Hegel Viking.

EQUIPMENT REPORTS The pleasures of reviewing a new CD player reside in its light weight, compact dimensions, and, most of all, its ABC-simple installation: no cartridge to mount, no stylus to break, no step-up transformers or cartridge-load values to explore. Description Hegel Music Systems' new Viking CD player costs the same ($5000) and looks almost the same as the now-discontinued Mohican CD player, which I reviewed in 2017. I was happy to have gotten this Viking DAC-to-Denafrips DAC comparison out of the way at the beginning of my auditions because the real value of the Viking CD player resides not in how effective it is as a transport (very effective) or even how its DAC compared to a $7500 NOS R-2R DAC (a comparison where the Viking also did very well) but in how it felt to use it and how exciting it made playing CDs. The Viking is a true-native 16/44.1 CD player developed from the ground up for optimal performance on standard ('Red Book') CDs.". INSET: ASSOCIATED EQUIPMENT. [Extracted from the article]