I have the CD9 and just love it for playing redbook CDs. Whereas other players might find a bit more detail, the CD9 is more musical. Many reviewers have written that it is one of the very few CD players that make CD's sound analogue.
Given that the maker is ARC and their forte is tubes I believe that the CD9 more than the CD6 is where you get something special.
Roy Gregory wrote about the CD9 about a month or two ago in HiFi+.
In a follow up to me he wrote,
"The Ref 9 might not be the most detailed player in the World, especially at low frequencies where it is a little warm and wooly, but it has one enormous virtue: where players like the dCS and Esoterics might lift more "words" off of the disc, the ARC manages to make the words it does lift into much more meaningful sentences and paragraphs. It may not have the detail when it comes to individual notes or technique, but it gives phrases and musical lines far more shape, creating a greater sense of the piece as a whole, where you are in it and where it's going. No wonder it's so much more enjoyable to listen to!"
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