California Audio Labs Tercet is an affordable reference quality compact disc player incorporating Waveshaping. Having established new reference benchmarks in CD performance with our tempest, and Aria, we looked to see whether what we had learned could be applied to an affordable or "budget audiophile" CD player.
The majority of today's compact disc players suffer from one or more of the following; glare, hardness, brightness; lack of dimension; and lack of focus. The design research we do at California Audio Labs helps us to understand why these things occur, and how to eliminate them from interfering with the music. With the Tercet we started with 16 bit, 4x oversampling and added our Waveshaping circuit which shapes and aligns the timing of the digital pulses before they arrive at the Digital to Analog converter. Waveshaping negates the spurious third to seventeenth order harmonics which are what create some of that glare, edge, hardness, and lack of focus and dimension found in other players.
Next we designed an audiophile quality analog stage, featuring a large, separate power supply and selected components from Monster Cable, Wima, and Sidereal, in a circuit design that is a leap forward in performance for the budget audiophile. The Tercet's unprecedented smoothness from one end of the frequency extreme to the other, the sense of three-dimensionally and focus is superseded only by out Aria, and Tempest II.
Other manufacturers have had varying success with the reduction of the edge and glare in their players, but have yet to achieve as great a sense of "being there". What separates the Tercet from those players, aside from it's superior tonal neutrality, is imaging, that sense of attending a live concert, imaging is the illusion in your 're seeing the separate and distinct positions of the performance and instruments, on the stage. This depth, width, and height is a representation that only the best players can extract from compact discs.
If the players you've auditioned or owned don't achieve this sensation bring some of your favorite discs, and perhaps your own player into your local California Audio Labs dealer and compare the Tercet. There's a whole new world out there waiting for your ears, and as we know, all the world's a stage.
