I listened to both players before buying a CL-20. As far as I was concerned there was no AUDIO difference between them. The CL-25 has a 10 bit VIDEO converter which has nothing to do with the audio quality of the player. The CL-20 has a 9 bit video converter. Both players sounded the same to me. They were both, warm, non-fatiguing, musical reproducers, and both do HDCD encoded discs.