John Darko
My favourite CD transport/player of the last three years? It’s not the Schiti Urd, the Cambridge Audio EVO CD or the TEAC VRDS-701. They each use a slide-out drawer to load and un/load the CD. Long-term use has told me that those drawers are flimsy, as if a falling CD case would knock them out for the count. No: the Shanling ET3 gets the nod because it is a top-loader whose weighty oven-dish topper acts as both puck and lid. It also features I2S and AES outputs, an AirPlay network streamer (hello Roon!) and an upsampling engine.
In early 2025, I began my search for a more luxurious CD top loader. The Shanling half-width had primed me to work around its need for top-shelf placement. In that sense, it’s no different from a turntable and in my head, loading and unloading a CD from a top-loader feels closer to the vinyl experience than any slot or drawer; it feels like an event.
The Gryphon Ethos had my attention for five minutes. Its flip-up lid and puck had me excited about industrial art intersecting with technology but the US$40,000 dropped my enthusiasm from hero to zero. I lowered my aim to land on the Michi Q5 from Rotel. Its top-loading CD mechanism lights up from within when the cover/puck is lifted, just like the Gryphon. Unlike the Gryphon, the Rotel retails for US$6999.
The Michi Q5’s disc mechanism is a custom job. From Hifi News: “the laser, motors and (necessarily) the code written for the servo/decoder board are all specific to this model. Moreover, the linear-tracking laser is fitted to a CNC-machined alloy plate suspended from a U-shaped steel frame, the complete assembly weighing in at 1.7kg.” The hi-fi world’s jungle drums say that it was these in-house customisations that delayed the release of the Q5 from last autumn to this spring.
There’s no doubt about it: the Michi Q5 is a centrepiece product. Thankfully, an €80 IKEA Baggboda has sufficient width and depth to accommodate the Q5’s generous proportions (respectively 48.5 cm and 45.2 cm) and its top shelf – unlike the bottom, which isn’t cross-braced – doesn’t sag under the Q5’s 23.5kg weight. Why so large and heavy? Three possible reasons: 1) a pair of custom-wound toroidal transformers sitting inside 2) an alloy case that’s 3) flanked by two heatsinks.
According to Rotel, those transformers “isolate digital and analogue voltage supplies, significantly reducing noise and interference”. Furthermore, “The CD drive motor’s voltage and current supplies are also electrically isolated from the sensitive audio signals, preventing any potential motor noise from affecting the sound quality.”
Not only. The cover/puck weighs a monstrous 1.1kg. Drop it on your foot and you’ll spend the afternoon in the emergency room but lower it carefully into the Q5’s cavity and you’ll be rewarded with a satisfying ‘thonk’. Just make sure you stop the CD before lifting it out again.
We do that using the on-device controls that are tucked away on the right underside of the front panel. The labels, however, are hard to read. Thumbs down.
Whilst I’m in niggle mode, the casework is finished in the same material favoured by AURALiC for its streaming DAC products: one stray finger leads to white marks and smudges that take a micro-fibre cloth to remove. A few of those smudges escaped my attention when shooting the photos for this preview post. (Look closely at the cover/puck).
But wait! There is no dedicated ‘stop’ button on the remote control. Instead, we must long-press the play/pause button. It’s a slender wand that feels heavier and more solid in the hand than expected. Thumbs up.
At the DAC end of its Q5 “Transport and DAC”, Rotel has gone with a DAC circuit that’s fully balanced and fully differential, built around an ESS Labs 9028PRO chip. The TOSLINK and coaxial outputs on the back panel allow us to sidestep that DAC to use the Michi Q5 as a CD transport; but I’m not sure you’d want to do that unless you were feeding something truly exceptional like the Mola Mola Tambaqui (€9999) or Grimm MU2 (€18,000).
The Michi Q5’s sound is bold, dynamic, vivid and present. Bolder, more dynamic, more vivid and more present than streams landing at the Eversolo DMP-A10 (€3780). That’s what I heard when comparing the Rotel’s balanced XLR analogue outputs to the Eversolo’s, each connected to a Marantz Model 10 (not pictured).
Icing the cake, the Rotel’s soundstage is notably wider and larger than the Eversolo’s. Whilst we are here, we should acknowledge that the DMP-A10 is a fully featured streaming DAC and R-2R ladder-driven analogue pre-amplifier with parametric EQ and room correction. And the Rotel is none of these things.
A more likely use case for owners of both the Rotel and the Eversolo would be to route one of the DMP-A10’s digital outputs into one of the Michi Q5’s digital inputs: USB (MQA, 32bit/384kHz, DSD256), TOSLINK (24bit/192kHz) and coaxial (24bit/192kHz). But thinking on that for a moment, you could easily save some coin and go with the more affordable DMP-A8 (which can be had for less than €2k).
However, the Michi Q5 isn’t without its own network-based party tricks. The Ethernet socket on the back panel connects the Rotel to a home router – and then the Internet – to pull down and display artist, album and song information on the front-panel TFT screen. And this works every gosh darn time. Less successful is cover art download and display, which only works some of the time. When I received my Michi Q5 at the end of March, it would display cover art for roughly one in thirty discs. Rotel is aware of the issue, which (so I’m told) is only “affecting a handful of units”.
Since then, Rotel has rolled out at least one firmware update. I’ve been running 1.02 for several weeks, but whilst shooting the photos seen in this post, the Michi Q5 found cover art for roughly half the discs that I played. But it isn’t consistent with its successes. I got cover art the first time I loaded The Chemical Brothers’ Out Of Control, but not the second. Oddly, this improved cover art hit rate came about without the new firmware that was promised last week but failed to arrive. This points to issues with the remote server, but is that an intermediary box sitting at Rotel HQ, or does the Michi Q5 talk directly to the cover art provider?
The answers will hopefully come in time for my video review. ETA TBC.
Further information: Rotel
