elberoth
Member
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:
the M1 made from acrylic:
to their most expensive model from the mid-90's, the Barclay Digital F1:
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!
I have always been wondering how this transport was designed - after all, the ML No.31, which was 50% cheaper, looked like this:
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:
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):
Dimmed glass front panel hides a generic Philips display:
Back panel:
please note the F1x Super Transport part!
The drive gave some initial hopes of beeing the CDM-Pro drive from Philips:
but soon turned out to be the cheapest Philips drive, from the very bottom of their parts bin:
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:
to the PCB in the Barclay (pls notice the exposed Marantz logo on the HDAM modules!):
(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:
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.
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:
$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:
Marantz:
Still, probably not sth MBL is proud of ...
$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:
the M1 made from acrylic:
to their most expensive model from the mid-90's, the Barclay Digital F1:
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!
I have always been wondering how this transport was designed - after all, the ML No.31, which was 50% cheaper, looked like this:
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:
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):
Dimmed glass front panel hides a generic Philips display:
Back panel:
please note the F1x Super Transport part!
The drive gave some initial hopes of beeing the CDM-Pro drive from Philips:
but soon turned out to be the cheapest Philips drive, from the very bottom of their parts bin:
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:
to the PCB in the Barclay (pls notice the exposed Marantz logo on the HDAM modules!):
(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:
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.
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:
$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:
Marantz:
Still, probably not sth MBL is proud of ...
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