This elite CD player is a top-class transport of delight

If you haven't written your letter to Santa yet, you might like to request the latest launch from Shanling. Its new CT90 CD transport is a high-end CD spinner with Hi-Res Audio support, impressive specifications, and a sub-$900 price tag.

The CT90 is similar to Shanling's 2025 ET3, which attracted great reviews, but it differs in several key respects. The first and most obvious is that it's bigger: where the ET3 is a half-width design, the CT90 is wider at two-thirds of a standard component's width.

It also drops some of the connectivity. The ET3 comes with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but the CT90 is Bluetooth only, so it doesn't have AirPlay or DLNA. What it does have, though, is a solid specification for audio CDs and USB drives.

Shanling CT90 transport: key features and pricing

As ever with CD transports, the CT90 is designed to connect to a separate DAC – there's no digital to analogue conversion in the device itself.

The mechanism in the CT90 is a Philips DA11 with a Sanyo SAA7824 servo and a linear power supply that's designed to minimise electrical noise.

There's also a USB-A port on the rear so you can connect flash and USB drives, and there are two AES/EBU outputs, plus I2S over HDMI with ten different pin configuration options for maximum external DAC compatibility.

The CT90 retains the internal upsampler of the CT3, which enables it to upgrade your audio CDs to PCM768kHz or DSD512 over i2S, although that's connection-dependent. If you're outputting via coax or TOSLINK you're limited to PCM192kHz or DSD64 via DoP, and the USB output is limited to 16-bit/44kHz. The CT90 also supports MQA and MQA-CD files.

Although there's no Wi-Fi, the Bluetooth module supports aptX, aptX HD and LDAC so you can stream from your phone or tablet. And there's a decently large 4.8-inch colour display on the front so you can see key information about the currently playing CD or USB device.

The Shanling CT90 will ship from the end of December with an international price of $899 (about £665 / €761 / AU$1,399). However, while it's priced in dollars that won't be what US customers pay as that price doesn't take current US tariffs into account.