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Well I've lived a few months with this new Universal and I am overall impressed. SACD and DVD playback is excellent.Telarc SACDs sound very realistic and almost as good as on the old Xindak SCD-2 tubed SACD player. The Xindak SCD-2 has a little more intricate detail in the high frequencies but even though it's solid state the bass is almost as warm and the midrange in the Yamaha is very liquid and smooth with the human voice sounding so real. Mechanically it's too early to tell but so far it plays the SACD layer of Hybrids SACD with ease.
Telarc CDs sound anywhere from good to excellent, the best having warmth in the midrange and smooth highs. Something I firming believed was impossible for CD to do, totally impossible. These Telarc CDs proved me wrong, CD playback can be improved. I guess the 9th time is a charm. Ironically strange thing the best sounding Telarc CDs are the earliest ones.
Other labels of CDs so far range from fair to painfully bad with one exception so far. I checked a bunch of CDs out of the library and they all sounded bad except one: Greg Brown: Slant 6 Mind on Red House Records. So it looks like there are other labels that make listenable CDs besides Telarc.
So the Yamaha is not the magical CD machine I thought it would be but at least I can now enjoy the best CDs.
However I won't be buying many more CDs, as SACDs are so much more enjoyable. But it is good to be able to get the early works of Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops.
"Music is love"
Teresa
Follow Ups:
Ayre CX-7e when I invited you, but at least now you know that CDs can sound quite good. I would just emphasize that, as you have seen, CD players can make a significant difference, and better machines than your Yamaha do exist. With these better machines, such as the one I have, you would find that many labels have fine sounding CDs. To be sure, regardless of the CD player, there are a lot of bad-sounding CDs out there.If even a few CDs can have good sound, then there is nothing inherently terrible about the RBCD standard. Perhaps a further revelation would be to see how well the sound of an LP can be captured by RBCD. CD-Rs carefully made from top-sounding vinyl recordings are virtually indistinguishable from the original. I know you and other say that RBCDs don't have the resolution of vinyl, but the claim I made is simple to demonstrate if one has a good ADC and is careful about the process. If you synch up the CD-R and the vinyl during playback, it is extremely difficult to tell which is which during playback when you switch between them. The sad thing is how poor many (most?) commercial CDs sound when the potential is there for them to sound so good.
Better CDs on the Yamaha DVD-S1700 CDs DO NOT sound like CDs, they sound more like SACDs with slightly less resolution. This is something that I believed totally impossible until I heard my first Telarc CD on the Yamaha! To say I am totally shocked is to put it very mildly.I wonder if CDs on the Yamaha are upsampled to DSD? I can't find anything about how CDs are handled in this player in Internet searches, and there are no professional reviews yet? I am curious though why the Yamaha can make CDs listenable when even a $5,000 CD player cannot? Megabuck CD players have more resolution but still sound like CDs. CDs on the Yamaha DVD-S1700 sound nothing whatsoever like CDs. So very, very strange and wonderful!
"Music is love"
Teresa
Exactly. This is my experience of good redbook CDs. There are many of them.If CDs do not reach the heights of sound quality, and for me they do not, there is an almost infinite wealth of essential music on the CD format. And most of it is not available on any other format.
It is just a matter of time before you discover that Telarc are not the only good CDs. I would mention Harmonia Mundi. The old LPs are fantastic, hard to find and very expensive. The CDs are good sounding, cheap and readily available.
Different CD players do sound different. Different commercial CD recordings vary tremendously in how successful they can be be in sounding musical and appealing. My complaint is that it isn't hard to make a good-sounding CD. Why aren't there a lot more. I make them all the time. To show you how good a CD-R of a vinyl recording can be, now that you appear to have a decent CD player, I'll be happy to make a CD-R for you. I have the entire Franklin Mint 100 greatest recordings. Is there one in particular you think has superb sound and would like to see how fine a CD it can be turned into? Contact me off line if so. Of course, I will be using a differet TT and cartridge and a different example of the record, so it won't sound exactly like your record, but in some absolute sense I think you will conclude it has very fine sound extremely close to that of a vinyl recording.Joe
Hi Joe,I sold my copy of Franklin Mint’s 100 Greatest Recordings of all time, too much mono and too many recordings of compositions I didn’t care for. Also this helped me clean out an entire rack for CDs, SACDs and DVD-Audios, I now have room of 208 combined of all three formats so I must choose wisely and carefully.
I have in the past not been successful recording LPs to CD-Rs or to 48kHz DAT. I might consider recording them to 96kHz as an experiment. But I now firmly believe the best results are obtained by listening to the original recording. Records when treated with Gluv-Glide should easily last until after I’m dead, so I no longer see the point. Also I believe that Analog recordings should be listened to in the Analog realm. So since I can play any format except 8 Track I see no reason to record anything except my guitar and voice.
And I know some people record LPs to CDs to listen in the car. I listen to Cassettes in my car, as I don’t like CD in the car especially on the roads in Reno. I have an excellent collection of 125 cassettes so I have got the car listening covered. My Kenwood car deck has Dolby B and 70ms (metal) EQ as well as a frequency response of 10-20kHz and sounds superb.
And how about the price of those considering an SACD with three layers in many cases only cost a few dollars more!!!
Does this player convert to PCM? Most players in this price range do. Why don't you spend a little more and buy a player that uses pure DSD? Your previous Toshiba also probably converted to PCM. I have heard that the Pioneer DV-79AVi can do pure DSD. It's reasonably priced.
I thought it was only cheap players that did this. The Yamaha is a $450.00 player, not expensive like the DVD-S9000ES or the Xindak SCD-2, but not cheap like awful sounding $129.99 on sale Pioneer universal I tried from Best Buy for 2 weeks.The Toshiba did not play SACD, it was DVD-Audio / Video and HDCD.
The copy claims it uses 192/24 DACs. These are PCM DACs. I doubt it has extra additional circuits for the DSD bitstream. It probably converts to high rate PCM and uses the same DACs that it has for CDs and DVDs. And it's not just cheap players that convert to PCM- many players at much higher prices also do this.At any rate, that is all the realm of the designer of the unit and should not be of any concern to the listener. The end result is what matters, not the internal design that gets there.
Information is sketchy on the Yamaha; I bought it locally knowing I could return it if I didn't like it, which I have done many times before.My manual does list the 24 Bit 192kHz internal DAC's but it only lists the frequency response as follows:
DVD fs 96kHz - 2 Hz - 44 kHz
DVD fs 48kHz - 2 Hz - 22 kHz
CD fs 44.1kHz - 2 Hz - 20 kHzIt doesn't list the frequency response for 192kHz DVD-Audio or SACD.
If DSD is converted to high rez PCM it doesn't sound PCM'ish, but even 44.1kHz doesn't sound PCM'ish so it very well could convert and you are correct it's the end results that matter. How music sounds, and this is very musical and enjoyable.
"Music is love"
Teresa
I'll see if I can find one in my travels and give it a listen. Especially when I know you don't care much for CDs! :)
No idea if it'll help with those not great sounding CD's in your setup, but for me is worth a look. I cant vouch for their reliability (people have had them fail).There are others and the Digital forum could be a place to get some initial opinions.
I have no idea how they did it? Unsampled to DSD maybe?
"Music is love"
Teresa
For archiving LPs and reel tapes.Its DSD recording mode is superlative,probably better than recording on a semi pro RTR machine.
You could probably use it to dupe SACDs(if there is no problem with this,such as prohibit codes,etc.).
Raanan
As far as I know, the Tascam won't even play SACDs, let alone duplicate them. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
The Tascam will record in DSD onto DVD media, but only in a proprietary format. It will not produce or play back SACD... and the discs it records are NOT playable on SACD players. Still a cool machine, though not ideal for archival... if the machine breaks, your only option is to buy another one. Otherwise you're stuck with an "archive" that is unplayable!
The files created by the Tascam DV RA1000 are industry standard DSDIFF files that any current DSD workstation can handle. The format on the disk is UDF, which Mac, Windows and Linux computers can read.I'm still trying to figure out how to (on my workstation) make a dvd disc that will playback DSD files on the Tascam. Some claim to have done it, but are short on details when questioned...:->
Best,
Why are they short on details?Does TASCAM employ hit-men to silence those who enjoy their machines too much?
Thanks for pointing these things out.
My intention was-For Teresa.to be able to use this machine in order to archive vinyl and tape-the DSD copies are then virtually indistinguishable from the originals.This is a marvelous recording machine,a bit quirky,but with marvelous sound.
No,it can not play SACDs,unfortunately.But,its superior sonics as a recording machine are not to be taken lightly.Raanan
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