Onkyo DX-C390 6-Disc CD Player

Onkyo sells the DX-C390 for $375, and it is currently discounted to $300 at the maker's own site. It is one of two CD players Onkyo still makes, positioned below the newer Icon C-30, which plays one disc at a time and costs $400. The DX-C390 trades newness for a carousel: it holds six discs, and five of them can be swapped while the sixth is still playing.

That detail is the entire argument for the machine. A single-disc player asks you to stop the music to change albums. This one does not. You can queue six CDs, let them run in sequence, and keep loading more behind whatever is currently spinning, which turns a CD collection back into something closer to a playlist.

The internals are conventional high-fidelity rather than flashy: a multi-bit DAC with 128x oversampling, a digital filter running at 352.8 kHz, a signal-to-noise ratio of 96 dB and total harmonic distortion of 0.005 percent at 1 kHz. Onkyo's own VLSC circuitry and a shielded Direct Digital Path cable are there to keep the audio signal clean on its way out, which is standard Onkyo language for reducing interference rather than adding anything audible you could point to on a spec sheet.

It is a heavy, old-fashioned object: 15.2 lbs, a brushed aluminum front panel, and dimensions that assume a shelf built for a hi-fi stack rather than a desk. The market for a 6-disc changer is narrow and specific: people who still own several hundred CDs and do not want to re-buy them as files. Onkyo is still making the thing for exactly that market, at a real discount rather than a gesture of one.