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Tried the Toshiba 3950 tonight -- WOW!

I've been reading many posts about these cheap new DVD players used as CD players, so I decided to try one out tonight. My Wife needed a DVD player for her sewing room so I figured this would be a good chance to try one!

First off my current system, CEC TL51Z belt drive player used as a transport to drive an Audio Note DAC 3 (original model). This goes to a homebuilt passive pre with 24 step attenuators, driving Bottlehead eXcites (paraglow with 45 tubes) driving home designed Lowther speakers.

Straight out of the box the sound was astounding! The soundstage is amazing, WIDE and DEEP, probably the best I have ever heard from a CD. The resolution of subtle detail and microdynamics is very good, not as good as the DAC 3, but better than any $1k player I've heard. It blew away the TL51Z. The 3950 did a wonderful job conveying the soul of the music. Again not as good as the DAC 3, but quite close. The sound was not edgy, grainy, harsh or any such thing, it was very smooth, but not syrupy or stodgy at all. The details just flowed through.

There were two things about the sound I had problems with, one, the bass is not that great. It feels like the botom octave or two is not coming through. Drums still have quite an impact, its not wimpy per se, just missing the really deep underpinnings. Two, it gets quite congested when playing loud complex passages. On one song the backup singers disappeared and the soundstage collapsed into a cave when things got realy wound up. On the DAC 3 the all the singers were clearly audible and the soundstage stayed wide.

I was a bit annoyed by some of the ergonomic issues. For one the display does not show the track number, just the time into the current track (whatever that might be). Number two, pressing the stop button then pressing the play button starts up where it was before pressing stop. That might be how DVD players work, but non of my CD players do that. Three the skip backward button didn't let you skip backwards through the tracks, it worked just like the reverse button. The skip forward button worked fine though.

BTW the 3950 works great as a transport for the DAC 3, I was hard pressed to hear any diffeences betwen them as transports.

And all this was without any extended burn in, I'll give it my usual treatment and see what happens.

All in all I was very impressed with this unit. I could not believe these cheap DVD players were any good. Well I was wrong, the Toshiba 3950 makes a VERY GOOD cd player, much better than it has any right to be. Its overall sound is probably better than most $1k players of yesteryear. The best of the past are still better, but its not all that wide a gap.

Warning! Don't use the interconnects that come with the player, they are junk, use decent quality interconnects. With the ones in the box the whole high end detail goes away and the soundstage collapses.

Some work beefing up the power supply would probably get rid of the congestion issue and probably help the bass. With the price so cheap I would think anybody could try modifying this.

John S.

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