Rotel established its reputation as a manu-
facturer of superior-quality audio equipment
almost half a century ago and it’s a reputa-
tion it has guarded jealously ever since,
during which time it has continually resisted
the temptation to move away from its area
of hi-fi expertise (electronics), and also stead-
fastly refused to sacrifice quality by going
‘down-market’. This high ‘moral’ stance has
made the brand a favourite with audiophiles,
because they know that if it says ‘Rotel’ on
the front panel, they can be confident that
the component’s sound quality, build quality
and back-up service will be second to none.
The equipmenT
When you have your first hands-on experi-
ence with Rotel’s RCD-1520, you’ll find it’s
more than just a pretty face, because unlike
some of the flimsy, insubstantial-feeling CD
players on the market, the Rotel is a weighty
beast, tipping the scales at 6.5kg. This is
partly because it’s built from metal, rather
than plastic, but also because it has a pretty
substantial power supply which, praise be,
is not a switch-mode type, but a tried-and-
true linear design. In addition to lifting it
up to feel its heft, you should also do some
button-pushing, because Rotel has also fitted
what I’d call ‘proper’ push-buttons to the
RCD-1520… buttons that not only actu-
ally move under your fingers, but also give
unmistakable tactile feedback, so you won’t
ever be wondering ‘did I actually press that
button hard enough for the player’s CPU to
register it?’
As you can see from the photograph
above, you load discs into the RCD-1520
simply by pushing them into the thin slot on
the front panel immediately below the front
panel display. I’ve never owned a slot-load-
ing machine of any type, so the unfamiliarity
of it felt a bit weird at first, and I was a bit
worried about how it would treat my precious
CDs, so I made sure I gave the RCD-1520’s
mechanism a real workout by paying one
of my children to spend many
hours over several weekends
loading, ejecting and re-loading
the same disc over and over, af-
ter which I inspected its surface
with a magnifying glass, look-
ing for even the tiniest mark.
The Rotel RCD-1520 passed
with flying colours: the surface
of the test CD was as pristine
and mirror-like after three
weekends as when it first came
out of the CD jewel-case. Now
that slot-loading mechanisms
are used in so many com-
puter designs, the state of the
slot-loading art has evidently
evolved dramatically.
The Rotel RCD-1520 is able
to be programmed to play
tracks in your preferred order,
using the method of ‘adding’
tracks. This makes it very easy
if you want to play only two or
two tracks from a disc, but a bit
of a pain if you want to play,
say, all except one of the tracks!
In this latter case, what I’d in-
stead suggest is that you burn a
disc on your computer with the
tracks you want, and use that instead. Obvi-
ously for highest quality you’d burn a Red
Book CD, but you could also burn a disc with
MP3 or WMA music files, because the Rotel
is equally capable of playing these computer
file formats.
You can use the RCD-1520 to play tracks
in random order, using the ‘Random’ button,
but the player will stop after all tracks on a
disc have been played. If you’d prefer to keep
listening once all tracks have been
played, press both the ‘Random’
and ‘Repeat’ buttons and the Rotel
will keep playing tracks until you
cancel this mode. The Repeat
button can also be used to repeat
a single track, an entire disc (in
the usual track order) or a pro-
grammed list of tracks (in program
order). The lack of an A–B repeat
mode seemed like something of an
oversight, particularly since I think
it would have made the Rotel very
popular with musicians: particular-
ly those in the process of learning
a musical instrument. Perhaps if
there’s a MkII version… You may
also find the ‘Scan’ feature useful.
When activated, it automatically
plays the first ten seconds of the
first track, then skips to the start
of the second track and plays ten
seconds of that, then skips to Track
3… and so on.
As you can see, there’s no direct
track access via the front panel
pushbuttons: if you want to play
track five, for example, you’d have
to press the ‘Track Skip’ button
five times, then the ‘Play’ button.
However, if you use the remote control, it’s
simply a matter of pressing the ‘5’ button
followed by the ‘Play’ button. This works
perfectly for tracks 0–9, but to access higher-
Rotel RCD-1520
CD PLAYER
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