PS Audio and Naim Each Lost a Disc Product to Drive Supply

Two products are gone, and both makers say so in their own words: PS Audio’s PMG SACD Transport and Naim’s Uniti Star. Naim’s own page for the Star now reads “This product is no longer available”, and PS Audio’s founder wrote in January that “the drives appropriate for a PMG are no longer available”.

That is the confirmed part. Discs still play, Naim says it stopped the Star in order to keep mechanisms for servicing, and nothing either company has published says the category is closing.

What each company actually said

17 June 2024	PS Audio’s Paul McGowan, on the PS Audio forum: “we have to place our last order (and they doubled the price of the mechanisms to boot!)”.
29 January 2026	McGowan: “Marantz, the maker of the drive ceased production last year and we bought all their remaining inventory.”
30 January 2026	McGowan: “The drives appropriate for a PMG are no longer available.” He adds that building a mechanism in-house is beyond a company whose work is “transistors, tubes, capacitors and code”, and that PS Audio will take “one more shot” at a transport it might launch in 2027 — under the Stellar name rather than PMG.
16 August 2026	Richard Dane, an administrator of Naim’s own forum: “The mech suddenly ceased production… they had to stop making the Star to preserve what mech stocks they still have.” A replacement drive Naim had found was itself discontinued before it could be designed in.

PS Audio’s store still lists the PMG Signature SACD Transport, at $8,999 and out of stock, read on 20 September 2026. Naim’s page for the Uniti Star is still up too, carrying the unavailability line above the section that sells CD playback and ripping.

The replacement Naim shipped instead

Naim did not leave the slot empty in its range. Its Uniti Star Lite does the streaming and the amplification and nothing else: the Star’s specification lists 12kg and CD playback, the Lite’s lists 11kg and no disc anything. A kilogram and a drive is the whole difference on the published sheets.

A cheaper successor that drops a feature is a pattern worth recognising before you trade up, and it is the same shape as every other case where a newer model is not the better buy.

What ran out, and why swapping is hard

A CD mechanism is sold as an assembly — the sled, the laser pickup and the servo board that drives both, as one unit with its own firmware interface. Designing a different one in means new control code and mechanical rework, which is why neither company treated it as a parts substitution.

The trigger is dated to June 2024. The Japanese hi-fi trade site avcat.jp reported on 12 June 2024 that D&M, the owner of Denon and Marantz, had notified manufacturers that final orders for its externally sold SACD/CD mechanism were due by the end of July that year, and described it as the only such mechanism then sold to outside firms anywhere. That one is carried here as reporting, not as a company statement: the notice went to trade customers rather than to the public, and we found nothing published by D&M in its own name. What is first-party is McGowan’s reaction five days later, on PS Audio’s forum, confirming the last order and the doubled price.

What the headlines this weekend add, and what they do not

Tom’s Hardware ran this on 20 September 2026 under the line that the collapse of mainstream optical drive supply “kills high-end CD players”, crediting Headphonesty, whose piece carries the date 16 September 2026. Both name the same two companies.

Two manufacturers and one supplier is what the evidence supports, and this page does not extend it into a claim about the trade as a whole. The 2024 avcat.jp report listed brands it expected the notice to hit — dCS, CH Precision, WADAX, Metronome Technologie, Goldmund, Soulnote and McIntosh — but that was a forecast, and no statement from any of them in its own name turned up here. The documented failure is one mechanism leaving the market, not every mechanism.

Neither is demand the thing that broke. The RIAA’s own mid-year report puts US CD revenue at $171.1 million for the first half of 2026, up 58.6 percent year on year on 17.5 million units. The discs are selling; the drives for one class of expensive machine are not being made.

One gap is worth naming plainly. Naim has published no explanation in its own name. The product page states the unavailability and stops there; the reason exists only as a post by an administrator of Naim’s forum. Its news page carries nothing about the Star or the mechanism, though that proves little on its own — the newest item on it is dated 24 July 2025. PS Audio’s statements are forum posts too, but they are the founder’s, under his own name, on his own company’s site.

If you own discs

• Your player has not changed. Nothing published here stops an existing machine reading a disc. Naim says the mechanisms it held back are for servicing, and PS Audio said in 2024 that it bought “ample stocks for warranty and new production”.
• Ask about parts before you pay for a repair, not after. Neither maker has published how many mechanisms it is holding or for how long, so the answer is specific to your model and the day you ask.
• Rip what you care about, and treat that rip as one copy rather than as a backup. A ripped collection outgrows a free cloud tier quickly, for the same reason five gigabytes is not a phone backup.
• The disc remains the copy you own. That is the practical difference this site keeps coming back to, because the word “buy” does not mean buy on a digital storefront.

If you are thinking of buying a player

• Buy on the machine, not on the scare. Two products left the market; players and transports are still being sold by other firms, and no evidence here says that changes on a date.
• Ask what mechanism it uses and who makes it. A maker that builds its own transport sits in a different position from one buying an assembly, and that question is answerable before you spend.
• Do not read the price as the safety margin. The $8,999 machine is the one that ran out of drives here, which is its own small illustration of why paying more does not automatically get you a better product.
• We are not predicting prices. Nothing on this page supports a forecast about what used or remaining stock will cost, and anyone telling you to buy today because of that is guessing.

What this cannot tell you

How long either company can service what it sold. Whether a third maker is in the same position — nobody else’s first-party statement was found. Whether the Stellar transport McGowan floated for 2027 arrives, since he described it as an attempt rather than a plan. And nothing about how any of these machines sound: this is a reading of published pages and posts, and no article under this byline has listened to one.