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RE: Esoteric DV-60 vs. SCD-1 with VSEI mods

Dave,
As the designer of the Vacuum State Upgrades, let's see if I can answer your main question.

The original SONY SACD players were not made down to a price, the SCD-1 must have cost SONY far more than they sold it for - it was a "loss leader" to get SACD well known and well thought of. It's quality of engineering would have cost at least $20,000 if some audiophile company like ML or Wadia had been selling it.

But they really goofed in the audio section which they lifted from a BurrBrown application note, the digital sections were brilliant, and really SACD focussed, but the whole audio section was HUGELY overcomplex, with an originally balanced signal being converted to unbalanced and then back to balanced again, as one small example.

We investigated just how much of this complexity could be removed and still have it keep working, we found we could remove it all (!!) and it sounded better with every stage we eliminated. But it needed some filtering to eliminate the ultrasonic noise present in a SACD signal, and it also needed the capability to effectively drive the output interconnect cable. So we designed a replacement audio module, which replaces 2 DACs and some 9 opamps with three signal handling transistors (and a super powersupply), extends the bandwidth to the promised 100kHz, and sounds radically better, as evidenced by the reviews you can find on my website.

Later, much more work has been done on digital noise filtering, and recently we have introduced a vastly better clock, which we call the UberClock.

No machine SONY (or anyone) has since made has been so focussed on handling SACD as well as the SCD-1, they are all built down to a price with bought in chips to act as the DACs etc.

More info can be found on my website, but the reviews tell the results.

As you can tell, we are proud of the changes we have been be able to make in this basically wonderful machine, and if a SCD-1 at Level 7 isn't the very best SACD player at any price, I haven't heard the one that's better. No stock machine is, that's for sure.

Regards, Allen (Vacuum State)

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