but very much front and centre in many line-ups, and it’s fairly rare to attend a hi-fi show and find a presenter leafing through a stack of discs to find the next track to play. Yes, LPs still have their place, but in general the main source at such shows seems to be a network player controlled via a tablet or phone.

Amidst that landscape, it would seem an audacious move for Rotel to add to its upmarket Michi brand not a network device, but a CD player – or ‘Transport DAC’ as the company calls its new Q5 model, selling for £5499. And talking to Rotel’s Chief Technology Officer, Darren Orth, at a recent London listening event to mark the official availability of the Q5, it became clear that the challenges weren’t just to do with deciding whether CD was the way to go, but also finding a way to build a player worthy of the acclaimed Michi line-up.

As Orth puts it, ‘In 2019 we launched the Michi amplification [the X3 and X5 integrated amplifiers, and pre and power amps], and realised that next we’d need to make a source component. Five years ago, a streaming source wasn’t quite at the top of the list, so CD it was. However, my personal feeling was that I could outlast CD – it was going to die. So we’d never have to build a CD player; we’d never make that kind of investment.

‘But to be fair, we build more CD players than anything else in our portfolio still today – and I’m thrilled. I love CDs. I don’t have patience honestly for vinyl – I get in the mood and it’s super fun, but really I love CD. So I was happy to discover CD has staying power, and there continues to be a demand for players – so two years ago we started an R&D project.’

With the process begun, the discussions ranged around how to build a CD player with not just the performance, but also the style and quality of the other Michi products: ‘That’s where we really started to run into trouble. How do we do this? How do we meet our own Michi level of elegance with a CD player? So we started looking at mechanisms. Slot-loading CD players were coming kind of from the car audio days, but they’re horrible, right? They’re noisy, they scratch the disc – so those were quickly off the menu.

‘Then we start looking at tray-loading CD players, which are better – we make a lot of tray loading players – but then you still have motors, and you’ve got noise. And how do we build that into Michi? I really couldn’t stand to put a drawer on the front of a Michi product – it just wasn’t respectful to the brand.’

Thus the Q5 became both an engineering problem and one of industrial design. The solution was an in-house mechanism, using lasers and optical blocks sourced from third-party manufacturers, but in an assembly machined and made by the company, and with a lid unique to Michi. Even this went through many iterations, ending up as a hefty metal assembly with glass let into it through which the disc can be seen spinning, adding to that ‘hands-on’ feeling.

The digital-to-analogue conversion here uses ESS technology, but with an eight-channel ES9028PRO converter allowing each of the two stereo channels to be both balanced and fully differential, for noise cancellation and accuracy; Michi uses its own digital filters; and the power supply transformers are again in-house, as in most Rotel products. What’s more, the player lives up to that ‘Transport DAC’ billing by having optical, coaxial and USB-B inputs for external digital sources including a computer, the last of these allowing streaming services to be connected through this Q5.

And then, just when you think you’re done, the Michi player throws in one more piece of user-appeal: using an internet connection it can look up the details of the discs you choose to play and show artwork and track information on its large colour display.

It’s a CD player – but probably unlike any you’ve encountered before …