Metronome Le Player 4+ DAC / CD Player

The Le Player 4+ is a bit of a Swiss Army Knife of a product and a very fine one at that as well.

First off, Le Player is a DAC, it has all of the useful inputs you would expect to see on a high performance DAC – there is 1 x USB-B, which is perfect for a Melco, or any of the other USB storage servers out there including conventional computers. It also has 1 x Optical, 1 x RCA and 1 x AES-EBU digital inputs as well.

The USB input supports playback of all files up to 32 bit / 384kHz and DSD files up to and including DSD 512, the other digital inputs support up to 24 bit /192 kHz

Le Player 4+ is much more than just a DAC, though, it is a CD player as well……remember those 12cm shiny discs that were once all the rage? Well there are still a substantial of people who like to play them as their main source, I’ve a good number of customers with seriously large CD collections and many of them have yet to embrace streaming or are simply quite happy buying and listening to CD.

Lastly Le Player 4+ has optional streaming board that gives you an Ethernet socket, once connected to your network via an Ethernet cable you can use MConnectHD on your iPad or iPhone to stream music from Tidal and or Qobuz. Le Player 4+ is not yet Roon certified, but this is in the process of happening and I can confirm it does work with Roon.

When streaming the display shows you what is playing and also shows you a monochrome image of the album art work as well.

To have the streaming board fitted at the time of purchase is £2000, it can be retrofitted for £2400.

In terms of analogue outputs Le Player has a pair of single ended RCA outputs plus a pair of balanced XLR outputs.

Le Player 4+ is a top loading CD player, with a manual lid and a puck to hold the CD in place, there are a row of touch sensitive buttons on the top of the player to control CD playback plus change the input, it comes with a remote control as well which obviously gives you the same functionality from the comfort of your chair!

Weighing in at 12 kg it is reassuringly weighty for a CD player/DAC, the overall build quality and fit and finish is exemplary. It comes with 3 feet as standard out of the box, but also included are 3 magnetic conical feet, that snap into place when offered up to the bottom of the feet.

In presentation terms Le Player 4+ sounds superb, it paints a big picture and is muscular and very tight, whilst never sounding artificial or forced, sitting on the more natural/colourful side of neutral – it’s certainly easy to get pulled into the music and lose yourself!

Available in both black and silver