From its base in Italy, the firm produces amplifiers and CD players that make a strong visual statement (they presumably don't please all tastes, but we think they're gorgeous) and generally seem to perform as well as they look.

Two CD players grace the current range: for £4,500 you can have the futuristic-looking and fantastically named Endorphin, but a little under half that amount will buy you the Digit.

Okay, so the Digit doesn't get as punchy a name and is clearly less visually arresting than its more expensive sibling, but it does share quite a lot of the Endorphin's technology.

In terms of size and shape, the Digit would appear to be in danger of trespassing on Cyrus's territory, even though the look is significantly different. Apart from anything else, there are valves sticking up from the top.

This is a Pathos speciality - most of the company's products use valves in combination with solid-state components, so as to make the most of each type's strengths. In this case, the valves are E88CC types - a familiar twin triode (two active elements per 'bottle') that partners well with transistors, not least because, by valve standards, it works at quite low voltages.

Are valves in a CD player just for show, or do they offer 'to taste' tuning (degradation, even) of the sound? Not according to Pathos, whose justification for them is well founded.

Indeed, many designers would agree that the simple but high-performance circuits which are typical of valve applications have a lot to offer compared with the sometimes over-complex designs all too easily cobbled together with transistors and their miniaturised relatives, integrated circuits.

Yes, the latter are an unavoidable part of digital audio life, but why compound the potential offence? Within its stainless-steel case, the Digit spins discs on what is, in fact, a DVD transport.

As Pathos points out, it does exactly the same job as a dedicated CD one, but it does have one small downside: it takes longer to load discs, as it looks for DVD information before scanning for CD information. In common with most DVD drives, it emits a faintly audible ticking as it reads the disc, although it's actually inaudible in any practical sense.

Conversion from digital to analogue is carried out by an integrated circuit, in this case from Cirrus Logic, the same chip that carries out digital filtering (as is usual these days). There's no upsampling, but there is upsampling and word-length reduction as part of the filtering process. Further ICs handle the balanced audio output.

Quite a large area of the audio circuit board is laid out for extra components but not actually populated with them, and the total audio path is about as simple as can be. Power comes via a small toroidal transformer snugly mounted at the rear of the case. Internal and external build quality seems generally very good.

Just about the only thing we could find that struck us as being a little bizarre, not to say annoying, was the complete absence of legends on the front panel buttons. Yes, one gets used to the layout and which button does which, but we did curse it once or twice. And yes, there's always the remote.