Mid range reality, being quiet, linear, and easy to match to different systems

None.

I think I'm an audio enthusiast not an audiophile. I build my own, having been through the super expensive stuff, but two kids in private school put a stop to that. So I have been experimenting with building my owned preamps, buffered and not, and stepped attenuators with no gain. Technically, the Tjoeb is as good as it can get. I measured a very low output impedence of just over 200 ohms! So, long interconnects, and no preamp, are no problem. Superb! Driving my home built single ended amp, as well as my old ARC (that I could not part with) I have gotten excellent sound. Tonal balance is just warm enough to get rid of harshness. Bass control is fabulous. I much prefer this to all-tube CD players I have used in the past, which can have their strong points but fall down on drive and bass roll off that can be un-predicatable into varying impedences. I say this because I have seen some other CD players on the market as of late that seem to be attempting similar characteristics. End results can be unpredictable. The Tjoeb, one year later, continues to satisfy. Most products will make me happy due to the "new" factor. The question is how is it when it's not new? I am very happy that I bought it. I have tried different op-amps. I see that Upscale now offers simple plug in kits. I don't know if my suggestion is what prompted that, but for the person that is not a kit builder like me, understand its NICE to have the option to get tonal balance right. They plug in so simple. I have tried three different ones, with superb results, and they are cheap!

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I have owned Cal Audio, Sonic Frontiers, Audio Research, and others

Musicality, openess, detail, fantastic price, and tweaks galore that make major differences,

It wasnt free,no joking, none.

After purdhasing the Ah I immediately set the player on repeat and left it to burn in for over 70 hrs. well all the reviews on this page are right its a high quality digital turntable, quite amazing. the soundstage is rich but tight, transparen, taut and thouroughly unfatiguing. I was very impressed, but the real beauty about this player is that the tubes can be changed to higher qualty ones and I managed to get hold of a pair of rare Telefunken Diamonds @ £40 each, and this is where the soundstage blew open and artists sat before me and played my favourite music. A wonderful lush cornucopia of musicality, soundstage depth and detail. A pure Gem. and because words are cheap dont waste any more time and buy one and tweak to your hearts content, fully worth the meager asking price. I actually tried many cables with the Ah and the best one price per sound was the Van Den Hul D102 3, which compliments the open bandwidth beautifully and gives you an uncoloured neutral but pure soundstage. I am yet to try the Nordost Blue Heaven. I must also say i used the Ah against my Marantz 67mrk 2 CD and in comparison the Ah sounds so much sweeter. the Marantz being pure digital has a very orderly placement of instruments but with a harsh tonality on all high frequencys, which is not the case with the Ah, which I regard as my digital Linn Sondek.

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Marantz 67mrk 2 CD Player,Carver MDA J420

The Njoe Tjoeb, …it was there, all the time…. It was the end of the passed millennium (a long time ago ..…) the rumor was spread around that an new Tjoeb was coming to market. “Much better than the old one”, so when it was released I purchased it. At that time I intended to update the “old” tube with other valves, tube dampers (Blue Note) and with better feet, so these modifications I did from the beginning with the Njoe Tjoeb. At that time I was more focused on the rest of my equipment: I wanted to make a big step forward, so over the last one and a half year a replaced all except my modified Thorens turntable and the Tjoeb. Now my system exists of Conrad Johnson, with the remarkable Premier L17 as pre-amp and the Premier 11 as power amp. To decide which speakers I liked most, it took some time. The winner was: Vienna Acoustics Mahler a speaker just released for market at that time. In my opinion: fast, smooth, with a lot of space and a beautiful tweeter. The whole system is wired with Transparent Reference: interconnects and speaker cables. The power links are of Power Reference level, connected to a Power Isolator. I was quite satisfied after all these changes. But what I learned about the stories on “running in your equipment” is, that this is really true: especially this is true for all the cables, but also for the crossover filters of the Vienna’s. It took me more than 8 months to hear the low bass (reproduced by the Eton Honeycomb bass drivers) to be “connected” to the upper part of the music image. I have to say this can be speeded up with long “running in sessions”, but due to the limited life time of valves I did not. My focus changed in this period from CD’s to vinyl: so I replaced the cartridge with Grado Platinum and the phono-amp with Electrocompaniet ECP1. Now I have a beautiful sound, with a wide music space (more than 120°) and a lot of depth. All instruments and soloists have their place in space, with a lot of air around it. The sound is very smooth, very detailed, with a lot of ease. Only recently I started to use the Tjoeb again, because I heard and bought a few very beautiful CD’s. The sound has the same beauty and warmth as my records gave me with the same “involvement”. Then I start to realize that all of this evolvement was due to the changes I did with the core of my system. Not with the Tjoeb. It was not ch

Sound, upgrade posibility

mechanically(housing/transport)

AH! did a great job in designing the Njoe Tjoeb. Compared to my previous Denon 1015(with Alphaprocessor) it''s a huge improvement. More and better defined bass, larger/more defined soundscape, better (micro)dynamics a.s.o. As upgrades I first changed to Burr-Brown OPA627 opamps, which give a more tube like sound, darker, better tonality. Next i changed the tubes to Russian ECC88 /6h23 tubes which gave already a better definition and more soundscape. Few months later i changed these to E288CC SQ from Philips miniwatt, which was again an improvement in slam, harmonic richness and tonality. Further I installed a new powerchord with netfilter. This weekend i heard their newest UPSAMPLER at the hifishop. This is again a great finding! It makes sound from CD much more "analog" sounding. The sound is a lot smoother and the soundscape wider, more detail. Guys, I want to have this soon! (my system:Amp:Vanderveen UL 40-S kit with passive pre, speaker kit Vifa Vivace silver wired.)

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Denon DCD1015

Extremely engaging and realistic musical reproduction. Great soundstage. You''ll find out how well your cds are recorded. Remote has volume control. Unit shows time elapsed and time remaining on a cd.

Minor - you can''t program the remote or change the program when a track is playing.

A fine cd player. Much more bass and treble than my old Sony 208 ES, a player I really liked. Much more lifelike, clearer and with a much larger soundstage, too. The tubes make a real difference. The base price is $579 though I got the upgraded feet and power cord which were an additional $100. The stock Philips JAN tubes are not bad at all though I succumbed to wanting the best I could get, based on other folk''s reviews, so I upgraded them for a pair of Mullard tubes at $80 for the pair. Big mistake. They were way too bright, much to forward and produced a boomy bass *on my system.* The result was so fatiguing that I was afraid to listen to more cds. Needless to say, I called Kevin at Upscale asap and, after he gave it some thought, he replaced them with a pair of NOS Ediswans which are much more balanced, engaging and musical, in my system. After letting them burn in with approx. 50 hours of playing time, I''m *really* happy with the music that I''m hearing. I was willing to spend over $1500 for a cd player and I''m glad I didn''t have to. This is one sweet machine.

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Sony 208ES. NAD cd changer; gave congested and fatiguing reproduction.

Wonderful on voices

Sound stage (?) sounds a bit constrained... not as "open" maybe as it could be.

There have been a lot of favorable reviews, but since I use this site a lot, I felt honor-bound to add my 2cents. I bought the Tjoeb 4000 with the Siemens tubes & the options... which brought the price up. To me, the player sounds very natural. Voices & folk music just kind of flow. It''s most noticeable if you do direct comparisons with a non-tube player. The difference surprised me because I have a tube preamp (conrad johnson) & didn''t expect quite that much difference. Very good value for the money.

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I have a Conrad Johnson PV14L & M2500. My previous cd player was a Sony CDP-XXX (who can remember the numbers?).

Sound for the price. Great customer support.

You will really start to notice the differences in quality among various recordings. This is much more apparent than on my old player. Not really a weakness, but might make you less enamored of some of your CDs.

Best thing I can say about it is that when I fired it up for the first time last summer, my wife walked in the room and said "Oh, I thought that was the turntable." And that was before it was really warmed up. It sounds as un-digital as I can imagine a 16 bit player sounding. Vocals are warm and rounded; orchestral music is detailed without being edgy.

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Rotel CD player c. 1989--can''t remember the model no.--was considered best palyer for ~$350 at the time

Warm sound, depth, pluggable tubes, pluggable upsampler (soon I hear), quality transport, the audacity of the Dutch, value for money, uniquely helpful and honest dealer

Can''t demo before buying, overhype (like I help)

I initially became interested in this player while surfing the web and reading reviews looking for something better to replace my rather low-end Sony DVD player which was doing a pretty poor job of playing audio. I grew up in Holland and was immediately amused by the strange but endearing spelling of Njoe and Tjoeb. I also understand where the AH! guys are coming from having spent a lot of time immersed in the rather quirky and unique Dutch sense of humour. I was even happier to find out they''d secured distribution in the US, no other than Upscale Audio and visting the web site, reading the tone and style excited me further. In fact, like so many others I bought this player unheard, based on the many glowing reviews on the net in this forum and others. Tweaking is a cool thing to do and given the chance to join in, I jumped in with two feet. Well, $579 isn''t that much for something people are saying is that good, is it? Sounds just get better and better. I did, like so many others notice a huge difference after an initial burn-in, say 72 hours but unlike others I could not wait before I turned up the volume! That said I noticed a larger feeling of space and warmth coming from this player, sort of like I''m used to hearing from more expensive players on demo in the high-end shops. At this time, my amp was a compromising Denon AV receiver with cheap cables. Anyway, I enjoyed the sudden elevation into "Audiophile" stature and felt rather pleased with myself, if not rather smug with my friends (how many others have tubes in their system these days?!). Oh, and lest I forget, the ultimate acid test - my girlfriend really noticed the extra layer of depth and warmth! Months passed. I upgraded my system by buying a Creek 5350 amp, BetterCables speaker cables, Monster 400 interconnects and a power conditioner. Something was nagging me about the sound. While everything has stepped up a notch and the soundstage was definitely improved I was longing for more . Or something to give an extra kick when listening to music other than chamber music and soft jazzy noodling (nice). Enter Dr Deal. Visit his website, it''s top. I chose to upgrade the old valves a tad, chose the Siemens 7308 to replace the stock Philips JADs. Talk about revolution! I wasn''t expecting much but what I did get was about a third more mid-range and double the bass

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Various Sonys, Denons, Marantzes and Arcams.

NJOE TJOEB 4000 CD Player. I had no idea a CD player could make such a difference. The best way to describe it would be as if one was upgrading speakers from 89bd''s to 99dbs. The music was so clear I felt I was in the room with the musicians. My amp is a Dynaco 70 wired in triod mode 17.5 watts/side with a four play pre-amp. I would recommend the Njoe Tjoeb 4000 CD player to anyone looking for an upgrade CD player at an extremely reasonable price. I glad I made the change. I would highly recomend this Njoe Tjoeb

Warm, musical sound with clarity and punch.

Not as big a soundstage as other reviewers report. May be due to my other system components plus my listening room.

I ordered this unit with the Siemens tube upgrade and the Nordost Blue Heaven connects. This review is written after 1 week of burn in.

I listen mostly to classical music, through a Marantz SR-19 (OK, I like DVD movies every once in a while!) driving Vandersteen's 2CE Signature speakers.

I auditioned the Rotel player with Grado phones and B&K speakers through a Rotel amp. Very clean with musical timbre but more dry and analytical than this little souped up Marantz player for less money.

My previous player, the Sony DVD player sounds more muddy and more lifeless by comparison. Especially on piano and voice, the tube-assisted player shows much more musicality: timbre and bloom around the notes make listening much more engaging. This player didn't make me want to go through my whole CD collection to re-experience each disc, but it DID make me want to sit down and listen to my favorites all the way through, just to savor the music.

The bass is very present without being overbearing, boomy, or mushy. At first, the sound made me check to see if my subwoofer were powered up, but then I remembered: it's packed away, since I'm moving soon. No, just the Vandersteens given some full information. Very tightly punchy on, say the bass drums, on jazz recordings. On the lower registers of piano, the bass capabilities make this player's piano reproduction authoritatively real. (Especially if the piano is a Bosendorfer Imperial Concert Grand pumping out an impassioned Appasionata ala Carol Rosenberger)

For midrange, I'll just say that Diana Krall herself now hangs out in my living room.

On the high end, I've noticed that most of the screeching violins on my older CD's have been tamed into something actually listenable. And well-recorded strings come out like silk. Cymbals in jazz recordings are very present and clean without being dry.

If you like sound that reproduces, above all, MUSIC, with all its heart-warming lyricism, this player is up to the job. At the same time, I find an accurateness and clarity that allows me to pick out individual instruments; at no time are the instruments mushed together.

If I wanted the very, very best, I'd dig into my retirement money and pull out all the stops, but with this player's being as good as it is, I'm not sure why I want to do that!

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Sony DVP S550D, Rotel RCD-991