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Denon DCD-SA1 Review (CD/SACD Player)

Very well written and interesting review, NTTY!

Those curious about having a glimpse of the performance of this Denon DCD-SA1 in SA-CD mode can download for an affordable price a test made with an Audio Precision System Two and a 0 dB SA-CD signal engraved on the Philips Super Audio CD DAC Test Disc : https://www.testberichte.de/preisvergleich/level4_stereoplay_27256.html

Beware FFT length and number of measurements taken to be averaged by the Audio Precision software are not disclosed in the aforementioned review. But the published noise floor looks almost exactly like what you see on the 32,768 points 8 average FFT in DSD mode displayed in the Burr Brown DSD1792 datasheet.

Incidentally, this DSD1792A (or the nearly identical PCM1792A) seems to me still the best D/A converter of the Burr Brown range of converter chips despite its age (20 years). The newer PCM1795 did get a fancier 32 bits input interface instead of the 24 bits input of the earlier DAC, but this change was apparently made to the detriment of both the digital filter in PCM mode and the overall performance specifications.

NTTY said:
How to conclude?

  • SACD measurements left me wondering what was into this move from Sony. I did not see anything tangibly good for me, especially knowing that I used a referenced SACD Test disc for the measurements, which I suppose has been created with great care(?).
  • Noise shaping techniques have improved, allowing the theoretical 16bits of CD Audio to be actually much lower. What's left to SACD when compared to CDA is that extended bandwidth which I did not find here, at least from the Denon Audio Check SACD.
Click to expand...

Don't forget Philips, which co-developed SA-CD and DSD with Sony in the same way the two corporations have co-developed the CD!

I once read messages from the great engineer Carel Dijkmans (Philips) on LinkedIn and other messages on forums from a former insider at Philips then Sony that lead me to believe that the technical rational behind recording and distributing music in a sigma-delta format were to completely avoid the issue of aliasing or at least make it practically irrelevant thanks to a sampling frequency put in the MHz region, far far above any high frequencies that can be even remotely considered audio. That and also capture better the shape of unpredictable and non-steady-state analogue signals. A bit for the same reason that it is generally recommended to get a digital oscilloscope whose sampling frequency is not 2, but 5 to 10 times the highest frequency of interest if signal types other than pure sinus are to be observed.
 
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€7,000 in 2005 is around $12,900 in today’s dollars.

I hate to disappoint any audiophiles here, but instead, I’ll buy a Sony DiscMan and one of these with those funds (and have leftover change for a a few thousand miles of gas!)

IMG_4496.jpeg
 
Does Denon not use earth pin for AC plug even in EU?
 
My primary interest in SACD has been its capacity for multi-channel reproduction of musical performances, which offers me a greater sense of realism that I truly appreciate. I understand that this kind of sound immersion is not to everyone's taste, but it gives me quite a lot of pleasure.
 
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usern said:
Does Denon not use earth pin for AC plug even in EU?
Click to expand...

To the best of my knowledge, Denon hi-fi devices are almost always double insulated devices (class II in legal term), hence no safety ground on mains connector.

Denon-DCD-SA1_002_class_II.png


I think most hi-fi devices from Japan that are sold in Europe are not grounded. Even some that have 3-pins mains socket aren't, the third pin being not connected to anything inside. Nowadays, it must be illegal to put a three-pins socket or power cord to a class II devices to avoid confusion, but at a time, it was a common thing nevertheless.
 
usern said:
Does Denon not use earth pin for AC plug even in EU?
Click to expand...

Good question! I overlooked the 2-pin power socket at first.

By the way: Is there any known scheme to de-code the Denon serial numbers? I’ve read that the first 3 digits may give the production date, like maybe May 2004 for NTTY’s unit.

1726122372041.png
 
Henreid said:
My primary interest in SACD has been its capacity for multi-channel reproduction of musical performances, which offers me a greater sense of realism that I truly appreciate. I realize this kind of sound immersion is not to everyone's taste, but it gives me quite a lot of pleasure.
Click to expand...

You can thank Philips for that. We now from an insider that Sony originally envisaged the SA-CD to be 2.0 stereo only. Just a kind of super CD, as the name implied. But at Philips (and also the electronic consumer sale department at Sony), they insisted that SA-CD get multichannel capacity. The same Carel Dijkmans wrote that faithful reproduction of natural music (he spoke about classical music mostly) cannot be achieved without multichannel and everyone at Philips recording facility seemed to have been on board with that opinion for a long time. As for the sale persons, they were very much aware that consumers would easily hear differences between multichannel and simple 2.0 stereo, whereas they most probably would struggle to hear a difference between 16 bits/44.1 ksps PCM and something better.

If Sony's original project had been successful and SA-CD was a purely stereo format, perhaps it may have contained DSD128 (not sure considering the technical feasibility in the nineties) and the ultrasonic noise that bothers so many people would be much less disturbing to see on a FFT. But the storage capacity of the DVD optical disc did not allow better than DSD64 while preserving the multichannel capacity. Philips had even considered that the multichannel tracks would be in DSD48 (2.1168 MHz) until the Philips engineering team that developed the lossless 1-bit data compression technique they called DST (= Direct Stream Transfer) found that their algorithm worked better compressing DSD64 than DSD48. As a result, this made it possible to put 8 channels (2 for stereo and 6 for 5.1) on an SA-CD with all the same specifications. This gave SA-CD an advantage over DVD-Audio. The latter could contain 24-bits/192 ksps PCM, but to stay within the data rate transfer limits of the DVD disc format, as soon as you wanted to put more than two channels on a disc while maintaining a significant playing time, you were forced to juggle between 16-bits/48 ksps and 24-bits/96 ksps PCM and anything in-between depending on the number of channels and the program length.
 
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Brilliant review! I will use my Cosmos E1DA ADC to test my two old Marantz CD players to see how they compare to the ones you tested. Can you share some details on the test CD? Where did you get it? I'd like to buy one as well.
 
The sine signals on this Denon test disc are not dithered, though.
 
horias2000 said:
Brilliant review! I will use my Cosmos E1DA ADC to test my two old Marantz CD players to see how they compare to the ones you tested. Can you share some details on the test CD? Where did you get it? I'd like to buy one as well.
Click to expand...

Thank you!

I initially used those of Denon (Denon Audio Technical CD - 38C39-7147) and Sony (Sony Type 4 For Adjustment & Checking of the player- YEDS-18).
The two Denon and Sony CDs do not have dither, and AES recommends to use dither for digital tests. They were also missing some tests, especially to highlight the AL24 trick here, for instance.

So I created my test CD (my current internal version is 6.2 :) ) with 44 typical measurements, and I documented them here. This last 6.2 version contains triple tones to counter the AL24 (or AL32) filter detection.

I can certainly share the WAV files, if you'd like. You'd just need to burn it (without adjusting levels option if you use Windows Media Player, else it adds low level distorsion).

Cheers

--------
Flo
 
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Scytales said:
The sine signals on this Denon test disc are not dithered, though.
Click to expand...
It's not (although it contains some 1/3 oct band noise signals) but dither can be added on the analyzer's side (REW,MUltitone Analyzer,etc)

(for digital-ins of course)
 
Sokel said:
Here's a small view of the signals:

View attachment 391795
Click to expand...
It is the one I initially used indeed, two years ago. But because they are not dithered test signals, I anyway had to find another solution.
So I started burning my own CD, and I used the Denon test CD as a reference to verify I was able to create same quality burnt CD. That is when I discovered the issue with Windows Media Player adding distorsion when the "adjust level" is selected (it is by default).
And once happy, I regularly updated my test CD version to include those test signals of importance (I don't deviate much from the AES).
I listed to the 44 tracks of my latest test CD here.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...-actual-differences.47692/page-9#post-2049868
--------
Flo
 
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