CD / SACD players and transports — EvoAria Evo Era

The Evo Era is a battery-powered CD player from EvoAria, a company founded in early 2025 by Thomas Liang, formerly chief executive of Cayin. It is the second EvoAria product after the Evo One Android music player, and it combines a disc transport with a USB DAC, a Bluetooth receiver and a hybrid headphone amplifier in a single aluminium case.

Key specs that matter

Two conversion paths are fitted. One uses a pair of ESS ES9069Q chips, each working in mono for its own channel, and the other is a discrete string R-2R ladder of more than 170 precision resistors with separate supplies for left and right, which runs either with oversampling (OS) or without it (NOS). The balanced 4.4 mm headphone socket gives up to 1,050 mW into 32 ohm in TURBO mode, rising to 1,500 mW when a compatible USB-PD supply is connected with DC INPUT enabled. A 3.5 mm headphone jack sits alongside it. Over USB, an XMOS XU316 receiver accepts PCM up to 768 kHz and DSD512, and Bluetooth 5.4 runs on a Qualcomm QCC5181 chip with aptX Lossless, aptX Adaptive, aptX HD and LDAC. The 10,000 mAh battery lasts about 9 to 14 hours of disc playback depending on settings. The case measures 182 x 182 x 29 mm and weighs about 1,025 g.

Engineering and use context

Two KORG Nutube 6P1 triodes sit in the analogue section. In TR mode they are bypassed and the path is fully transistor, while the VELVET and LUMINA modes are two hybrid variants with the valves in circuit. Any of the three can be combined with the delta-sigma DAC or with the R-2R ladder in either mode, which gives nine combinations. An FPGA with 100K logic elements handles digital processing and calibration of the resistor network. The amplifier switches between Class A and Class AB, has Low, Mid and High gain and P, P+ and TURBO power settings. Level control pairs an ALPS potentiometer with an NJW1195A electronic volume chip. A custom transport with optimised servo control can also rip discs to USB storage as WAV files while playing. The housing is micro-blasted, anodised 6063 aluminium, with a 2.2-inch TFT screen, four buttons and a Power/Hold switch. A full charge over USB Power Delivery at 9 V and 2 A takes about 3.5 hours.

Pairing

Beyond headphones and in-ear monitors, the Evo Era can feed a home system through its 3.5 mm line output at 2.1 V or a balanced 4.4 mm line output at 4.2 V. Optical and coaxial outputs pass PCM up to 192 kHz and DSD64, which lets the player act purely as a disc transport ahead of an outboard converter.

Alternatives

EvoAria makes no other CD player, and its other models are the Evo One digital audio players.