New or Old CD Player?

I've owned the Audio Research Reference 8 CD player for a couple weeks now. I figured I should at least give a few words on how I think it sounds.

First I dropped it into my Big Rig to get a feel for how it performs. It is highly musical and does nothing offensive. The highs are a touch restrained over my beloved Berkeley Alpha Reference 2 DAC. There's not quite as much air or three-dimensionality as with the Berkeley. The mids are smooth and a bit more pronounced than the Berkeley. The biggest difference is in the bass, where the AR gets a little wooly and not as tightly pitch defined. So, as an absolute, it would not displace my Berkeley DAC. But if the Berkeley is a 10, I'd give the Reference 8 a solid, um, 8.5.

But in my headphone rig, where if a recording is too hot on top, it'll blister your ear drums, the Ref 8 filters out a lot of that, resulting in a more enjoyable performance. I find it just about perfect for headphone listening. Musical and quite accurate. 

And a word on tube testing. I test ALL tubes with a Hickok 6000A tester before use. One of the triodes within one tube that came with the AR had a Significant loss in transconductance, about half output of the others. I had a spare 6h30 tube and used it. I don't know how much degradation in sound that one tube would have had. But it couldn't have possibly been positive.

Hegel Mohican cd player is minimalist 
Simple natural music reproduction
Not sure why AR Reference 8 needs to be dissected 

@trelja "I cannot recommend the Hegel Mohican...

Like the rest of their players, it simply comes off as a rebadged Opera Audio Consonance CDP, typical of that outfit's efforts in the first 5 years of this millennium. At $5000, you're spending 2X - 5X for machines that proved historically unreliable and more than decade old technology."

Based on the internals @twoleftears provided, I must reiterate my non-recommendation of the Hegel Mohican.  Comparing the rear panels of the Consonance CD120 Balanced shows what appears the reintroduction of a $1000 machine, discontinued 12 years ago with a new faceplate, digital output, downgraded CD mechanism, and going completely against better and better digital becoming more and more affordable, a price tag 5X higher than it used to be

http://www.canuckaudiomart.com/details/649267251-consonance-cd120-balanced/images/1202196/

https://www.stereolifemagazine.com/news/item/1235-hegel-mohican

Personally, I find this dirty pool.  And I'm going to call it out.

I have a lot of experience with the original.  In no way do I feel it's not an excellent sounding CD player.  At its price point, it bettered most of its competitors.  And for a few hundred dollars, I heartily recommend anyone to move forward, and would even feel happy to have one myself.  But $5000 bought much better performance then (even within the Consonance lineup itself via the Reference and Droplet models) and even more so today.  Indeed, Mohican seems the appropriate moniker

The nearest contenders are the Primare CD35 using ESS Sabre chipset and TEAC transport, and Bryston BCD-3 using AKM chipset (AK4490) and (Austrian) StreamUnlimited transport.