AMC  CD9

may 2008

A bastard son of NAD or what ?!

You can kill me for telling the wrong story but if my solder  flux fume contaminated brain serves me, the NAD engineers who left the company created a similar firm called AMC. They probably did not want to work for the multicorporation and tried to produce high value goods for audiophiles. They had some succesful CD players and amplifiers, some of products with a tube inside. I never heard whatever happened to them. Anyway, they left behind them before disappearing some nice goodies.
Below - we will look at one of them:




Visually, the AMC front panel can not hide he truth. Despite the mother denial, we know who the father is. The resemblanse is too obvious.
The PCB look is another deja vu. Blue like nad. And even better made. With more attention to performance and less focus on absolute cost cutting.








The mechanism is not any experiment but well tried and reliable Sony KSS210A. Nothing to complain about.




Just look - 4 regulators for such a simple player - more than most players costing twice as much have


The output stage has one opamp per channel, and a very good opamp too. The caps are first class, especially these green ones - to be found only in TOP TOP Marantz players and sounding very good. Electrolytes are larger than average and as I said - the DC supplies are regulated 4 times separately.




The DAC is hiding underneath the PCB - the very popular and very good Technics Panasonic Matsushita MASH MN6474. It is fully balanced and U out type.
In this player I applied the snipit and bypass mode without lampizator. Add a cap between DAC pins and RCA's and the sound is VERY GOOD.





The transformer has AMC logo but is it really "audiophile"? I seriously doubt it. But it is very fashionable to advertise on transformers. Ask Krell people, they'll telya.







This is a VERY GOOD balance of engineering versus price versus looks. No bullshit at all. A lot of good solutions and real engineering excellence.
If only more companies were like that.
I put AMC on my white list and the CD9 on my recommended stock players list.

Good look hunting it on ebay !

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