Fell Audio Fell Disc review

It’s fair to say the world of affordable hi-fi has shrunk and changed dramatically over the years. Gone are the days of the What Hi-Fi? budget CD player supertest, when it was easy for us to round up ten or twelve affordable machines to pit against each other.

Now, what we classify as an entry-level CD player has moved up a couple of price points, and you’ll be lucky to find more than a handful of options on the market.

This has left an opening for an ambitious company brave enough to throw its hat into the ring. Step forward Fell Audio, a new hi-fi brand born in the UK and backed by retailer Peter Tyson, a business with over 50 years of experience in the market.

Given all the brands and CD players to have passed through its showfloor over the years, it’s in the perfect spot to gauge the market and rival products. Can this new arrival freshen up what has become a relatively stagnant market in recent years?

Price

The Fell Disc is sold through UK retailer Peter Tyson, and you’ll also find it for sale on Amazon UK with plans for a wider rollout later this year.

It retails for £499, which places it up against the Marantz CD6007, a five-star machine and multiple What Hi-Fi? Award-winner. The Marantz officially retails for £449, but is regularly discounted to £349.

The lack of competition at this level of the market means other rivals are few and far between. Alternative disc spinners are available in the shape of the cheaper, four-star Cambridge Audio AXC35 (£299 / $350) and the more expensive, five-star Arcam CD5 (£699 / $699).

Build

On the face of it, the Fell Disc is a neat and eye-catching design. The silver chassis and black/green display combo harks back to the golden era of ’80s British hi-fi.

The Fell Audio logo looks tidy too – the way it nods to the Fells region in the north of England with a small bevelled mountain arrangement on the top is a nice, subtle touch.

Unsurprisingly, the Fell Disc has been designed to match its Fell Amp sibling, so you have an overhanging frame which wraps around the top and sides of the player.

This does make the display recessed, though, and depending on where you place the player, the frame can block your line of sight.

Build quality is okay for the money. Placed next to the Marantz CD6007, the slimmer Fell looks modern, but the Marantz still has class and refinement in spades.

The CD6007 might lack the fancy touch controls, but every element of the fascia feels rock solid, and the CD loading drawer is super smooth.

Design & features

The Fell Disc’s minimalist fascia with its slot-loading mechanism and touch-sensitive control buttons provides plenty of shelf appeal, but the large, slightly cumbersome-looking power button looks a little out of place, in our opinion.

The touch-sensitive controls look nice, but we don’t find them enjoyable to use, and they are sometimes hit and miss in terms of responsiveness.

Another quirk we discovered during testing was the repeat control, which you touch once to repeat the same track and touch again to repeat the whole CD. Fair enough. For some reason, though, the button keeps flashing in the latter mode, and won’t stop, which is rather strange.

We are big fans of the slot-loading mechanism, which is smooth and quiet, which isn’t always the case with this kind of design.

As far as displays go, the Fell Disc’s looks clear, but we did come across some viewing angle strangeness. Depending on your vantage point, it can appear with a green background with black text and numbers (which looks great), or a dark green background with light green text. And at certain angles, there’s a clash of two greens which almost cancel each other out. Not the end of the world, but quirky, nonetheless.

The Fell Disc comes with a matching remote control which is reassuringly quick to respond and zips through tracks should you want to skip to your favourite track on an album.

In terms of features, the Fell Disc offers everything you’d expect from a player at this price. There’s a pair of analogue RCA outputs on the rear, and both digital coaxial and digital optical outputs should you want to feed the player’s digital signal straight into an external DAC.

Sound

To test sound quality, we use the Fell Disc with three different amplifiers: our reference Burmester 088/911 Mk3 pre/power combination, a price-comparable amp in the shape of the Arcam A5, and we also partner it up with the matching Fell Amp.

After all, if you’re looking to build a system from scratch, there’s a good chance you’ll try both Fell Audio components together for system synergy.

We start with the Burmester and feed the Fell Disc Daft Punk’s Get Lucky. First impressions are that you’re getting a big, broad sound with a lot of weight and power behind it.

There’s plenty of heft and solidity to the tune’s funky bassline, and there’s a satisfying sense of power behind the claps. You can imagine the Fell Disc grabbing someone’s attention straight out of the box.

But we switch to the Marantz CD6007, and the picture it paints is so much clearer. From the very first drum hit, there’s so much more zip and pizazz to the sound. The track sounds livelier and funkier, and just flows with greater dynamic contrast.

We switch over to Love The Way You Lie by Eminem and Rihanna, and it’s a case of more of the same. The Fell Disc communicates with the listener, but on a much more basic level. In isolation, it sounds quite authoritative and bold, but it’s also quite forward and relentless – there’s not much depth to the sound, space around the track’s different elements, or subtlety.

In the opening seconds of the track, played on the CD6007, you can sense the space around Rihanna’s vocal as it hangs in the middle of our stereo image. Through the Fell Disc, it doesn’t feel like there’s much dynamic differentiation or separation between her vocals and the piano.

It sounds flat, without much in the way of layering, which just isn’t the case when listening through the Marantz. There’s much more of a spark given off by the CD6007, with more layers of separation between the drum beat, the percussion that flits in and out of the image and Eminem’s vocal.

There’s weight behind each bass note as it slams into view, but dynamically, the presentation is quite stunted. The track has quite a few explosive punctuation points, but the Fell Disc fails to drive any of them home.

As Eminem’s vocals become more aggressive and angry as the track approaches its climax, it’s the Marantz CD6007 that conveys the shift in his emotions the clearest.

During testing, we do notice that you can get a small improvement in sound quality by turning off the display. In our experience, the effect is normally quite small, but in our opinion, here it does make the Fell’s presentation less noisy and a little clearer. It’s definitely something we’d recommend trying out for yourself.

We move from the Burmester to the Arcam A5 amp to give the Fell Disc a partner that’s more price comparable, and although the Fell feels more at home and less exposed, its shortcomings are still present.

Playing Nitin Sawhney's Anthem Without Nation, the Fell Disc struggles to deliver variance in bass notes - the CD6007 does a better job of communicating the different weights, textures and depths, and from the intro through the rest of the track, there’s a greater sense of freedom and space – the track sounds multi-dimensional through the Marantz and disappointingly flat and one dimensional through the Fell Disc.

During the first few seconds, with the hustle and bustle of the crowd combined with the newsreader’s voice over the top, the Fell has neither the insight nor clarity and separation that the Marantz brings.

In terms of dynamics, the crowd’s noise level is almost as loud as the newsreader's, which shows also a lack of subtlety and dynamic differentiation on Fell’s part. The presentation is congested, with the Fell Disc only scratching the surface of the information on the disc.

Finally, we take a listen to the Fell Disc with its matching Fell Amp sibling. Unsurprisingly, the two products match each other well in terms of maintaining a consistent tonal character.

The sound they produce is forceful and authoritative, but there’s still a major lack of subtlety, refinement and sophistication.

As a pair, they struggle for insight and clarity, unable to mould themselves to the dynamic requirements of different recordings.

Verdict

We have to say it was a brave and bold move for a new hi-fi brand to try and stake a claim to an area of the market that has seen a real lack of competition in recent years.

And to be fair, the Fell Disc’s powerful delivery does, initially, grab your attention. But the longer you play it, the quicker it starts to unravel, especially when placed up against the current class leader. It falls flat in several areas, which, unfortunately, makes it impossible to recommend at this level.

Review published: 4th September 2025

SCORES

• Sound 2
• Features 5
• Build 4

MORE:

Read the matching Fell Audio Fell Amp review

Also consider the Marantz CD6007

Read our Arcam CD5 review

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