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Barclay Digital transports - a scam ?

elberoth

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Those of you who have been in this hobby since the 80-90s, probably remember the company called Barclay Digital. They used to make probably the most expensive CD transports of the era, costing up to $30.000.

$30.000 maybe not be shocking today, but back in the 90's ... that was over twice the price of the Levinson reference No. 31 CD transport!

Barclay transports have always looked very impressive. From the corian made Cabernet CD transport:


zWk6CF.jpg



the M1 made from acrylic:


p5DM2B.jpg



to their most expensive model from the mid-90's, the Barclay Digital F1:


GPBqvN.jpg




2uv6Ft.jpg




H2CgPk.jpg



I remember drooling over this transport back in the 90s.

Not only the manual claimed that this was 'the finest CD Transport available' and a 'cost no object' design, but they even called it 'F1 Super Transport'. Not just a regular, mundane 'transport'. A Super Transport!


MyzkIM.jpg



I have always been wondering how this transport was designed - after all, the ML No.31, which was 50% cheaper, looked like this:

levinson-31-transport-inside_550pix.jpg



MLNo31.5.jpg


It was built like a tank, had acres of PCB stuffed with custom Xilinx chips, dual PSUs - basicly everything about this transport was state-of-the-art.

The ML engineers even used tricks like reclocking circuits with suspended clock to minimise vibrations and improve performance:

levinson-31-transport-digital-output-board_550pix.jpg


The ML 31 was ultra expensive, but at least you knew what you were paying for.

I was always wondering, what else one can get for twice the price. What kind of NASA space ship technology one can get for $30.000.

Unfortunately, the company folded soon after. Not many of those transports have been sold and I have never seen one opened ... anywhere.

Recently, a friend of mine who runs a reputable shop called Retro Audio (he is a renowed Luxman specialist), have called telling me he just got a Barclay Digital F1 transport for repair. He told me he HAS TO show me what he have found inside after opening one ...

When I got there, the transport was already in parts, waiting for ultrasonic cleaning. The trasport looks gorgeous. It is basicly entirely CNCed from slabs of aluminium. Nothing unusual in 2018 (chineese would do the complete casework for less than $500-700 now), but that was back in 1995 and CNC work was expensive (although not $30.000 expensive ...).

Each foot weighs about 2kg (4lbs):

FpAOeC.jpg



Dimmed glass front panel hides a generic Philips display:


5SSi0g.jpg


sUEp2C.jpg


Back panel:

vI7Bpt.jpg


please note the F1x Super Transport part!

a9e3Aw.jpg


The drive gave some initial hopes of beeing the CDM-Pro drive from Philips:

CcaKta.jpg


W5x5jt.jpg


but soon turned out to be the cheapest Philips drive, from the very bottom of their parts bin:

upfQzq.jpg


And from there ... it got only worse.

If you hoped to find some NASA technology PCBs inside (remember the $30.000 price tag), you would be sorely disappointed. The whole transport turned out to be ... Marantz CD63 in disguise ! Yes, the $299 CD player in nice aluminium case.

Compare the original Marantz innards:

IW2HAd.jpg


to the PCB in the Barclay (pls notice the exposed Marantz logo on the HDAM modules!):

S3Lcai.jpg

(there are small differencies in the PCB layout around the PSU caps - that is 'cos one PCB is from CD63mk1 and one is mk2, not sure which is which)

They actually put a complete, unmodified Marantz PCB inside. You could make a CD player out of the Barclay F1x Super Transport - just istall two RCA sockets at the back panel, wire the cables to the PCB, and viola! Your $30.000 Barklay F1x Super Transport just became a CD player ! I'm sorry - a CD SUPER player.

Not even the premium $499 Marantz 63 KI, with many premium parts, but the regular CD63. At this point, one starts to wonder, why they haven't used the $249 Marantz CD53 - afterall, the only part that was missing were the HDAM modules in the analog output stage, which were not used anyway ... I guess, they were cheap, but not that cheap , lol.

The first question I have asked was if there was a digital output board. Afterall - you could use the PCB of an exisiting CD player (the question would remain - why the cheapest one, and why in the $30.000 product, but still ...) just to source the SPDIF (digital) signal from and then add your super duper digital output baord, with multiple reclocking techniques used, NASA clocks, FIFO buffers which could produce the best, cleanest SPDIF signal in the world.

Then you could just laugh in the faces of Levinson engineers, that spent their budget developing the wrong part of the transport.

BUT, the SPDIF signal was sourced ... directly from the PCB. That is right - no speacial digital output board, no reclocking, no NASA clocks, no FIFO buffers. You know - the stuff that Levinson put in their CD transports.

The RCA SPDIF out on the back panel was directly wired, with a pair of twisted pair cables, from the PCB, from the place they had removed the original Marantz RCA SPDIF output socket:

25mKAj.jpg



There was a small doughterboard attached to the back panel, but it was only needed to create the ST and AES/EBU signals. There was no signal regeneration as far as I can tell. The digital output board sourced the signal from a different place on the Marantz PCB - just a few cm down. So the signal that went to RCA and AES/ST outputs was a bit different - I would guesstimate that the signal at the RCA output was terminated to ~ 75 Ohm, so they just sourced the signal for the AES/ST board before that point.

6RC2uo.jpg


DYcboz.jpg


The only modification that Barclay actually did to the original Marantz CD-63 CD player, was replacing the original transformer with 3 separate transformers. That is right - no 3 new PSUs (with rectifiers, capacitors, super duper voltage regulators etc) - but 3 new, $20 each, encapsulated toroidal transformers that they have wired to the original Marantz PSU on the PCB:

h786Yr.jpg


Q7cEQ1.jpg


$30.000 for a $299 CD player in an nice aluminium box with $60 worth of extra transformers ?

That is a scam in my book.

MBL did a similar thing back in the 00s, when they put a Marantz CDP inside one of their CD players (CDP-2 if I'm not mistaken). But for one, that was a $2000 CD player, not a $30.000 one, and at least they have used not the regular, but the far more expensive, special edition version of the player (6000 OSE).

MBL:
cdp-2-1-mbl.jpg


Marantz:

CD6000OSE%20Inside.JPG



Still, probably not sth MBL is proud of ...
 
Last edited:

Thomas savage

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I had this beast, still to this day my favourite HiEnd audio purchase even though she betrayed me.
9D4F6EEF-DB46-4899-85B1-7D4DFFF5426A.png


9ABC8C57-4BAA-4ADD-A851-CAADFD1D3104.jpeg


I sent it away to get the optical input fix and it came back with a broken CD mechanism. I loved it, looking at these pictures is bringing back the pain lol
 

graz_lag

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Or it could be that Mr. Ken Ishikawa has had many young boys from mistresses ... a little start up audio company to each of them during his long years of career ? ;)
 
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elberoth

elberoth

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elberoth

elberoth

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I had this beast, still to this day my favourite HiEnd audio purchase even though she betrayed me.
View attachment 18862

View attachment 18861

I sent it away to get the optical input fix and it came back with a broken CD mechanism. I loved it, looking at these pictures is bringing back the pain lol

I'm pretty sure that transport can be repaired. Plus, with the temps this transport generates inside, all the electrolytic caps would need a replacment.
 
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elberoth

elberoth

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Same as Primare of Sweden for their BD universal players ...

Primare actually did some mods to that Oppo player - the whole PSU was of their own design. Plus, they have never hidden the fact that their player is Oppo based.
 

jsrtheta

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I'm not surprised, though this has to be one of the ballsiest grifts I've seen. And for audio, in the 1990s, that's saying a lot.

And I'm not sure how it could be prepared. Philips came out with many different transport mechanisms, and didn't support discontinued models.
 

jsrtheta

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I'm not surprised, though this has to be one of the ballsiest grifts I've seen. And for audio, in the 1990s, that's saying a lot.

And I'm not sure how it could be prepared. Philips came out with many different transport mechanisms, and didn't support discontinued models.
Umm, should be "repaired." Sorry.
 

bigx5murf

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Now I'm glad I wasn't filthy rich in the 90s.

Not really
 

PierreV

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Here's what preemptively cured my thirst for high end transports, upscale DVD-Audio players... The year was 2000, the month December. I was publishing and supporting disassembly/debugging tools. Virtually every high end product I knew about was essentially working on and from the same ROM for audio decoding... I drowned in support requests. One of my first answers in bold...

> Well, this DVD rom is probably the most widely scrutinized DVD rom in the world :). See where
> the error message is called from, backtrace from there to the comparison that fails and
> eventually invert the jump - or - analyze the checksum mechanism, recalculate and append enough

> data for it to succeed.

Thanks very much for the tip! We'll follow up on it and hope we're smart enough to get
somewhere. By the way, if you know of some others that are working on this ROM,
please let them know that we would be willing to collaborate or pay for useful
information. There's no point to having different people all around the world re-invent the
wheel. There wouldn't be a conflict, as most people are working on this to sell mod kits
to the aftermarket. We only want to use it for our own players that we manufacture
(only a few hundred a year).


Now, I tired of this after a few weeks, big names started being interested in what was probably shared on private forums, and I fired up a message to our users informing them we could not support them for the purpose they had in mind while also reassuring them that their IDs were safe with us (never leaked a customer ID, and won't even now that I am out of that line of work).

Thanks for getting the word out. I appreciate your discretion regarding the Japanese
manufacturers. While we don't have any agreements or laws that are being broken, it is
probably best not to stir up trouble. It does make me a bit curious, however. What are
they doing with xxxxxxxxx? Reverse engineering their competitors' designs?


The "Japanese" had reasons to believe their firmware had been stolen and was used everywhere. As far as I know, they were correct. In a way, that was kind of a given because, a bit earlier the discussions revolved around...

However, my understanding is that the SDMC scheme proposed by Verance requires about 60 mips full time to decode the audio stream. This
is beyond the capability of the existing hardware and will require a new chip.


So you could not expect boutique manufacturers to design a system, improve on the reference designs, write and debug custom firmwares in the few months they had to release their "high-end" stuff...

I am willing to bet that most of the users who paid their $10000 or so tax to jump on the high-end DVD-Audio stuff released on the couple of years were actually listening to the same data stream which they could have had for much much cheaper...
 

RayDunzl

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Here's what preemptively cured my thirst for high end transports...

My curiosity for transports disappeared when I found that just holding the optical cable from a CD player so equipped near (but not inserted into) the input worked fine, sending the coaxial signal through a potentiometer rigged as a "volume" control worked fine (until the signal was attenuated to the point that it didn't), and, maybe most importantly, placing my thumb on the spinning disk did nothing amusing to the output unless the read buffer was depeleted (after a few seconds of stopped/slowed disk spin).

I have a newish Tascam CD200 now - my 1997 player became a bit skippy.
 
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elberoth

elberoth

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It doesn't have that much of a difference now - the digital input receivers got so much better.
 

DSJR

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Late reply. Hopefully someone will confirm, but that Cd63 player was a bit jitter prone in the transport I seem to recall from a Paul Miller lab report. having said that, the donor Marantz in original form (before all the SE's and KI tweaks which arguably made it worse?) was actually a very 'nice' sounding player into a high end system with Krell driven Apogee Duetta Signature speakers.

Maybe this Barclay thing shows how little difference there really is subjectively if the eyes are fooled (or removed from the comparison entirely?)
 
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elberoth

elberoth

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Having gone through countless of CD transport back in the 90s and 00s, I can assue you they made a BIG difference back then, with the DACs of the era (which in general had much worse jitter rejection / attenuation than today's DACs).

There was even a popular of thought, which suggested that you should spend much more on a CD transport than accompanying DAC. I'm not saying it was right, but it just shows how important the quality of a CD transport was back in the era.

The CD-63 was a good CD player in its class back then. I wouldn't call it extraordinary in any way, but it was a solid performer. I remember when I took my CD-63 KI Signature out of the storage in the mid/late 00s, put it in my system and compared to MF V-DAC (which was a $199 DAC) - the lil MF DAC was so much better in every respect, I could not believe. I put the CD-63 KI Signature into the classifieds next day and sold it (which I regret doing to this day, as I could have it autographed by Ken Ishiwata, who became a good industry friend of mine).
 
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