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  • Stereophile

    FOLLOW-UP

    Nov 10, 2020 5 minutes
    BY JOHN ATKINSON, HERB REICHERT, & JIM AUSTIN

    MBL NOBLE SERIES N31 CD PLAYER–D/A PROCESSOR

    n ’s February 2018 issue, I reviewed the MBL Noble Line N31, a baroque-styled CD player and D/A processor from German manufacturer MBL. The N31 is expensive, at $15,400, but, as I said in my review’s conclusion, digital audio engineering doesn’t get any better and neither does digital sound quality. However, I also wrote that the N31’s absence of a volume control might be a problem for those who’ve sold their preamplifiers, as will be the lack of a network port for those who’ve banished their noisy NAS drives from the listening room. (The N31 does have a USB port—two, actually—which I used with Roon running on a Mac mini.) I also wished that the MBL’s reconstruction filter—the N31 offers a choice of three: Fast and Slow linear-phase filters and a minimum-phase filter—could be selected with the

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