Coming toward the end of this month is a new hifi CD player from Opera Audio called the Forbidden City Ping featuring a solid-state 100 watt 2-channel amplifier, and a LED display and an AM/FM tuner. They’ve designed a linear style player with an interesting color pattern that comes in red or gray that almost looks like peg-board.

The interesting part about this hifi CD player/amplifier is it’s a USB 1.1 connection to your computer. Using a SpAct interface through USB the Ping player can play music on you computer hard drive or any other mounted drive, and works with Mac and Windows (English and Japanese versions). The SpAct architecture recovers the audio clock from the USB packet data. This enables the playback on the stereo to happen with low clock jitters in the music.

The price tag for the Forbidden City Ping runs a steep $3,000 which for a CD player is a little “forbidding” for me.

Source: Gadgetell