MHZS Audio CD-66, Looks nice but is it any good ?

Hi Bob,

I actually have one. I use it with a pair of Jolida Music Envoy Monoblocks and Music Envoy pre-amp.

I also have a Jolida JD100S cdplayer and I feel the MHZS is much better.

I reaaly hadn't expected such a step forward in performance. I must point out however that the MHZS is not original anymore. I upgraded some parts (tubes, caps and opamp).
But also the JD100 was substantially modified. Even to a greater extend as the MHZS already had much of the good stuff in it.

It really is a great player and unbeatable for the price I think. Especially when upsampling to 176,4 KHz.

There are some dislikes. There are no gaps to put your fingers in, so grabbing the disc to change it is a bit difficult sometimes.
The play button on the remote is not as sensitive as one would like, but that might be a foult of only my unit.
On the asthetic side there's the upsampling button on the remote wich reads 176,4 HKz instead of KHz.

There's also a CD88 out now which has HDCD and tube rectifiers.

Hope this helps.

Kindest regards,

Vincent - EPVINCE

i too have some questions.

vince, do you have the top loader (12ax7) or the fron loader (6n3) ??

before you had the player modified, could you describe the sound?? is it tube like in its subtractive coloration ? is it very forgiving of poor recordings ?, or is it closer to neutral and more like the modern tube sound.

incidentally, i owned the jolida. i didn't like it. it wqas too revealing and sounded like a solid state player.

I have the CD66, which is a toploader. The CD33 is a frontloader.

I modified the player myself. I only briefly listened before I made the modification as I couldn't wait to open it up:) But straight out of the box it outperformed my JD100S (a JD100S is quite different from a JD100!), which is very tube-like and kind of unrevealing at times, but the Jolida won over my previous CEC-Wadia combo (which I used with a Spectral pre-power combo. The Spectrals were no match for the Music Envoys by the way...)
The MHZS is very detailed, I think the Jolida is somewhat more dynamic (this is what i can remember from the unmodified units). I intend to switch to the Jolida again in a few days, so I can compare them with the MHZS broken in.
Both models are modified, so my findings are of less interest to you perhaps.

Vince

Vince interesting the mods you made. I just had my cayin 17 opamps changed by a local tech guy. And it has made a significant improvement over what was out of the box great player. So changing opamsp is easy(they pop out) and highly recommended.
Now I'm looking for better 6922 tubes.
But also may change the caps to Mundorf, which will cost me 200/parts/labor.
Do you suggest changing the caps?

Which caps would you change? The outputcaps are WIMA and judging by the size they are MKP10, which are, in my humble opinion, very fine caps. I've used them in the Music Envoy Monos (strangely the pre-amp comes with an all WIMA MKP10 interior, the power-amp not).
Mundurf MCAP supreme are probably better caps, but I wonder if the investment would pay of. 200 dollars also buys you a couple of good CDs. In the end it really is about the software, although I too can get cought up in the modification fever.... I sometimes find myself listening to the effects of a cable or mod instead of listening to the music.
With the Jolida I put Mundorf caps in the power supply, but I used WIMAs in the analog output section.
Bypassing the outputcaps with small, high quality caps is also an option perhaps.
With the Cayin, as with every unit, I would modify the power supply the most.

Changing the tubes is always an easy upgrade and fun. Especially the standard tubes in Chinese gear are quite bad sometimes.