A few months ago I wrote about the Plus record player that puts speakers, amplification and wireless tech in a single cabinet with a turntable on top; a complete vinyl system in just one box. The reader reaction was immediate and exceptional, and everyone had just one question; where can I buy one?

It seems lots of people who want good quality music want one box that does it all. And so to Ruark’s R5 that, like the Plus, does it all. Except the R5 is based around CDs rather than vinyl. Ruark, a family-owned British hi-fi brand, started up in 1986 when CDs began to clobber vinyl, and the company heritage is all digital.

First and foremost the R5 is simple. It’s a single box with a display and a CD slot at the front, nicely tactile controls grouped intuitively around a selector wheel on top, and inputs and outputs at the rear; enough to satisfy the needs of about 99 per cent of people.

The user guide is logical, helpful and detailed, the set-up is dead simple. It only took minutes before I had the R5 hooked into my Wi-Fi and, thus, all the music on my computer and my phone, not to mention Spotify, Deezer, Amazon Music and Tidal. There’s an optical connection for the television, a USB handling MP3, AAC, WAV, FLAC and WMA and a phono connection as well as RCAs in and out.