Pro-Ject CD Box S3, Ultra compact CD Player with 1:1 bit-accurate CD playback, Silver

I am very pleased with this CD player because it looks stylist, has excellent sound quality using my existing speakers and is easy to use.

What a great size for a CD player. Hifi quality product in a small package. The remote lets it down a bit. The sound is good, smooth, warm body of tone. Beats a Discman style potable CD player by miles. Look forward to trying it with my DAC through the SPDiff Coax port. Good stuff

This CD player sounds extremely good. Feels solid and well made and very neat appearance. Wanted a genuine hifi player and small in size. This fits the bill.

Bought from another retailer but I'm so impressed by it, I thought I'd post a review here. Great sound and great quality. Only niggle is the battery is very fiddly to get into the remote. Apart from that though I highly recommend this CD player 😁

The positives: solid build, silent operation and especially nice was that the included remote has been changed from the terrible looking credit card version to a rather stylish and still compact one that fits very nicely in the hand. It actually is the nicest looking and best sized remote in the house. Or was...The disappointments:- Poor feel and operation of buttons on both the device and remote. You think you pressed them enough, but nothing happens. Or does. Very erratic.- Slow response and buffering of repeated commands, like skipping over several tracks (no numeric buttons for direct access on the remote). If I pressed the "next” button 5 times (quickly) to get from for example track 2 to 7, the display wouldn’t respond at the same pace. So one has to just trust that all presses have been buffered and at some point the player will actually get to track 7.- Blue power LED. I hate blue LEDs. Even though the hole in the front panel is probably less than 1 mm, the light is annoyingly bright. Still an improvement over some older Pro-ject products' LEDs that actually protruded from the front panel and lit up the whole room. Now that duty has been given to the display...- Yes, the display. This was the worst disappointment. It actually feels like a deception. In all the promo photos Pro-ject uses for marketing, the display is shown as a high-contrast unit, as if it were OLED or similar. White on solid black background. But in reality it is a terrible backlight leaking LCD with poor contrast (see attached image). And if you invert it*, it’s insanely bright even in daylight. And there is no way to adjust the intensity, or turn it off. Terrible ”design”, just terrible. But I'll give Pro-ject this: the graphics (read font size and style) are much improved over the gigantic ones in most of the brand's other cd players.*Instructions on inverting the display are so poorly written in the manual that it's no wonder I've come across comments on the internet of it not functioning at all. Even I thought so at first. Only after realising the manual is probably just as half-assed as the product did I experiment and eventually figured it out.Still, I thought I could live with these issues. I bought this player primarily for its compact size as there is limited space available in my dedicated furniture. And I trusted the brand as I have enjoyed my 1-XPression III turntable for more than a decade and have had Pro-ject phono amps and switchers previously.But the worst was yet to come. Having plugged the player to my system and initially tested that it spins discs and sound comes out, I was too busy with work the next couple of weeks. Then I finally had a few hours to enjoy music and did so - until after around 10 seconds I adjusted the volume on my Yamaha amplifier. The music paused for a second or two and then continued from the next track. I couldn’t believe it, but quickly had to. Pressing the volume up or down buttons on my amplifier’s remote control also made the cd player skip to the next track. In the 35 years since my first hi-fi set I have owned several dozen remote controlled devices and this is the first time one has interfered with another.I had my doubts about Pro-ject doing digital products but thought that since the S3 is the 3rd iteration of S-line CD players and has been in production for some years already, those worries would be baseless. They weren't. There’s a saying in Finnish: "Juosten kustu” (peed while running) which I feel well describes this product. I still believe the mechanics are well thought out and solid, but the software is a disaster. Looking at the attached image you can notice that the firmware has been updated from 15.21 to 15.25. I can only wonder what those updates have been about. And if any of the issues I have mentioned could be fixed with a further update, how would it be done out of factory as there is no interface, at least on the outside. The player doesn’t even read data discs… Still, I doubt the remote control code issue could be fixed this way without needing new remote controls, too.So returned it was. And I must say the seller, Akustik-Projekt, were very helpful. Had to relocate some equipment to fit another full size box, but my new Cambridge AXC35 is how a cd player should be IMO - simple and thought out to the last detail. Like the subtle WHITE power LED. Yes, the remote is big, ugly, with squishy buttons and a third of them are for the brand's amps, but you can't have it all. But now I have the music and can adjust its physical impact from the comfort of my couch - a basic human right, is it not?