| I read a show guide for a HiFi show at Heathrow. In it it said that
Woodside Electronics (owners of Radford) would be demonstrating
a CD player. Since this company presently only deals in Valve equipment
the logical conclusion is that this player would have a valve based
analogue section a.k.a Acuphase.
Attempting to anticipate the next step, I would guess that there
is a market for a valve based A-D converter box (the analogue section
would be valve , not the Digital though that really is a wild
idea,trouble is the box would have to be the size of a transit van)
A valve based analogue section could appeal to die hard analogue
ites .
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| withe ref to previous, the Radford Compact Disc player was reviewed
in the Oct issue of Hi-Fi news by Ken Kessler. It retails for just
under $1000 (pounds), and according to him competes favourably with
the CAL tempest. Radford intend to market the DAT for this unit
for around $500. It does not , however , use tubes i'm affraid.
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| Don't know if you're still interested: this is the first time I've seen this
conference or I'd have replied earlier.
Results first: I compared the Arcam Black Box 2 with the Musical Fidelity ( =
British Fidelity in the US?) Digilog D/A converters about three months ago, and
ended up buying the Digilog. The reason was that the Digilog was better able
to present unemphasised but musically important detail. I compared the two
using an Arcam Delta 170 transport, connected with an optical link.
The dealer was Reading Hi-Fi, who are very helpful. I spent about an hour at
the shop listening to a Meridian 207 and an Arcam Delta 170/Black Box 2, and
then borrowed the Arcam units, the Digilog and an MF 3b preamplifier for the
weekend. (The Meridian was nothing like as good - I was surprised. Maybe it
was an early unit; apparently they've improved a lot.)
Comparing the two D/As was initially very difficult. I started out feeling
that the results were identical, but after about an hour of trying a lot of
different discs something 'clicked' (in me not the system!), and the difference
became increasingly obvious. I'll try to describe it.
Both D/As immediately impressed me with the way in which they picked up subtle
detail, certainly in comparison with my old player. There were sounds present
that I'd not previously been aware of, and the ones I had previously heard were
presented earlier - they didn't just pop up out of thin air, I could hear far
earlier into the attack of each note or sound. I don't like to emphasise
sounds here, as though I were talking about just noises. I'm talking about
musical detail, about the way an instrument behaves.
What became clear was that the Digilog went a little further than the BB2 in
this. It was better at giving a picture of the space in which the musicians
were playing. This was especially obvious, amusingly so, on recordings where
it was clear that some section had been recorded in a different environment,
perhaps with less people in the room or whatever, and then introduced onto the
master: I could hear the new room appear, then something would be played, and
then the room would go away again - and not just during quiet passages. The
BB2 seemed to give the same information but in a slightly cruder and less
believable manner: not a gross difference but enough to impair recognition of
what was going on.
Anyway, outside the context of critical comparison, in normal listening I ended
up feeling a lot more comfortable using the Digilog. Its natural presentation
of detail has to have helped here. I do have to say though, I greatly prefer
good vinyl on my relatively humble Axis/K9, as it does all this even better!
Nick Shipman
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I was thinking about digital outputs on CDs/DATs the other day, and it
occurred to me that I don't know how they work.
Is the digital output the pure bits as they come off the disk ? Or does
the transport apply the error correction ? If the transport does some
processing on the bit stream first, how does the clock get sent to the
D/A box ? Does the D/A get to see the out of band information (P and Q
bits etc) ?
Trevor
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I've been borrowing a Meridian 203B DAC this weekend, to see what
difference it made to our relatively old-tech Phillips CD360. The
answer appeared to be not a great deal.
It seemed to be a little more detailed, a little less harsh, and
perhaps a little more musical than the 360. However, the subjective
difference wasn't as great as between the 360 and the CD850 we had the
other week.
I found this quite interesting, as in this month's "Audiophile/Hi-Fi
Answers", there is an article about a person who visited several
dealers in Liverpool with his Phillips CD160, and asked them how they
would go about upgrading. His choice of the solutions offered was the
Meridian DAC, which he reckoned offered a reasonable improvement over
the basic CD160. What's more, the demonstration system used was almost
exactly the same as ours (Mission Cyrus I/Royd Sintras). I was under
the impression that the CD160 was the same as the CD360, but without
remote control and FTS (of course, I could be wrong about that). No two
sets of ears are alike...
Trevor
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