Am I really going to like SACD?

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by ress4279, Nov 8, 2004.

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  1. Tony Plachy

    Tony Plachy Senior Member

    Location:
    Pleasantville, NY
    John is so right :righton: his experience and mine are identical. Given that you can get in so cheap today (not the case for the early adapters of SACD) I would by a cheap SACD player and see if you like it. If you do (I think you will) you can later up-grade to a hi-end SACD player and if you then decide that you want to get even more out of your CD's you can even later add an out board DAC of your choice (most hi-end SACD players have great transports).
     
  2. JMCIII

    JMCIII Music lover first, audiophile second.

    Amen brother Alp, amen.
     
  3. michael w

    michael w New Member

    Location:
    aotearoa
    I think whether you are going to be happy with SACD or not depends largely on your previous digital experience.

    If you are used to listening to Red Book CD's on a cheapo CD or DVD players, you will probably find SACD "blows you away" as another poster wrote.

    But if you have heard high quality Red Book playback then you may well be less than impressed.

    I'm still waiting for that "blown away" SACD moment.
     
  4. smilin

    smilin New Member

    Location:
    chi
    Michael, try my apl sacd 1000 and you will be blown away too,and yes I do have a superb redbook player, but done right, sacd IMHO blows away even great redbook. This is true with DVD-A too. They are just more dynamic, more extended, tighter, soundstage better, but most especially more analogue, sounding. I have brought my player to friends homes who have outstanding TT's and have converted them with sacd vs. vinyl sessions. I am sure, with the right digital, you would be converted too. :goodie: :righton:
     
  5. Tony Plachy

    Tony Plachy Senior Member

    Location:
    Pleasantville, NY
    Michael, Please fill out your profile so we can all see what your high quality red book play back system is. :)
     
  6. AudioEnz

    AudioEnz Senior Member

    I'm with Michael on this. (btw, Michael is a writer for AudioEnz but, as he lives far away from me, our experience of players is quite different).

    I've heard three or four SACD players in my system, including the Stereophile Class A rated Marantz 8260. The Marantz on SACD was a bit better than my seven year old Meridian 508.20 (playing redbook) in some areas, and a bit worse in other areas. A Pioneer universal from three years back (a well built player that retailed here for a similar price to a Rega Planet) was not as good on SACD as my Meridian on redbook.

    I'd love it if these cheapie universal to moderate priced players sounded really good. But in my experience, they don't.
     
  7. michael w

    michael w New Member

    Location:
    aotearoa
    It's been mentioned before, my current CDP is a Marantz CD-23, from the JDM Marantz Music Link range; CDM9-Pro transport, 1-bit DAC, stuffed full of Marantz' H(ot)DAM (!) modules.
    Possibly the pinnacle of Marantz 1-bitness.

    Next to unheard of outside Japan, AFAIK there was only one officially imported into the US by Marantz as a sample. The lucky buyer of that example contacted me a few years ago via Audio Asylum. It was decided not to sell the Music Link line as it was too small and cute for American tastes...

    So far I haven't found anything comprehensively better that didn't cost an arm or a kidney.

    Otherwise as far as Red Book players go, various Wadia, Krell, Jadis, Goldmund players have blown me away.

    :D
     

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  8. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    Hmmm, seems to me that the best course of action would be to buy into the format(s) that holds the majority of music YOU listen to and can afford.

    By that logic, my choice is to buy a better turntable, a better soundcard, and keep my CD player in good shape.

    Right now, i'm listening to my needle drop of Ramsey Lewis' "Wade In The Water" album on CD-R, and the smoothness, bass, and overall warmth and depth has me happy.
     
  9. Robin L

    Robin L Musical Omnivore

    Location:
    Fresno, California

    I don’t know how many of you remember this, but about ten years ago there was some talk about Radio Shack’s portable CD player, the Optimus 3400. There was talk that this cheap portable player was better than megabuck high-end CD players. So I bought one.

    As it turned out, it did sound better than my other cheap player, some JVC thing. I’ve tweaked/messed with audio all my life. My tweak on the JVC was to stick small value MIT Caps (capacitors) on the power supply caps. As far as I could tell this dropped the noise floor of the CD player and the resolution seemed to increase. I’d be listening to these CD players through Stax electrostatic headphones, the expensive ones with the dedicated tube amplifiers. So I had no problem hearing differences in the noise floor or timbre or the overall sound quality of these players.

    Anyway, I get the Optimus 3400 and start fiddling with it. As it turns out, it sounds better with batteries than with the wall-wart. You know what a wall-wart is? It’s one of those ac adapters that take up two electrical outlets, with a small transformer and diode bridge pumping out noisy dc. Not much room for filter caps. Garbage wire. As cheap as it gets. Anyway, as it turns out the player sounds better with batteries. Gel-cells (miniature, sealed lead/acid batteries intended for wheelchairs and such) produced better sound than the AAA-cells that come with the portable player. What I’m thinking is that quiet power is better than noisy power and that more power (more amperage) is better than less power. I figure that the batteries must have self-noise, so I do the MIT-Cap thing with the battery. And that also turns out to be an audible improvement. Truth to tell, I push this set of kludges as far as I can, resulting in a kitty-litter box full of ugly stuff as the power supply.

    At the same time, I’m doing a little bit of recording. Minimal-miking (ORTF) of classical concerts---mostly Early Music performed in churches. I’m getting enough work that I need to do some editing, So I’ve got a sound card in my computer with SPDIF ins and outs and guess what? The Optimus 3400 is the only portable CD player I’ve ever seen with a SPDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface) output. So I can try out the little CD player as a transport. The JVC also had a SPDIF out so I could compare the two. The Optimus 3400 stomped the JVC player, the distance in sound quality between the two CD transports was enormous. Eventually I get a t.c. electronics M-2000 reverb box. It has great sounding d/a converters. So the sound from CDs had moved to an altogether different---better---level.

    I send a letter to “The Absolute Sound” about all this, pointing out the need to rethink the design of power supplies for CD players. I find out that the letter is published when i get a phone call from John Curl, who congratulates me. This starts up a dialog/ friendship that continues to this day.

    In case you don’t know, John Curl is a well known electronics engineer. His Vendetta Research phono pre-amp is a high-end audio touchstone, a design that changed the playing field for high-end audio gear. Right now he is doing design work for Parasound, among other things.

    The fact that power supplies have to be quite and stable is underlined when Mr. Curl shows me what noise components are in unfiltered A/C. As it turns out, the high frequency noise that digital domain gear (transports, converters) throws back into a/c, messes up the sound of analog domain gear. So you want to electrically isolate digital gear from analog gear. In turn digital gear wants to be connected to silent, unmodulated, stable power just like any other piece of electronic gear.

    So John Curl turns me on to Jack Bybee and Bybee filters. Jack Bybee was a professor of physics at Stanford University. He came up with a room temperature superconductor. They were designed with the goal of reducing the self-noise of batteries. And this filter really does drop the noise floor on electronic equipment. I get two of the filters. They seemed to be particularly effective with digital gear.

    Ten years later and finally the price comes down on SACD playback gear to the point that I can buy a SACD player, and mess with it and not feel guilty. Sony’s DVP NS775V is marketed as a DVD player with “extras”. I plug it in, I hear the difference with the SACD layer right off and also notice that the resolution of RedBook playback is better than I expected. I had the sort of “aah!” of recognition I had with the Optimus 3400.

    Within a day of getting the player I call up John Curl, telling him that I’ve encountered another sort of Optimus 3400. It’s only fair to note that he really doesn't express much enthusiasm for the idea. He really doesn't like the sound of digital in a general way. As he’s (arguably) the world’s best designer of low-noise audio circuits, I’m sure he’s aware of just how much noise and garbage digital gear has. But he says that right now he’s using one of the cheap Sony SACD players and thinks that SACD sound is pretty good. Not as good as analog. He would much rather listen to LPs. And I really can’t blame him, considering how good his phono set up is.

    So I go back to my SACD player a little humbled but also aware of how many steps it took me to get that little portable CD player to really sing. The 3400 really was the stone in stone soup. John Curl pointed out that the one thing the 3400 had going for it was a really good transport mechanism. Knowing the design and specs for the transport mechanism in the 3400, he could predict that it would sound good as a transport. Supplied with a good power supply and a really good DAC, that little player could really sing.

    As I said before, the Sony DVP NS775V instantly reminded me of the 3400. But it does have a touch of low-level grunge, a sort of a sandpapery quality to the sound. I look at the amp for my Stax headphones and notice the a/c cable I made for it. Hospital plug, 12-guage Van den Hul silver-clad copper crystal leading to a Bybee filter. So I replace the captive a/c cord on the Sony DPV NS775, using the cable with its captive Bybee filter. That noise element, the slight harshness, is gone from the SACD player,

    I’m looking at web-sites offering modification of SACD players and notice that they have Bybee filters. I also notice that they swap out the op-amps.

    I should tell you that I attempted another little mod, attempting to hardwire some 18-guage Van den Hul silver-clad copper crystal interconnect to the audio outputs. This resulted in a much more detailed sound. On other people’s playback gear the sound was altogether too bright. Hooking the SACD player to other machines resulted in all sorts of aberrant reactions and audible nasties. My guess is that the machine has some sort of hiccup of an Op-amp between the posts marked “L” and “R”. I must have hooked up the wire right at the DAC output and just before the Op-amp. The fact is that the resolution of the player increased through my little kludge. It is also clear that the DAC needs some sort of buffer amp to connect to the real world. Thus the Op-amp swap-out and upgrade offered by the folks doing mods to these inexpensive players.

    As far as I can tell, $600 invested in a modded SACD player has a real chance of sounding at least as good as $600 of LP playback gear. Probably enough better to make the investment worthwhile. From my own experience, the mods offered on inexpensive SACD players would result in much better sound in RedBook CD playback.
     
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