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Re: perspective/thoughts

203.216.48.245

Posted by jcarr on April 5, 2001 at 21:26:29

In Reply to: perspective/thoughts posted by Jazz Inmate on April 5, 2001 at 16:32:58:

Jazz Inmate,

Speaking as someone who has worked and consulted for some of the bigger Japanese electronic companies, while it is true that most of the audio products in the mass-market sector from the big Japanese brands use low-cost parts, this most certainly isn't true for their high-end stuff (which usually isn't exported outside of Japan - the SCD-1 is something of an exception).

And yes, at these price levels, the engineers at these companies do tweak and listen, and quite extensively, too. While you may not always agree with the sonic result, my experience has been that the amount of tweaking and listening going on with the high-end audio groups of the big Japanese electronic companies is greater than that of many US high-end companies. And they have much greater financial and engineering resources, too. Would a US high-end company be able to invent the SACD system and be able to pull off a design like the SCD-1 from scratch? If they could, how much would it cost?

In addition to analog and digital electronic engineering divisions, Panasonic has daughter companies that make capacitors, resistors, semiconductors, motors and so on, and all of these companies do make special parts on the request of the engineers in the audio division. For their good stuff, the Panasonic engineers use special ZIF-like jigs that allow them to quickly and easily try out different parts until they get the sound that they want.

As far as I know, many of the exotic "audiophile" parts from Japan were originally created on the behest of the big Japanese electronic brands. Black Gate originally started out as a Toshiba project, the 2SK147 high-gm JFETs were made by Toshiba's semiconductor division for its Aurex audio division, Sony has had a direct hand in the development of the Nichicon Muses, Panasonic makes its own "Purism" and "Take-Bamboo" caps, Elna has made customs for everyone in the industry, the Hokuriku tantalums were made because Stax wanted a high-quality resistor that didn't contain ferromagnetic materials, and so on.

To mention some hands-on tweaking experience, I haven't modded an SCD-1 yet, but I have worked over Sony's DAS-R10 extensively. This is a DAC that sells in Japan for JPY800,000.

The grades of parts that it uses are not that bad. Most of the electrolytics are Silmic electrolytics, which are Elna's highest grade, but Sony further had Elna make "specials" by sandwiching the top and bottom of the caps with thick constrained-layed damping.

Most of the resistors are gold-plated Riken RMGs, which sell for about JPY180 each. The coupling caps are high-voltage ASC polypropylenes. The smaller caps are mostly copper-foil polystyrenes with constrained-layer damping around them.

All of the signal and power wiring is multi-strand 6N high-purity copper, and every bit of it is marked with directionality indicators.

The analog circuit board appears to be of some sort of high-frequency polyester material. The DAC and digital filters are custom hybrid modules built on aluminum daughter boards, rather than monolithic integrated circuits. The grounding and power supply feeds are done through elevated busses rather than using circuit board traces.

The analog boards are mounted through a combination of teflon cubes and thick felt, while the other boards are mounted via teflon sheeting. The chassis panels are also mounted via either teflon sheeting or neoprene rubber. There is a big toriodal power transformer in there that wouldn't be out of place in many power amps.

And so on. The personality of this DAC as it was voiced-in by Sony is that it has a rather big and powerful bottom-end, with a fairly sweet midrange, and an extended but mild-sounding top-end. It is a fairly "musical", non-aggravating and relaxed sound. If fact, it is quite likeable. But open-sounding it is not.

After working on it many times and listening to it after each step, I conclude that the original sound was the result of deliberate voicing/tweaking towards a very specific sonic goal and more than a few hours of trial-and-error work.

While it hasn't been so hard to "improve" individual aspects of the sound by swapping parts, values or changing wire and jumper configurations to effect different board layouts, it has been quite hard to improve the performance across the board and also keep the original sonic personality of the Sony intact.

I tried to replace the AD712 opamp with various Burr-Browns, Analog Devices (including the 744/811 hybrid), and NatSemis. In general, the resolution went up but the bottom end became emasculated. Now the AD712 is a cheap part compared to the BB's, but it is also cheap compared to the cost of those big blue Rikens, and there are dozens of those and only two of the AD712s. Which suggests that the reason why the AD712 was chosen was not for cost reasons but because it gave the Sony engineers the sound that they were looking for.

When I replaced some of the Rikens with Vishay S102Ks, again the bottom-end went into hiding and the dynamic range seemed to shrink. There were a couple of locations where replacing the Rikens with ceramic-body Caddocks yielded a useful increase in resolution without much alteration of the tonal balance, but I certainly had to search to find those points.

Beefing up the voltage regulation and the local bypasses turned out to yield a better combination of improved resolution without frequency spotlighting or shifts in the tonal balance.

Today, in addition to the above, I am running the R10 with a fair amount of foamed nitrogen-PE Audioquest wire, and the output caps are a mixture of MIT polypropylene and polystyrene as well as ASC teflons. However, the values are different. Since some of the tweaks (as mentioned above) increased the resolution but also emasculated the lower frequencies, I had to increase the output cap values and juggle the constructions to compensate.

I have no doubt that the sound of the SCD-1 can be changed to better fit audiophile preferences, and you may not even like the sound very much in its stock form. Nevertheless, as far as I know, this is not because Sony hasn't cared or tried to give it a good shot. And it's probably not even because Sony tried to cut costs and every corner that they could find.

If anything, it is probably because they are simply looking for a different kind of sound than you are.

hth,
jonathan carr

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