Yamaha’s unique retro CD player has a feature that let’s you party like it’s 1999
As the vinyl revival continues spinning and sales of records and record players remain buoyant, there’s life left in the music format rival that was, ironically, meant to replace the 12-incher.
More than four decades on from its launch, the compact disc is alive and well. The past year saw new CD sales by value increase in the UK, albeit modestly, for the first time in 20-odd years and there are, quite literally, billions of the wee silver discs out there.
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Hide AdI, for one, am still wedded to the physical format. I don’t stream music from the internet - a form of renting tunes that pays the artist a pittance and requires a stable broadband connection and ongoing subscription that can easily bag a tonne of secondhand discs instead.


I still purchase the odd bit of vinyl, but my CD collecting habit has been heading for epidemic proportions for some time now. New material can be had for about a third of the price of the equivalent LP while sources of cheap secondhand CDs, such as independent record shops, charity stores, car boot sales and record fairs, are abundant. New or used, you gain all the benefits of the compact disc - lack of surface noise, longer playing time, ease of storage, consistency of sound and longevity - plus the ability to make a copy by simple computer ripping for mobile listening use. The CD wins every time over vinyl, and streaming, as far as I’m concerned.
Last year, I put together a guide on what I considered to be the best new CD players on the market, for anybody looking for a machine for between as little as £20 and £1,000. One of the options I included was Yamaha’s new CD-C603, which I’d only examined briefly but considered intriguing. Why so? Well, in what some people deem to be the format’s twilight years, the famous Japanese maker of musical instruments, audio gear and motorbikes has seen fit to release a brand new five-disc CD changer.
It’s the sort of multi-disc unit that rose to prominence in the 1990s, with some models of the era swallowing more than 100 discs to provide listeners with their very own digital jukebox. Even those with more limited capacities, such as this Yamaha five-disc player, can be loaded up to provide an evening’s worth of entertainment. Stick five “best of” compilation CDs in the thing and you can party like it’s 1999.
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Hide AdYamaha clearly knows a thing or two, as demand is said to have been outstripping supply since the unit’s launch. Which is just as well as the company had to retool a plant in Malaysia to effectively relaunch a design it had once deemed obsolete. So much for the CD doomsayers.


So, putting my wallet where my curiosity was, so to speak, I recently got my hands on a shiny new CD-C603 to see if this is one bit of kit that lives up to the hype. Doing so involved parting with £449 (it’s not widely available and stocks fluctuate but at the time of writing this, in mid-January 2025, a couple of places, including Richer Sounds, are offering a decent discount on the normal £529 retail price).
Now, that is still quite a chunk of money for a hi-fi separate CD player when they start from about £150 and you could viably use a cheapo DVD player that sells for less than £30 to undertake CD playing duties. Particularly if you are adding a player to an existing set-up focused chiefly on streaming and vinyl playing.
However, the Yamaha is genuinely unique in hi-fi circles - one of a kind in 2025, some three decades on from peak CD multi-changer. And it sounds pretty darn good. It can be hooked up to any separate amplifier or system with a CD/auxiliary input using its left and right analogue outputs. Expect to get sound quality at least on a par with the better budget players out there (sub £400) from the likes of Denon, Marantz and NAD.
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Hide AdAlternatively it can be hooked up to a standalone digital to analogue converter, or DAC, via its single digital optical output, which is how I’m using mine. The resultant sound quality will then be largely dictated by the performance of said DAC. I also have an Audiolab 9000CDT CD transport (single disc, naturally, but costing just under £1,000) feeding another input on my DAC (a Moon 230HAD at around £1,900, though half-decent DACs start from about £200) and differences do exist. The Audiolab player offers a bit more musical insight, a little more detail, less of a hard edge and a more extended bass but then you can’t load it up with six hours of tunes.
Having played around with the CD-C603 for a bit now it has thrown up the odd quirk. There’s quite a delay between it swapping discs once it’s loaded up and playing but the brilliant Play X Change feature allows you to eject the tray and change four of the discs while the fifth keeps playing. Very neat. The random/shuffle mode will also do its thing on just the one disc before moving onto the others, rather than choose tracks across all five. This is probably no bad thing given the amount of potential additional wear and tear this would cause, and that pregnant pause between changing discs.
In summary, the CD-C603 seems a cleverly-engineered, functional and fun piece of kit that has rocked up at just the right moment in the compact disc’s history. Savvy CD lovers ought to buy one while they can.
Yamaha CD-C603 five disc CD changer/player. Colour: black (silver may be available in some markets). Normal retail price: £529 (search around for a discount)
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Hide AdGood points: Ease of use, unique Play X Change feature, decent sound quality for the price, comes with a useful, comprehensive instruction manual, in printed form - not always a given these days Not so good points: It’s quite a big, deep unit so check for available space, probably pipped sound wise by the best budget single disc players
Scott Reid is a business journalist at The Scotsman and previously worked in the hi-fi industry from 1982 to 1997
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