Harman/Kardon FL8450 CD-changer
The Harman Kardon FL8450's simple styling could be interpreted as nice and streamlined or plain and boring, depending on your point of view. As with other carousels, its wide loading drawer could lead you to mistake it for a laserdisc player at first glance. The FL8450 loads five discs on its platter, which when opened extends a full 10 inches so that four disc wells are fully exposed; the fifth can be dialed up by pressing the Disc Skip button. All edges in the vicinity of the platter are nicely rounded to avoid any possibility of scratching a disc. When the drawer is closed the changer searches the wells to ascertain which are loaded. You can choose a specific disc for playback by pressing its corresponding Disc Select button. Once a disc is playing, you can still open the drawer to load or unload other discs without interrupting the music - a great feature that has lately become almost standard on carousels. We were a little surprised in this case, however, to find that pressing stop and opening the drawer did not automatically rotate the halted disc out of the playing position; you have to hit the Disc Skip button to get at it.
Other features include the usual transport controls, track and disc repeat, random play of tracks on one disc or across all discs, track and disc intro playback, and a headphone jack with a volume control. The changer lets you program playback sequences for as many as thirty-two tracks. You can select each desired disc and track, building the sequence one track at a time, then you can review the sequence. Or, conveniently, you can use a Delete button to omit specific tracks or discs. Home recordists will appreciate the ability to automatically or manually sequence as many as thirty or thirty-two tracks, respectively, from the current disc for recording to a tape of specified duration. In the automatic edit mode, you select a duration with the Tape Size button, and the changer determines which tracks can be fit onto each tape side. In the manual edit mode, you choose the tracks yourself, and the changer will warn you if a track won't fit in the time remaining. Either way, the FL8450 automatically inserts a 4-second pause between tracks so that the search mechanisms on cassette decks can more reliably find selections.
A blue fluorescent display provides disc, track, and time information as well as other status indicators. The wireless remote duplicates all of the primary front-panel controls and adds a ten-button keypad, A-Â repeat, and an on/off/dim switch for the front-panel display. Around back, the FL8450 sports fixed-level analog outputs, an optical digital output, and remote in/outs for wired control interaction with other Harman Kardon equipment.
The FL8450 performed consistently well on the test bench, with none of the measurements outstandingly good or bad. As with most CD players, frequency response was flat to within a small fraction of a decibel and distortion was below a hundredth of a percent at full output. The linearity error of the digital-to-analog (D/A) converter measured +1.7 dB at -90 dB, which is acceptable but not great performance. As with most midprice CD players, the FL8450's overall electrical performance should be more than sufficient for downstream reproducing equipment, as our critical listening tests confirmed. The only weakness we found was that the player skipped when it was mildly jolted on either the top or sides.
