50% OFF THIS EX-DEMO AS NEW PIONEER, "A MUST FOR ALL MUSIC LOVER"

50W X2 ,Internet Radio, your CD (and SACD) collection, your iPod, even music stored on your home PC, the PDX-Z9 will receive and digitally amplify your entire music collection; how and wherever it’s stored.

Pioneer’s PDXZ9 SACD receiver is one smart looker. No button-packed frontage: it has a stylish glass-finished bezel with a recessed display that leaps to life with a shuddering Pioneer logo animation, then ‘No Disc’, inviting you to get under way immediately. Controls are on the top (making stacking with other kit a no-no), lovely touch-sensitive flush controls as well— so sensitive, indeed, that all manner of interesting operations are initiated as you reach over to plug stuff into the back panel.

Those operations start with loading a CD to play, or even an SACD if you possess any of those superfi hybrid music discs that can carry higher-resolution music (and also surround-sound music mixes).

Or you can enjoy the FM/AM tuner (wire and loop antennas provided), with the important mono button to de-hiss any lessthan- optimal FM reception. There are 30 presets available, though it’s arcane on the button presses required to program them — first the mysterious T.Edit button, then a ‘Class’ button (you get three ‘classes’ of presets; ‘bank’ or ‘group’ would be better, or simple numbering from 1 to 30). Still it works, and you’ll get used to it.

Local radio too provincial for you? Plug in an Ethernet cable round the back, and move to the Home Media Gallery, rather clumsily labelled above the tiny source selection buttons. From here the Z9 will access internet radio stations, thousands of them at varying streaming rates, all managed through the vTuner database. Since you’re now connected to your home network, you can also access music stored on connected PCs. The Pioneer will pick up Windows Media Connect on XP computers or WMP11 on XP or Vista machines. In theory it will pick up any DNLA-compatible servers, though we never managed to get anything from various Mac server programs, including DNLA-compliant Twonky. From our PCs, we started with a “license error”, but were soon streaming beautiful music without any problems. It’s good on format-friendliness, too, playing MP3, WMA, AAC, PCM, WAV and FLAC files (though not anything stuffed by DRM, of course).

Finally there’s a special cable to connect your iPod, which then appears under the Home Media menu, while a nice Pioneer logo appears on your iPod. You get full control over menus, playlists etc, though your iPod is disabled when plugged in, so don’t rush over to check your contacts list or look at photos. No ejecting procedure is required; just yank it out at will.

Also, once you’re navigating around to find more music, the next/last track controls cease to work on the remote (oddly they still work on the actual player).

So technically excellent, musically powerful, beautifully constructed. We just need a better way to navigate the sheer wealth of new media to which this CD receiver provides access. RRP is $2599. More info: www.pioneer.com.au