TAGA HARMONY TCD 50 CD PLAYER

TAGA Harmony is a Polish brand that we have been following for a number of years now. They have always impressed at shows with their professional outlook to the production of no-nonsense, good-value products. The TCD 50 CD player continues this theme and costs just $444 plus VAT. Currently, there are several EU distributors but none for the United Kingdom and those looking to buy this unit will currently have to buy in, for example, France and pay for import and shipping.

Build And Specifications Of The Taga Harmony Tcd 50

The DAC inside this CD player from Poland is the ESS SABRE ES9018 Reference 32-bit DAC with what TAGA call Hyperstream™ II architecture and Time Domain Jitter Eliminator. There is also a 2-pole Fully Differential Linear Phase Bessel filter and I’m not going to pretend I understand what that does, despite having looked it up. All the RCAs are gold plated, as are the XLR pins and OFC copper is used to wire all the analogue outputs.

I do like the fact that this has an onboard headphone amp (which is fine) with its own volume control so that, at a push, you could actually just have this unit if all you did was listen to CDs through headphones.

The TCD 50 is available in either silver or black and that front panel is excellent, adding a touch of class to the unit.

Everything works as it should. The tray opens buttery smooth and the CDs play pretty much immediately. The finish is very good, particularly for this kind of money…it’s what I would call “proper” HiFi in that it’s the right size and the right shape. Personally, I think it looks very sleek and stylish in this black colour. It’s got XLR and RCA outs so that’s all covered, and it has optical and RCA digital outputs should you want to whack it in to an external DAC. It doesn’t have any inputs to allow you to use the onboard DAC. The buttons all work as they should and feel nice to the touch. Really, there’s nothing you can moan about with re-

Reviewed by Stuart Smith