Hello Everyone,
This is a review and detailed measurements of the Denon DCD-3560 stereo CD player.
I already mentioned multiple times that I’m into older CD players (like the Marantz CD-73), this is one more proof.
Denon DCD-3560 - Presentation
This CD player is a member of the "over-engineered" league, its weight alone is a statement (17kg - 37.4lbs). It was released in 1990 at a very high price.
Most of the functions are hidden behind a small hatch:
The elements of interest are:
Headphones can be switch off and on from the back (what an idea!) and digital out can be deactivated from the front panel.
Let's go quickly inside:
This player is divided in 4 sections:
I did not mention the copper chassis, but you see it
To me, at the time, these players were some kind of abnormal devices, as I was really unsure of what the Japanese wanted to demonstrate with these. Also, I wondered if, really, a big brand into consumer products could compete with other “true” the high-end players. Naive, I was.
Denon DCD-3560 - Measurements (Analog out)
From now on, I will be consistent with my measurements as I described them in the post “More than we hear”, and as I reported them for the Onkyo C-733 review. Over time, this will help comparing the devices I reviewed.
The Denon DCD-3560 outputs a high 2.5Vrsm from its RCA outputs and 1.3dB less from XLR. There was a slight channel imbalance of less than 0.01dB (excellent!). The balanced outputs are noninverting; the single-ended outputs invert absolute polarity.
RCA and XLR showed the same performances, RCA outputs doing a little better from time to time. For the rest of the presentation, I will show results from XLR outputs, so you get the worse of that player
Here you go with the standard 999.91Hz sine @0dBFS (without dither) from my test CD (XLR out):
Both channels are represented but only one gets evaluated in that window. Right channel does a little better (by 0.8dB). That kind of difference happens especially when two different DACs (actually 2 per channel in that player) running in mono mode are used.
THD is at -103dB and so will clear CD Audio content. SINAD (96.2dB) and ENOB are limited by the CD Audio format only.
As I said above, RCA output do improve by 1dB the THD seen above.
It is to note that distortion stays very low even when digital signal goes down, which was not always the case R2R DACs, because of their linearity issue. As seen below, THD is still at -98dB at -6dBFS which is excellent:
That's the proof BurrBrown had a very precise manufacturing process to get there (laser trim). I simply have never seen such a good performance with old R2R architectures.
EDIT (29 Dec. 2024): playing with the trimmings pots for distorsion adjustments, I could improve a lot left channel which reached -108dB distortion at -6dBFS, beating the recent Topping Centaurus. At the same time, both channels of Denon are now well below -100dB at full scale (Left at -107dB and right at -104dB).
Let's try to push the BurrBrown conversion to its limits with a shaped dither signal. This type of noise shaping technique allows to lower the noise floor in an area of interest, where our ears are most sensitive. In a bit depth limited format as we have here (16bits only), it allows us to above and beyond the 16bits, which is a very nice software/mathematic trick.
So, here we go with the same 999.91Hz test tone @0dBFS with shaped dither:
I did not changed the scale of the view so you can see the noise floor actually really going down. This view shows that this conversion of the Denon is clean enough to reach a real SINAD of more than 106dB (where it matters, here calculated from 20Hz to 6kHz), which is more than 18bits real resolution, in 1988... And all of that is with an audio CD and a WAV file at 16bits/44.1kHz, thanks to the trick of noise shaping, which is largely used in modern CD Audio Masters.
As you can see above, the noise shaping reduces noise floor up to 6kHz after which the noise is rejected in a less sensitive zone or our ears, and that's what creates the two waves you see, from 6kHz to 20kHz.
All of that to say that we get a much cleaner trace here that the competition of the time, I name the Philips TDA1541A S1 (crown version), as you can see in the Revox B 226-S.
You probably already noticed, power supply is very quiet, and so the attention from Denon to that section paid off (1kHz @0dBFS, XLR out, left and right channels):
Now, let's have a look at the bandwidth:
There is a small 0.1dB deviation at the top end between the two channels (RCA too), else they nearly perfectly match at 0.01dB difference, which is very good. The small bump at the end is due to the oversampling filter.
Let's have a look at the 8x oversampling filter, which was new at the time (Overlay of White Noise and 18k+20Hz dual tones):
This is not the ALPHA filtering, so there's no filter selection, as opposed to the Denon DCD-SA1 for instance.
The attenuation is good for the era with nearly 90dB but not the 110dB as per the specs of the NPC oversampling filter. I think the ADC of my measurement interface could be a limiting factor.
The filter is relatively sharp and is fully active at 24kHz as I see, which corresponds to the documented 0.5465*fs (=24.1kHz) of the SM5803AP datasheet.
Note in the above view that no noise shaping technique shows before 96kHz, so I don’t know if it is activated or not.
Let's continue with the multitone test (starting with this review it is now 1/10 decade):
It is free from distorsion way below the CD Audio format.
Jitter was nailed 35 years ago:
The red trace is what is recorded on the test CD (From the digital outputs), it can't be better. The blue trace is from the XLR ouput. We see nearly 0 jitter, perfect.
Let’s have a look at an undithered 1kHz sine at -90.31dBFS. With 16bits, the signal should appear (on a scope) as the 3DC levels of the sign magnitude smallest digital signal. It should look like this (this is from the digital output of the Denon):
You can clearly see the three DC levels -1, 0, +1 repeating. Indeed, at such a low digital level, there's only one bit to represent the signal, and so it's either negative, positive or 0. So the system cannot reproduce a sine wave, because there's just one bit on and off for a period of time. It therefore creates a square wave, which we see "suffering" from the Gibbs Phenomenon due to the band limited (22.05kHz max) representation of the Audio CD.
Now the same but from analog output:
This is a crazy good trace for the time. We can clearly recognize our 3DC levels. It’s a little disturbed by the low-level noise, but it is really minor, and again for the time of the release, it was incredibly good. Seeing an R2R conversion, implemented in a complex architecture, achieving this level of precision is very satisfactory, and proof that Denon were in full control of what they were doing.
On your request and support (more information here), I am adding an "intersample-overs" test. It intends to identify if the oversampling filter has sufficient headroom to process near clipping signals. Indeed, and because of the oversampling, there might be interpolated data that go above 0dBFS (see the values in the table) and would saturate (clip) the interpolator and therefore the output. This effect is highlighted with the measurements below, and revealed through THD+N measurements up to 96kHz:
I left several other references for you to compare with. The oversampling filter to the Denon DCD-3560 does not have headroom to process Inter-sample overs. The Yamaha CD-1 shines in that test because it does not use an oversampling filter.
And here are some other measurements (not shown):
Last but not least, one of my favorite measurements, the THD vs Frequency at -12dBFS (THD only, over the first 5 harmonics, and from XLR outputs). I already commented that I use it especially to test older R2R architectures as it shows their difficulty to be linear below full scale. Below are measurements of the right channel, overlaid with the previously tested (and near best-in-class) Onkyo C-733 CD Player:
To be honest, this is an incredibly good trace for the tech and the time. I was impressed.
EDIT (29 Dec. 2024): I managed to play with the trimming pots of the PCM58s and left channel very much improved. I failed to improve the right one, so far. So the above measure looks like this now:
You can see that left channel improved a lot and is now very close to 1bit linearity, which is even more impressive than before.
Denon DCD-3560 - Measurements (Digital out)
The pitch error, which is due to lack of clock precision, prevented me from performing high precision analysis of the digital output. Indeed, when looking at the digital signal, I can see frequency variations since there's no PLL in that case.
For that reason, I don't have high resolution FFT to show, because I get too many windowing error. But by reducing the FFT Length, I can get my computer to be fast enough to compute 4 averages:
This is left and right channels with my standard undithered 999.91Hz test tone @0dBFS (Frequency linear scale). The THD is non existent, entirely buried into the noise floor, limited by the CD-Audio format.
Denon DCD-3560 - Testing the drive
What would be good measurements if the drive would not properly read a slightly scratched CD, or one that was created at the limits of the norm? The below tests reply to these questions.
The drive was able to consistently continue playing, without generating typical digital clicks, with dropouts of up to 0.75mm. The interpolation effect remained hidden to my ears when it kicked-off and succeeded to maintain a constant flow up to 0.75mm. The Denon had no issue with variable linear velocity and/or track pitch, as well as with HF detection.
Conclusion
This CD player was absolutely incredible at the time. And 35 years later, without being serviced, it still delivers. Amazing...
I always wondered if these "crazy" players were really that good, or making a tangible difference. I am happy to report that yes they did (at least this one), using a much more precise test set than those available at the time. I am truly amazed to see that this very old tech can really go beyond 16bits resolution. That means Denon built a digital and analog environment around a superb DAC, something from the past and for the future. That was also "BurrBrown Revelation" (available on all streaming platform as of now
).
I might give it an additional challenge later on, just to see where we can push grandad
EDIT: done, look at shaped dither tests.
The clock needs to be looked at. I already have a Revox with the same issue that will receive of good modern clock. If I can get better results, I'm likely to update this big Denon too and report here.
I hope you enjoyed the review as much as I enjoyed writing it. Let me know how to improve and if you have questions.
Thank you.
————
Flo
This is a review and detailed measurements of the Denon DCD-3560 stereo CD player.
I already mentioned multiple times that I’m into older CD players (like the Marantz CD-73), this is one more proof.
Denon DCD-3560 - Presentation
This CD player is a member of the "over-engineered" league, its weight alone is a statement (17kg - 37.4lbs). It was released in 1990 at a very high price.
Most of the functions are hidden behind a small hatch:
The elements of interest are:
- Crazy built quality, crazy engineering!
- R2R conversion using 4 BurrBrown PCM58P (2 per channel) in their most linear version "K". Only a couple of BURMESTER offered 4xPCM48P-K too, and not in the very special arrangement of this Denon.
- “LAMBDA Processing” which is a complex D/A architecture, where the positive and negative sides of the signal to convert are sent to two different DACs (reason for two DACs per channel) in a complementary mode, to reduce noise and improve linearity at the lowest levels, eliminating the zero crossing point. See here to know more.
- Undocumented manual MSB trimming for the two most significant of the BurrBrown PCM58 to theoretically go below -100dB THD near and at full scale (we’ll check that).
- Oversampling filter via a Nippon Precision Circuits SM5803AP which was SOTA at the time with 8x overs, a stop-band attenuation of more than 110dB, and a noise shaper! I could not find evidences of the noise shaper being used in my measurements, though. This ship was awarded at the time, and is still mentioned today on the NPC website as a highlight of their history in 1989.
- Pre-ALPHA filtering player
Headphones can be switch off and on from the back (what an idea!) and digital out can be deactivated from the front panel.
Let's go quickly inside:
This player is divided in 4 sections:
- On the bottom left, a full metal drive with the famous magnetic Sony KSS-151A head (ultra fast) below it.
- Top left, a double power supply for digital and analog sections (we'll see what it's worth too when measuring).
- Right side hosts the servo and digital our card.
- Below it, there is the D/A conversion card with the 4 BB PCM58P-K, and so they are hidden.
I did not mention the copper chassis, but you see it
To me, at the time, these players were some kind of abnormal devices, as I was really unsure of what the Japanese wanted to demonstrate with these. Also, I wondered if, really, a big brand into consumer products could compete with other “true” the high-end players. Naive, I was.
Denon DCD-3560 - Measurements (Analog out)
From now on, I will be consistent with my measurements as I described them in the post “More than we hear”, and as I reported them for the Onkyo C-733 review. Over time, this will help comparing the devices I reviewed.
The Denon DCD-3560 outputs a high 2.5Vrsm from its RCA outputs and 1.3dB less from XLR. There was a slight channel imbalance of less than 0.01dB (excellent!). The balanced outputs are noninverting; the single-ended outputs invert absolute polarity.
RCA and XLR showed the same performances, RCA outputs doing a little better from time to time. For the rest of the presentation, I will show results from XLR outputs, so you get the worse of that player
Here you go with the standard 999.91Hz sine @0dBFS (without dither) from my test CD (XLR out):
Both channels are represented but only one gets evaluated in that window. Right channel does a little better (by 0.8dB). That kind of difference happens especially when two different DACs (actually 2 per channel in that player) running in mono mode are used.
THD is at -103dB and so will clear CD Audio content. SINAD (96.2dB) and ENOB are limited by the CD Audio format only.
As I said above, RCA output do improve by 1dB the THD seen above.
It is to note that distortion stays very low even when digital signal goes down, which was not always the case R2R DACs, because of their linearity issue. As seen below, THD is still at -98dB at -6dBFS which is excellent:
That's the proof BurrBrown had a very precise manufacturing process to get there (laser trim). I simply have never seen such a good performance with old R2R architectures.
EDIT (29 Dec. 2024): playing with the trimmings pots for distorsion adjustments, I could improve a lot left channel which reached -108dB distortion at -6dBFS, beating the recent Topping Centaurus. At the same time, both channels of Denon are now well below -100dB at full scale (Left at -107dB and right at -104dB).
Let's try to push the BurrBrown conversion to its limits with a shaped dither signal. This type of noise shaping technique allows to lower the noise floor in an area of interest, where our ears are most sensitive. In a bit depth limited format as we have here (16bits only), it allows us to above and beyond the 16bits, which is a very nice software/mathematic trick.
So, here we go with the same 999.91Hz test tone @0dBFS with shaped dither:
I did not changed the scale of the view so you can see the noise floor actually really going down. This view shows that this conversion of the Denon is clean enough to reach a real SINAD of more than 106dB (where it matters, here calculated from 20Hz to 6kHz), which is more than 18bits real resolution, in 1988... And all of that is with an audio CD and a WAV file at 16bits/44.1kHz, thanks to the trick of noise shaping, which is largely used in modern CD Audio Masters.
As you can see above, the noise shaping reduces noise floor up to 6kHz after which the noise is rejected in a less sensitive zone or our ears, and that's what creates the two waves you see, from 6kHz to 20kHz.
All of that to say that we get a much cleaner trace here that the competition of the time, I name the Philips TDA1541A S1 (crown version), as you can see in the Revox B 226-S.
You probably already noticed, power supply is very quiet, and so the attention from Denon to that section paid off (1kHz @0dBFS, XLR out, left and right channels):
Now, let's have a look at the bandwidth:
There is a small 0.1dB deviation at the top end between the two channels (RCA too), else they nearly perfectly match at 0.01dB difference, which is very good. The small bump at the end is due to the oversampling filter.
Let's have a look at the 8x oversampling filter, which was new at the time (Overlay of White Noise and 18k+20Hz dual tones):
This is not the ALPHA filtering, so there's no filter selection, as opposed to the Denon DCD-SA1 for instance.
The attenuation is good for the era with nearly 90dB but not the 110dB as per the specs of the NPC oversampling filter. I think the ADC of my measurement interface could be a limiting factor.
The filter is relatively sharp and is fully active at 24kHz as I see, which corresponds to the documented 0.5465*fs (=24.1kHz) of the SM5803AP datasheet.
Note in the above view that no noise shaping technique shows before 96kHz, so I don’t know if it is activated or not.
Let's continue with the multitone test (starting with this review it is now 1/10 decade):
It is free from distorsion way below the CD Audio format.
Jitter was nailed 35 years ago:
The red trace is what is recorded on the test CD (From the digital outputs), it can't be better. The blue trace is from the XLR ouput. We see nearly 0 jitter, perfect.
Let’s have a look at an undithered 1kHz sine at -90.31dBFS. With 16bits, the signal should appear (on a scope) as the 3DC levels of the sign magnitude smallest digital signal. It should look like this (this is from the digital output of the Denon):
You can clearly see the three DC levels -1, 0, +1 repeating. Indeed, at such a low digital level, there's only one bit to represent the signal, and so it's either negative, positive or 0. So the system cannot reproduce a sine wave, because there's just one bit on and off for a period of time. It therefore creates a square wave, which we see "suffering" from the Gibbs Phenomenon due to the band limited (22.05kHz max) representation of the Audio CD.
Now the same but from analog output:
This is a crazy good trace for the time. We can clearly recognize our 3DC levels. It’s a little disturbed by the low-level noise, but it is really minor, and again for the time of the release, it was incredibly good. Seeing an R2R conversion, implemented in a complex architecture, achieving this level of precision is very satisfactory, and proof that Denon were in full control of what they were doing.
On your request and support (more information here), I am adding an "intersample-overs" test. It intends to identify if the oversampling filter has sufficient headroom to process near clipping signals. Indeed, and because of the oversampling, there might be interpolated data that go above 0dBFS (see the values in the table) and would saturate (clip) the interpolator and therefore the output. This effect is highlighted with the measurements below, and revealed through THD+N measurements up to 96kHz:
Intersample-overs tests Bandwidth of the THD+N measurements is 20Hz - 96kHz | 5512.5 Hz sine, Peak = +0.69dBFS | 7350 Hz sine, Peak = +1.25dBFS | 11025 Hz sine, Peak = +3.0dBFS |
Teac VRDS-20 | -30.7dB | -26.6dB | -17.6dB |
Yamaha CD-1 | -84.6dB | -84.9dB | -78.1dB |
Denon DCD-900NE | -34.2dB | -27.1dB | -19.1dB |
Denon DCD-SA1 | -33.6dB | -27.6dB | -18.3dB |
Onkyo C-733 | -88.3dB | -40.4dB | -21.2dB |
Denon DCD-3560 | -30.2dB | -24.7dB | -17.4dB |
I left several other references for you to compare with. The oversampling filter to the Denon DCD-3560 does not have headroom to process Inter-sample overs. The Yamaha CD-1 shines in that test because it does not use an oversampling filter.
And here are some other measurements (not shown):
- Crosstalk : -118dB (@1kHz)
- IMD AES-17 DFD "Analog" (18kHz & 20kHz 1:1) : -75dB
- IMD AES-17 DFD "Digital" (17'987Hz & 19'997Hz 1:1) : -78dB
- IMD DIN (250Hz & 8kHz 4:1) : -85.3dB
- Dynamic Range : 97.8dB
- Pitch Error : 19'994.60Hz (19'997Hz requested) ie -0.01%
Last but not least, one of my favorite measurements, the THD vs Frequency at -12dBFS (THD only, over the first 5 harmonics, and from XLR outputs). I already commented that I use it especially to test older R2R architectures as it shows their difficulty to be linear below full scale. Below are measurements of the right channel, overlaid with the previously tested (and near best-in-class) Onkyo C-733 CD Player:
To be honest, this is an incredibly good trace for the tech and the time. I was impressed.
EDIT (29 Dec. 2024): I managed to play with the trimming pots of the PCM58s and left channel very much improved. I failed to improve the right one, so far. So the above measure looks like this now:
You can see that left channel improved a lot and is now very close to 1bit linearity, which is even more impressive than before.
Denon DCD-3560 - Measurements (Digital out)
The pitch error, which is due to lack of clock precision, prevented me from performing high precision analysis of the digital output. Indeed, when looking at the digital signal, I can see frequency variations since there's no PLL in that case.
For that reason, I don't have high resolution FFT to show, because I get too many windowing error. But by reducing the FFT Length, I can get my computer to be fast enough to compute 4 averages:
This is left and right channels with my standard undithered 999.91Hz test tone @0dBFS (Frequency linear scale). The THD is non existent, entirely buried into the noise floor, limited by the CD-Audio format.
Denon DCD-3560 - Testing the drive
What would be good measurements if the drive would not properly read a slightly scratched CD, or one that was created at the limits of the norm? The below tests reply to these questions.
Test type | Technical test | Results |
Variation of linear cutting velocity | From 1.20m/s to 1.40m/s | Pass |
Variation of track pitch | From 1.5µm to 1.7µm | Pass |
Combined variations of track pitch and velocity | From 1.20m/s & 1.5µm to 1.40m/s & 1.7µm | Pass |
HF detection (asymmetry pitch/flat ratio) | Variation from 2% to 18% | Pass |
Dropouts resistance | From 0.05mm (0.038ms) to 4mm (3.080ms) | Up to 0.3mm without interpolation, up to 0.75mm with interpolation. |
Combined dropouts and smallest pitch | From 1.5µm & 1mm to 1.5µm & 2.4mm | Fail |
Successive dropouts | From 2x0.1mm to 2x3mm | Up to 0.2mm without interpolation, up to 0.5mm with interpolation. |
The drive was able to consistently continue playing, without generating typical digital clicks, with dropouts of up to 0.75mm. The interpolation effect remained hidden to my ears when it kicked-off and succeeded to maintain a constant flow up to 0.75mm. The Denon had no issue with variable linear velocity and/or track pitch, as well as with HF detection.
Conclusion
This CD player was absolutely incredible at the time. And 35 years later, without being serviced, it still delivers. Amazing...
I always wondered if these "crazy" players were really that good, or making a tangible difference. I am happy to report that yes they did (at least this one), using a much more precise test set than those available at the time. I am truly amazed to see that this very old tech can really go beyond 16bits resolution. That means Denon built a digital and analog environment around a superb DAC, something from the past and for the future. That was also "BurrBrown Revelation" (available on all streaming platform as of now
I might give it an additional challenge later on, just to see where we can push grandad
The clock needs to be looked at. I already have a Revox with the same issue that will receive of good modern clock. If I can get better results, I'm likely to update this big Denon too and report here.
I hope you enjoyed the review as much as I enjoyed writing it. Let me know how to improve and if you have questions.
Thank you.
————
Flo
Last edited: