The SMSL PL-100PRO CD player

Amazingly good for the money!

$159 won’t even buy a tank of gas for a giant SUV these days, but it will buy you a pretty bitchin’ CD player. The PL100PRO used to be $99 before tariffs, but hey – this is still less than a month’s worth of latte’s at your favorite coffee shop.

With RCA and XLR outputs, you can run it into any system with ease. Just because they were here, we did try a 20 foot pair of balanced interconnects, and the PL100PRO drives them with ease. The slot-loading mechanism feels pretty robust, and if you like the sound, buy a 2nd one and put it on the shelf for the day something bad happens.

It may not be as awesome as the yelling, screamy guys on YouTube say it is, but compared to what that $1,000 Sony CDP-100 sounded like in 1983, this is an incredible deal and a major technological advance. What it lacks is the refinement of a much more expensive player, but in the context of a nice budget or vintage system, I think you’ll be pretty excited. It also features optical and coax SPDIF outputs, in case you’d like to use it as a transport. It’s even better as a transport.

Running the PL100PRO out in the garage system with the FiiO K17 DAC via the optical input, everything sonically is well balanced. And thanks to a 5v USB-C power input, it’s easy to connect. As we bought our review sample pre-tariff, it did not come with a power supply. That may be different now.

However, using it with a basic Apple Power Book charger than happened to be around yielded great results. Stepping it up to a better linear power supply (also on hand) from Wyred 4 Sound provided benefits in terms of better bass control and a more refined top end – though that starts to defeat the “budget” aspect of this player.

Totally an Exceptional Value Award winner…

https://smsl.shop/products/pl100-pro