Opera Audio Consonance Orfeo

By Michael Wong

December 2008

Opera Audio Consonance Orfeo CD player $2999

Opera Audio Consonance Orfeo (click for larger image)

The Opera Audio Company of Beijing is a fourteen year audio veteran with one of the most expansive and diverse product ranges around. More than 100 products including turntables and tonearms, solid state and vacuum tube amplifiers, a vast range of CD players and even horn loaded speakers, are available in a variety of colours and finishes. Remarkably, every piece in this vast range is designed by company founder Mr Shiu Hui Liu.

Opera Audio also makes equipment for other companies and is known to enter into partnerships with select outside companies where both partners benefit. A good example being the new Well-Tempered Amadeus turntable, made under licence. Both brands are represented in New Zealand by Denco Audio.

Forbidden delights

The Orfeo is the CD player in the Forbidden City line-up. This new range features stylized fascias that pay tribute to the gates of the real life Forbidden City in Beijing. The rest of the range is made up of a CD receiver (a one box combination CD transport, DAC, tuner and Class A amplifier), two integrated amplifiers and a stand alone DAC. Overseas markets also have access to an oversampling CD player, turntable and power amplifier.

At 450x110x400mm and 18kg, the Orfeo occupies a fair sized amount of shelf space but its impact is lessened by yet another interpretation of the ubiquitous rounded corner casework that has so enslaved modern designers.

The front panel carries a small display window, below sits the slim disc tray. The transport control buttons nestle below the square dots decorating the fascia. The rear features a set of unbalanced RCA outputs, RCA coaxial digital output and IEC mains socket. A solid metal remote control provides basic transport functions plus adjustment to the brightness of the red LED display and sampling rate selection. There is no direct track access, programming or other fripperies.

The Orfeo is solid and nicely made although not quite up to the level of a $3k CDP from a more mainstream manufacturer like Marantz or Yamaha.

Unlike the previously reviewed Consonance Reference CD2.2 (which used 96kHz/24-bit oversampling), the Orfeo uses Opera Audio’s acclaimed “Linear” concept. Opera adopts a purists’ approach to digital audio; the classic Philips TDA-1543 chipset (in a quad/two per channel configuration), no upsampling or oversampling and no digital filter (similar to the road taken by ultra high end companies like 47Labs, Audio Note, Zanden et al) to maintain the purity of the digital signal. So why dilute this approach by offering 88.2 kHz upsampling ?

Setup in my resident system (Krell KAV-300i, Magnepan MG1.6s, XLO cabling) was quick and painless. Place the Orfeo on a suitable support, plug in the cables, switch on and you’re ready for music. The small buttons on the player are accompanied by equally small legends but work well if you have good line of sight.

Ditto the solid remote which looks like the one supplied with earlier Consonance CD players but is much better made. The old one felt like it was full of broken bits, the new one is reassuringly solid with no rattles at all.

CDs are quickly loaded by the plasticky Philips transport, track access is a little leisurely.

No sleep 'til Beijing

Despite the intervening years, it’s hard to forget the soporific snoozefest that was the Consonance Reference CD 2.2. In contrast the Orfeo is a revelation.

Music is big, bold and full of life. There’s a vividness and presence rare in CD players of this price. Dynamics are faithfully reproduced with good impact and transparency. The soundstage is realistically sized; imaging is good with fine focus and immediacy, albeit dimensionality is a little flattened, reducing the holographic effect.

Tonally the Orfeo leans on the warm side of neutral, most listeners will find this preferable to a squeaky clean, clinical sound. It’s not the most refined $3,000 CD player around, lacking some of the airiness, fine detail and sweetness available on other (usually more expensive) CD players but these small deficits never get in the way of the natural flow of the music. The Orfeo simply does a great job of playing CDs.

Today's audio marketplace is full of competent but boring CD players that do the job on paper but often fail to standout from all the other boxes. The Orfeo is anything but boring. There are a few rough edges (physically and musically) but none of them fatal. Like a classic Italian car, they add a touch of character. The Orfeo is an excellent CD player that offers tremendous of musicality for $3,000 and is well worth auditioning.