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• CDs are getting the audiophile treatment again, sitting somewhere between the ritual of vinyl and the convenience of digital music.
• Top-loading design brings back the ritual of physical music.
• Rigid aluminum construction and a low-vibration SUOS drive help reduce jitter and unwanted noise.
• It’s Pro-Ject’s first RS-series CD player with an integrated DAC, pairing a PCM1796 converter with a balanced dual-E88CC tube output stage.
• At US$2,799, this is CD playback turned into a luxury purchase.

The compact disc was once supposed to be the future of music, until streaming arrived and turned shelves full of CDs into something many of us packed away years ago. Now, with physical music enjoying something of a second life, Pro-Ject is making a rather expensive argument for digging those old discs back out. The new CD Box RS2 Tube takes the familiar CD player and gives it the full audiophile treatment, combining a dedicated top-loading mechanism, high-end DAC, balanced circuitry and a pair of vacuum tubes inside an aluminum body.

At US$2,799, this obviously isn’t the machine you buy because you’ve found a box of old CDs in the garage and want to hear them again. The CD Box RS2 Tube sits in Pro-Ject’s top-range RS2 line and is aimed squarely at listeners who still see physical music as part of the experience, right down to placing the disc onto the exposed top-loading mechanism and securing it with a magnetic clamp before pressing play.

• Supports: Red Book CD-DA
• Tubes: 2x E88CC
• DAC: Texas Instruments PCM1796
• Digital outputs (S/PDIF): 1x optical TOSlink, 1x coaxial RCA
• Analogue outputs: 1x RCA, 1x balanced XLR
• Power supply: 20V/3000mA DC; 100–240V, 50/60Hz
• Power consumption: 20W max.; <0.5W standby
• Remote battery: 1x CR2032 / 3V or 1x CR2025 / 3V
• Dimensions: 206 x 84 x 200mm (210mm including sockets)
• Weight: 3.2kg without power supply
• Finish: Black or Silver
• Price:US$2,799

That top-loading mechanism isn’t there purely for theatre. Pro-Ject uses a SUOS DM-3381 Red Book CD-DA drive with its BlueTiger CD-88 servo system, developed specifically around conventional audio CDs rather than relying on a multipurpose optical drive. A magnetic clamp holds the disc in place, while the player’s gravity design and central mass point are intended to keep unwanted vibration under control.

The bigger difference comes after the disc has been read. Unlike a standalone CD transport, the RS2 Tube has its own Texas Instruments PCM1796 DAC, used in a fully differential configuration before feeding a balanced analogue output stage built around two E88CC vacuum tubes. Pro-Ject says those tubes are intended to bring warmth, fluidity and a more natural harmonic character to digital playback, with listeners able to connect through either balanced XLR or conventional RCA outputs.

It’s an interesting combination because CDs have spent decades being associated with convenience and digital precision, while glowing vacuum tubes belong to a much more romantic corner of the hi-fi world. Putting the two together feels almost deliberately contradictory, but that’s also what makes the CD Box RS2 Tube interesting: Pro-Ject isn’t reinventing the compact disc so much as treating it with the sort of attention normally reserved for expensive turntables and analogue systems.

The physical construction follows the same philosophy, with full aluminum casework, a large front LCD that can display track, time, and CD-Text information when available, and even an aluminum remote control rather than the lightweight plastic controller usually thrown into the box. At only 206mm wide but weighing around 3.2kg, it’s also considerably more substantial than its compact footprint might suggest.

There are some very deliberate limitations, though. This is a Red Book CD-DA player, not a do-everything digital source designed for SACDs, Blu-rays or a library of high-resolution files, which makes that US$2,799 asking price even more interesting. You’re paying for a machine built around doing one increasingly old-fashioned thing exceptionally seriously, rather than another box promising to handle every format imaginable.

And perhaps that’s really the appeal. Streaming gives you millions of songs almost instantly, but there’s still something satisfying about choosing an album from a shelf, physically loading it and listening without an app endlessly suggesting what should come next. CDs may not have quite the same ritual as lowering a stylus onto vinyl, but an aluminum top-loader with a magnetic clamp and two glowing vacuum tubes certainly gives them a little more ceremony.

At US$2,799, nobody needs a CD Box RS2 Tube simply to hear a compact disc, and there are obviously much cheaper ways to play the collection you already own. But necessity isn’t really what products like this are about; Pro-Ject has taken one of the most ordinary physical music formats of the past four decades and treated it like a genuinely high-end source component.