Marantz SA-10 Review (SACD Player & DAC)

[charleski]

In the latest Stereophile they review the Cyrus CDI-XR, a $3k CD player. One quote from Cyrus' head of research stood out, "If the data is not correctly read the first time, the CD head needs to skip back on the spiral to re-read it. This moving causes noise withing the power supplies, etc, which degrades the overall performance." Now, on the face of it, this isn't entirely nonsense, after all we're dealing with stepper motors being fed by a PWM chopper drive. If the ground plane for the motors isn't properly isolated from the analog electronics it is conceivable that noise would leak through (though this would be evidence of poor design). But this would clearly be measurable, and I wonder if anyone's seen measurements of a CD player that exhibit this sort of breakthrough noise on the analog ground plane. It is possible that this would differ depending on the CD, with more noise visible on discs that aren't tracking well and producing more head shuffle. I know that at least one CD test disc contains tracks specifically designed to elicit tracking errors.

 

[DWI]

So you want to see this instead of the jitter graph I show?

View attachment 192542

Just because a spec exists doesn't mean we want to chase it. The measurement set you see from me has evolved over testing of nearly 400 DACs. It has no trouble differentiating DACs from each other no matter how good. Sure, if you run a lab and want to get paid per measurement, you follow the AES spec. But that is not what we do here.

That's pretty much what my builder said to me, $15,000 into rewiring my house. I didn't pay her a cent and got someone else who did follow the regulations (without which I could not get building certification or valid house insurance). I work in a regulated industry. Standards are there for a reason. The cost of compliance is completely irrelevant. Who would use a surgeon who had carved up 400 bodies in a morgue rather than paid to go through medical school? would his malpractice defence be that it was too expensive? I must admit I'm slightly surprised by this post. I wonder who does follow these regulations? (which state are designed to be low-cost to implement)

 

[restorer-john]

In the latest Stereophile they review the Cyrus CDI-XR, a $3k CD player. One quote from Cyrus' head of research stood out, "If the data is not correctly read the first time, the CD head needs to skip back on the spiral to re-read it. This moving causes noise withing the power supplies, etc, which degrades the overall performance." Now, on the face of it, this isn't entirely nonsense, after all we're dealing with stepper motors being fed by a PWM chopper drive. If the ground plane for the motors isn't properly isolated from the analog electronics it is conceivable that noise would leak through (though this would be evidence of poor design). But this would clearly be measurable, and I wonder if anyone's seen measurements of a CD player that exhibit this sort of breakthrough noise on the analog ground plane. It is possible that this would differ depending on the CD, with more noise visible on discs that aren't tracking well and producing more head shuffle. I know that at least one CD test disc contains tracks specifically designed to elicit tracking errors.

Or, they could simply use a trasnport, and a processor front end that could handle errors up to and including the maximum correctable burst error loss allowed for in the format itself. IIRC, it is circa 2.4mm. (I can pull out my reference books if I was wrong...)

 

[restorer-john]

Basically 99.99% percent of DAC's after that used oversampling.

With respect, that is wrong. The BB PCM-56 ran with 44.1 for many years.

'oversampling' (digital filtering) came into being in major way once the Japanese decided the PCM-56P needed some help. 2x, 4x and then 8x and 16, 18, 20 bit converters. (PCM-56/58/63 etc) Then Bitstream, PDM and PWM and the ladder D/A was done for...

 

[threni]

Employing a reference standard during testing re-enforces the presentation of the captured data and places it outside of criticism. Doing so would elevate your work here to a level that renders any criticism moot and still remain accessible to all who seek it out.

Trouble is, it's like trying to idiot-proof something. You just get bigger idiots.

 

[voodooless]

With respect, that is wrong. The BB PCM-56 ran with 44.1 for many years.

How does that disprove the metic? Take all DACs ever sold, how many are not oversampling do you think?

 

[Billy Budapest]

Ah, I’ll be 79 in May. Can’t take the $$$$ with me.

Russ

I hear you!

 

[Herbert]

dCS hardly invented upsampling either. Oversampling filters (which is just upsampling) were already part of the early 14 bit TDA DACs like TDA1450 (SAA7030 filter) from 1982 on. Basically 99.99% percent of DAC's after that used oversampling. Filters are of varying quality throughout the decades of course, and today it's no different. In general: the more boutique, the worse the filter. This Marantz CD player fell also victim to this.

Looking at the brochure of the SA-10, the chipset look very much like Analog Devices Inc.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwje_4boo8j2AhVKSPEDHTMxBEEQFnoECAcQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.marantz.com%2F-%2Fmedia%2Ffiles%2Fdocumentmaster%2Fmarantzna%2Fuk%2Fctlg_marantz_sa-10_en01.pdf&usg=AOvVaw2vh778iwDR0mCSqtmN6usH

I assume they did not develop anything... touting own development is a ripoff but not new.
From the very beginning, players shared the same chipsets, made by Philips, Sony, Pioneer, Burr - Brown...
Which comes hady for repair. Yoz are only lost, when the microcontroller is "kaput."

 

[Joe Smith]

Cost is kind of insane for what you get. I keep two players around for SACD, one is an Onkyo and the other a Sony UHP-H1. Both are pretty good universal players and I payed about $80 for each, used. Both have digital outs so I can use with an outbound dac if desired.

What I would love to see on the market is a 'good-enough' universal CD transport that could output coax and optical and cost around $250-300. I guess those current Cambridge Audio transports come close to that.

 

[Herbert]

With respect, that is wrong. The BB PCM-56 ran with 44.1 for many years.

'oversampling' (digital filtering) came into being in major way once the Japanese decided the PCM-56P needed some help. 2x, 4x and then 8x and 16, 18, 20 bit converters. (PCM-56/58/63 etc) Then Bitstream, PDM and PWM and the ladder D/A was done for...

Nope. My Nakamichi OMS-5II (Sony based) had an earlier BB PCM54 with 4x oversampling.
This was in spring 1985.
The oversampling filter was SM5804B from NPC.
The predecessor OMS5 / OMS 7, looking like a twin, was Philips based, TDA1540, 4x oversampling, 14 bit.

 

[Herbert]

In the latest Stereophile they review the Cyrus CDI-XR, a $3k CD player. One quote from Cyrus' head of research stood out, "If the data is not correctly read the first time, the CD head needs to skip back on the spiral to re-read it. This moving causes noise withing the power supplies, etc, which degrades the overall performance." Now, on the face of it, this isn't entirely nonsense, after all we're dealing with stepper motors being fed by a PWM chopper drive. If the ground plane for the motors isn't properly isolated from the analog electronics it is conceivable that noise would leak through (though this would be evidence of poor design). But this would clearly be measurable, and I wonder if anyone's seen measurements of a CD player that exhibit this sort of breakthrough noise on the analog ground plane. It is possible that this would differ depending on the CD, with more noise visible on discs that aren't tracking well and producing more head shuffle. I know that at least one CD test disc contains tracks specifically designed to elicit tracking errors.

What Cyrus claims is just nonsense.
Sony/Philips invented a well thought out error correction scheme,
using parity bits for 100% reconstruction. It is a crucial part of the standard.
The older folks might remember that the ruggedness of the Compact Disc
was a big selling point back then - before the audiophile morons showed up.
As one example, they jumbled the data on the disc to a fixed pattern.
So one big data loss -caused by a defect or even bad pressing- results in hundreds
tiny losses that can easily be reconstructed - without any loss. No need to re-read.
Data loss can sum up to 6mm on a disc.

Next thing: The early Philips players are dead quiet. They used one ground plane for
everything. But had BSL motors and magnetic servos for the heavy swing arm mech.
You can play a silent track from a test disc without the muting relais kicking in.
Ramp the volume completely up on you amp - and you will hear a tad microphony from the laser servos
while following the track. But not the laser servo or motor servo.

 

[don'ttrustauthority]

Exactly, audiophiles value other things more than the sound quality.

When I was renting rooms and driving a taxi, I laughed at anyone with a cd changer and I called the men in white suits on someone with a record player.

Now, they call the men in white suits on me. Not sure it's because I have several record players though ....

 

[srrxr71]

I wonder about Sony x800m2. Inexpensive. Commonly available. Built decently well at 9lbs.

 

[73hadd]

Top quality CD players outperform CD roms/DVD roms for realtime playback of CDs, particularly imperfect, out-of-spec, or damaged CDs. No doubt about that. People mistakenly think EAC and a CDRom drive will do a better job than a CD player. The CD player can play in real time, with mathematically perfect error correction. EAC will often need multiple tries and often gives up altogether on difficult discs.

Is this actually true that the error correction is mathematically perfect? Just because the CD will keep playing (filled in with interpolated data) doesn't mean it's accurate, or the original data?

I agree for realtime playback that a CD Rom may not be as good. But when using something like dbpoweramp or EAC, if the drive "gives up" it means the data is not actually readable, right?

 

[voodooless]

Is this actually true that the error correction is mathematically perfect? Just because the CD will keep playing (filled in with interpolated data) doesn't mean it's accurate, or the original data?

Not guaranteed or course, but it's pretty darn good!

 

[73hadd]

Not guaranteed or course, but it's pretty darn good!

Oh sure I think the tech is fine, but once the laser and CIRC has done its thing decided "I am going to send you some bits", there is nothing the DAC can do about it, so there is not guarantee of accuracy. I go back to the CD Rom drive accuracy database on dbpoweramp. It shows that even when the same error correction scheme is applied, there is a 9% difference in rip accuracy between best and worst make/model of CD Drive. I'll start a new thread.

 

[Herbert]

Is this actually true that the error correction is mathematically perfect? Just because the CD will keep playing (filled in with interpolated data) doesn't mean it's accurate, or the original data?

Up to a certain amount of data loss, it is original data. To my knowledge,
this data los equals a scratch of 6mm. When a player klicks, this is nor because of data loss
but because tha laser lost track.

 

[pma]

We have now a new generation of users that almost has not lived with CD discs. A proper 44.1/16 analog data reconstruction from data stored on CD is not the same thing as reading digital data from solid state memory chip. CD data is stored as a series of tiny indentations (pits), encoded in a tightly packed spiral track of pits moulded into the top of the polycarbonate layer. The areas between pits are known as 'lands'. Each pit is approximately 100 nm deep by 500 nm wide, and varies from 850 nm to 3.5 μm of length. The spacing between the tracks, the pitch, is 1.6 μm. A CD is read by focusing a 780 nm wavelength semiconductor laser through the bottom of the polycarbonate layer. The difference in height between pits and lands leads to a phase difference between the light reflected from a pit and from its surrounding land. By measuring the intensity with a photodiode, one is able to read the data from the disc. The pits and lands themselves do not directly represent the zeros and ones of binary data. Instead, Non-return-to-zero, inverted encoding is used: a change from pit to land or land to pit indicates a one, while no change indicates a zero.
We can say that a proper reconstruction from CD is more difficult process than the now usual USB data transfer to DAC. Limited resolution of 16 bits is again more demanding than current 24, 32 or 64 bit data manipulation, when dithering is not so important.

 

[SuicideSquid]

*IF* you prefer to play CDs (I don't now, but did up until 15 years ago or so), you also appreciate the tactile experience of the CD player and its loading mechanism, don't discount that. I agree that by SINAD numbers etc and if you primarily use the USB port, come on, there certainly are better choices out there, but for those who prefer the CD ritual and only use computer-centric stuff as a rare second choice... and value the tactile feel, this may not be that bad. I voted "not terrible", but the main reason why I'd never buy it is because I never play CDs - I just rip them to FLAC. I have no use for a CD player in my audio rig.

The question isn't "why buy a CD player" it's "why buy a $7,500 CD player".

You can buy a very well-made universal disc player that will give you at least equal performance to this Marantz unit for under $1,000. Might as well light the other $6,500 on fire for all the good it's doing you spending it on this player.

 

[SuicideSquid]

We have now a new generation of users that almost has not lived with CD discs. A proper 44.1/16 analog data reconstruction from data stored on CD is not the same thing as reading digital data from solid state memory chip. CD data is stored as a series of tiny indentations (pits), encoded in a tightly packed spiral track of pits moulded into the top of the polycarbonate layer. The areas between pits are known as 'lands'. Each pit is approximately 100 nm deep by 500 nm wide, and varies from 850 nm to 3.5 μm of length. The spacing between the tracks, the pitch, is 1.6 μm. A CD is read by focusing a 780 nm wavelength semiconductor laser through the bottom of the polycarbonate layer. The difference in height between pits and lands leads to a phase difference between the light reflected from a pit and from its surrounding land. By measuring the intensity with a photodiode, one is able to read the data from the disc. The pits and lands themselves do not directly represent the zeros and ones of binary data. Instead, Non-return-to-zero, inverted encoding is used: a change from pit to land or land to pit indicates a one, while no change indicates a zero.
We can say that a proper reconstruction from CD is more difficult process than the now usual USB data transfer to DAC. Limited resolution of 16 bits is again more demanding than current 24, 32 or 64 bit data manipulation, when dithering is not so important.

Okay. So what?

The way data is physically recorded to and read back from a CD, and the way data is physically recorded to and read back from solid-state memory, and the way data is physically recorded to and read back from a spinning hard disc, are all different. But given that the data that is being recorded and read back is the same, and given that what is ultimately provided to the DAC is the same (between a CD and an uncompressed rip of the CD stored on a solid state or hard disk medium), why does this matter? It's interesting from a technical standpoint but it has no bearing on the measurements or outputs of these devices.