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Well, wasn't it this year 30 years ago that CD players first became available as a sort of mass market item? How many of you bought one of these (like me) and figured you were at the leading edge of modern music reproduction?
Funny when you look at this unit, which really only had about 14 bits of resolution at best with those early chips, it's a lot sharper looking industrial design then much of what ships these days.
This unit did use one of the early TDA converters, which was an NOS type chip- non-over-samplilng, something that is prized by many listeners still, and a lot of boutique players on the market that use later versions of these chips.
What I noticed at the time was that it had pretty dang good bass extension, more clarity in some parts of the lower treble where phono cartridges often had tracking issues, but the midrange in general seemed to be washed out, the HF reproduction chalky, and imaging hardly existed. But hey, it's Digital! It's new!
This player was eventually replaced by a Sony XA7-ES from the Sony outlet store; it came with a 5 year warranty, had a cool working transport mechanism (optical assembly was fixed; CD sled was moved relative to it), sounded better than any other early 90's CD player I heard, and I literally wore out the first optical pickup assembly within the 5 year warranty and had that replaced under warranty, before later giving it away to a friend who uses it still.
Sonically, it was better than the Philips, but had similar faults, just to a much lesser degree. This was around the time carousel CD players were becoming popular, and it was a more "purist" approach in every regard. It was also available in a champagne color as well as black.
Measured performance was very good by that days standards.
Especially the low level -90 dB 1 kHz sine, for which many players couldn't resolve anything...
HF Intermodulation
My next major player was the Sony SCD-777-ES; the "baby brother" of the SCD-1, and which differed mainly in color and not having the bogus design balanced outputs of the SCD-1, which actually harmed performance. Don't take my word, take Charles Hansen's.
This is a brute of a player, one of the first two SACD players in the world, and I still have mine, and it still plays fine... well, as fine as it ever did. It was a step up from the XA&-ES, but not as much as one would have hoped.
Noise performance was good,
But not as much improved as you might hope, as SACD is delta sigma and uses noise shaping to push the noise up in the HF area.
What does that mean? Here's the 16 bit 1 kHz performance of the SCD-1/SCD-777-ES versus an NAD M51.
NAD M51 1 kHz -90 db (this is just toggling a few bits with 16 bit data.
For reference, here is the NAD M51 with 24 bit -90 dB sine:
Still, that 777-ES was the best CD performance I'd heard in the 2000 time frame, and SACD's sounded considerably better, though often in large part due to much more careful mastering and addressing issues with the source material. That was the dirty little secret about a lot of CD releases in the 80's and early 90's, is that often 2nd and 3rd generation tapes were used, as the conventional wisdom then was that it was good enough; and these tapes often had compression and equalization originally setup for vinyl. Which was good for vinyl, not so good for digital.
I've had a couple more disk players since then, which have been enjoyable and clear improvements over the SCD-777-ES, but still weren't getting me where I thought I should be, based on my late 70's vinyl experience.
I'll leave it to you to as a homework assignment to figure out what they are/were, if it matters! For a lot of people, this is not the preferred technology path, and instead we have the concept of PC or Mac based music servers and standalone DACs. My first specific built music server was never fully finished for that task- even had a ton of music ripped, was ready to go, but ended up replacing that custom built PC (by me) with a Mac.
More later...
Funny when you look at this unit, which really only had about 14 bits of resolution at best with those early chips, it's a lot sharper looking industrial design then much of what ships these days.
This unit did use one of the early TDA converters, which was an NOS type chip- non-over-samplilng, something that is prized by many listeners still, and a lot of boutique players on the market that use later versions of these chips.
What I noticed at the time was that it had pretty dang good bass extension, more clarity in some parts of the lower treble where phono cartridges often had tracking issues, but the midrange in general seemed to be washed out, the HF reproduction chalky, and imaging hardly existed. But hey, it's Digital! It's new!
This player was eventually replaced by a Sony XA7-ES from the Sony outlet store; it came with a 5 year warranty, had a cool working transport mechanism (optical assembly was fixed; CD sled was moved relative to it), sounded better than any other early 90's CD player I heard, and I literally wore out the first optical pickup assembly within the 5 year warranty and had that replaced under warranty, before later giving it away to a friend who uses it still.
Sonically, it was better than the Philips, but had similar faults, just to a much lesser degree. This was around the time carousel CD players were becoming popular, and it was a more "purist" approach in every regard. It was also available in a champagne color as well as black.
Measured performance was very good by that days standards.
Especially the low level -90 dB 1 kHz sine, for which many players couldn't resolve anything...
HF Intermodulation
My next major player was the Sony SCD-777-ES; the "baby brother" of the SCD-1, and which differed mainly in color and not having the bogus design balanced outputs of the SCD-1, which actually harmed performance. Don't take my word, take Charles Hansen's.
This is a brute of a player, one of the first two SACD players in the world, and I still have mine, and it still plays fine... well, as fine as it ever did. It was a step up from the XA&-ES, but not as much as one would have hoped.
Noise performance was good,
But not as much improved as you might hope, as SACD is delta sigma and uses noise shaping to push the noise up in the HF area.
What does that mean? Here's the 16 bit 1 kHz performance of the SCD-1/SCD-777-ES versus an NAD M51.
NAD M51 1 kHz -90 db (this is just toggling a few bits with 16 bit data.
For reference, here is the NAD M51 with 24 bit -90 dB sine:
Still, that 777-ES was the best CD performance I'd heard in the 2000 time frame, and SACD's sounded considerably better, though often in large part due to much more careful mastering and addressing issues with the source material. That was the dirty little secret about a lot of CD releases in the 80's and early 90's, is that often 2nd and 3rd generation tapes were used, as the conventional wisdom then was that it was good enough; and these tapes often had compression and equalization originally setup for vinyl. Which was good for vinyl, not so good for digital.
I've had a couple more disk players since then, which have been enjoyable and clear improvements over the SCD-777-ES, but still weren't getting me where I thought I should be, based on my late 70's vinyl experience.
I'll leave it to you to as a homework assignment to figure out what they are/were, if it matters! For a lot of people, this is not the preferred technology path, and instead we have the concept of PC or Mac based music servers and standalone DACs. My first specific built music server was never fully finished for that task- even had a ton of music ripped, was ready to go, but ended up replacing that custom built PC (by me) with a Mac.
More later...
Granted, I don't listen to music at work as much as I used to.
Only to discover years later that my Teac A-100 cassette player probably sounded better :cry:
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