Ayon CD Players: CD-1 and CD-3

Plain and simply the finest sounding Player I have encountered under 6k

If this unit sounds "solid state" it has just sent a benchmark for how to buld a player that is true to the music and presents it in an analog manner.

Far too many tube players out there are rolled off,veiled,have tubey bottom ends to them and lack retrieval of information capabilities.

The 6H30's do add that "clear sound" vs "frosted sound"
to the Ayon.
But there is no way this player does not have the natural harmonic timbre we associate to tubes.

I myself switched out the stock 6H30's for some NOS DR 6H30
tubes and also replaced the stock 6922's with some Telefunken E188CC's so there are definately tubes in there.
The unit does sound fantastic stock,but tube rollers and tube cd player lovers fear not you can tweak the Ayon to sound a bit different if you wish.

And I guess if you are a solid state CD player guy you can buy this one forget it has tubes in it and have the best solid state player you find(but there are tubes in there)

So in a nutshell this player fits the needs of both the solid state and tube player enthusiast

Better yet it fits the needs of great cd playback in an analytical and gray digital world.

Hchilcoat-please don't be too quick to judge the Ayon for the sake of this thread.
The unit does take a bit of time to break-in
The owners manual will advise just how to burn it in.
This is not one of those "turn it on and let it repeat for 50 hours scenarios"
The best way to break the Ayon in is to initially let it play for 5-8 hours and shut it down overnight.
Let the unit play for another 8 hours and shut it down.
Repeat this procedure until about the 50 hour mark and the unit is about 90% broken in.
I believe Ayon prefers this break-in procedure because it allows the caps affilliated with the 6H30 circuit to go
thru the "charge and dis-charge" process which actually breaks the caps in much better than continuous play.

the tube output stages also function quite differently
than the Raysonic and Shanling.
The Raysonic uses 2 tubes for the S/E output(middle two tube #2 and #3) and 2 tubes for the XLR output (outer tubes
tube #1 and #4)
The Ayon CD-1 incorporates all 4 tubes in it's output stage
which consist of 2 6H30 tubes and the oversized caps associated with them along with 2 6922.
The CD-3 uses 4 6H30 tubes.
The shape of the Raysonic,Shanling and Ayon look similar,however,the size of the Ayon's chassis is different than that of the Raysonic and Shanling.
The Shanling and Raysonic are essentilly the same chassis with both compainies products chinese made.
Raysonic has a base in Canada,however,it is a Chinese company along with Shanling.
Don't get me wrong there are some fantastic Chinese based compainies out there now including Cayin along with Raysonic and Shanling.
The Ayon is Made in Austria where the Euro is much higher than the US dollar making the Ayon a great value for what
it's being offerred at here in the US.
That same being said for the Raysonic and Shanling where production and labor cost are still very low in China allowing them to also offer a great value product.