Pioneer DV-565A (CD/DVD) Measurements

[ReDFoX]

Hello! This is a quick review/measurements set of a Pioneer DV-565A CD/DVD player, tested in CD mode.

The unit itself is built and feels like a typical Mid-Fi: generally pleasant appearance, but all buttons have almost no travel and sometimes require force to be activated.

We have a decent amount of I/O, unfortunately no HDMI is present (this model was too cheap for that). DV-565A has support for 24/192 DVD-As, SACDs, and almost all DVD formats, except DL.

All signals were generated with REW.
DV-565A was fed into line input of my E-MU1616 at 96kHz (E-MU has ultrasonic noise, so I don't use 192k).
Analysis settings, unless said otherwise, are:

• 32k FFT
• 8 averages
• Dolph-Chebyshev 200 window
• 0% overlap

Starting with single tone THD measurement at 1kHz:

And It's actually looks very promising: DV-565 easily clears 16bit threshold of a CD (in terms of THD), although, we can see quite a bit of mains leakage.

Next up is multitone (FFT length - 512K)

which again, is clean, with slightly higher noise floor overall than Marantz CD-67.

Frequency response from a sweep measurement is essentially ruler flat, as expected from this kind of device.

Anti-aliasing filter behavior (255 averages) is extremely strange here: it looks like it got only 25dB of attenuation after passband, but when we overlay CCIF IMD measurement, we can see that all images are quite sufficiently attenuated.

I'm not sure, what's the root cause, but as we'll se later, THD performance is actually good.

SMPTE IMD (256k FFT)

is relatively clean, apart from power supply spikes.

Jitter performance (256k FFT) is good for 16bit, not an audible concern:

Last but not least is a traditional THD vs frequency measurement

which shows stable and predictable behaviour from a device.

Manufacturer claims 0.0014% THD and at 1kHz I got 0.0005%, which is substantially better.

All in all, this is a great device for its price, managing to be transparent/almost transparent for regular CD playback, while supporting a variety of video&audio format.

My inner fox sleeps well after that conclusion

 

[DSJR]

I've retained a DV-545 slimline model from the early noughties, as it has similar socketry on the rear and a clean dot-display. I wonder how that performs in comparison. I tried different 'Legato Link' settings and even when my hearing was better, couldn't detect a meaningful difference. The remote controls seem to not last however, so handy to have the buttons on the front.

 

[ReDFoX]

I've retained a DV-545 slimline model from the early noughties, as it has similar socketry on the rear and a clean dot-display. I wonder how that performs in comparison. I tried different 'Legato Link' settings and even when my hearing was better, couldn't detect a meaningful difference. The remote controls seem to not last however, so handy to have the buttons on the front.

DV-565 is from early 2000s though and has no Legato Link, AFAIK

 

[Mart68]

DV-565 is from early 2000s though and has no Legato Link, AFAIK

I still have one of these units and there is no Legato Link which is good as it always sounded weird to me.

I did use it as my main source for a couple of years to the surprise of various visiting audiophile pals.

Direct quote: 'Wait! What's this? Are you seriously telling me this is what we've been listening to all day?'

 

[SNHK]

It really is a shame Pioneer pulled out of the hifi market, it would be interesting to see what they could do today with a CD player or universal player. Nice review and good player!

 

[Blumlein 88]

I have a Pioneer DV-578a of similar vintage. It has an odd quirk. Yours may have it as well. When you start a track jitter is super high and gradually reduces to quite a low level over 15 seconds. I burned a few CDs investigating this a few years back. If you can use the result for a longer jitter test track and edit out the first 15 seconds you will get a true picture of jitter. I found this happens every time you change tracks. It takes 15 seconds to lock in and give low jitter.

Now the DV 578a was a universal player that played CD, DVD-A and SACD so perhaps it was different than yours in this behavior.

Good job on the testing of this btw.

 

[ReDFoX]

I have a Pioneer DV-578a of similar vintage. It has an odd quirk. Yours may have it as well. When you start a track jitter is super high and gradually reduces to quite a low level over 15 seconds. I burned a few CDs investigating this a few years back. If you can use the result for a longer jitter test track and edit out the first 15 seconds you will get a true picture of jitter. I found this happens every time you change tracks. It takes 15 seconds to lock in and give low jitter.

Now the DV 578a was a universal player that played CD, DVD-A and SACD so perhaps it was different than yours in this behavior.

Good job on the testing of this btw.

Wow! I've never heard of such issue...
I've measured mine at the beginning of the track, might as well test at the end

 

[Scytales]

I have a Pioneer DV-578a of similar vintage. It has an odd quirk. Yours may have it as well. When you start a track jitter is super high and gradually reduces to quite a low level over 15 seconds. I burned a few CDs investigating this a few years back. If you can use the result for a longer jitter test track and edit out the first 15 seconds you will get a true picture of jitter. I found this happens every time you change tracks. It takes 15 seconds to lock in and give low jitter.

That is a very interesting observation.

Do you have take note of or remember the value of the jitter at the beginning and after the 15 seconds elapsed time?

 

[elvisizer]

oh neat, I had one of these years ago back before I got an oppo blu ray player. It think it converts DSD to pcm internally but I never minded, always sounded decent to me!

 

[Scytales]

oh neat, I had one of these years ago back before I got an oppo blu ray player. It think it converts DSD to pcm internally but I never minded, always sounded decent to me!

Yes, the DV-578 (AKA as DV-575 in other markets, notably in Europe) do.

The decimation of DSD into 24 bits/88.2 kHz PCM is done by the ubiquitous MediaTek MT1389 decoder chip-set. The same chip-set also generates the master system clock for the DAC chips (Burr Brown PCM1742) from a 27 MHz crystal oscillator. The way the MT1389 works internally to produce the masterclock required by different type of media (FS=44.1 kHz for CD and SA-CD replay and FS=48 kHz for DVD replay), may be the cause of the non-steady jitter at start-up.

 

[ReDFoX]

Yes, the DV-578 (AKA as DV-575 in other markets, notably in Europe) do.

The decimation of DSD into 24 bits/88.2 kHz PCM is done by the ubiquitous MediaTek MT1389 decoder chip-set. The same chip-set also generates the master system clock for the DAC chips (Burr Brown PCM1742) from a 27 MHz crystal oscillator. The way the MT1389 works internally to produce the masterclock required by different type of media (FS=44.1 kHz for CD and SA-CD replay and FS=48 kHz for DVD replay), may be the cause of the non-steady jitter at start-up.

Oh, so my unit can potentially have the same issue in DVD-A mode? Sorry, I didn't take notes of chips' names in mine, tho I can pull up service manual

 

[ReDFoX]

It really is a shame Pioneer pulled out of the hifi market, it would be interesting to see what they could do today with a CD player or universal player. Nice review and good player!

Yeah, all I want is 16bit transparent player with big LCD screen. Even cheap DACs easily clear/exceed a performance threshold for transparently play Red Book audio, SMPSs got smaller and better, but still, no affordable CD players yet

 

[Sokel]

I have the exact same one somewhere around here.
Mains noise can be greatly reduced (goes down to about 110dB mark) just by rotating the mains plug, I would be curious to see if yours does the same.

With mains reduced hits 93-94dB THD+N easily.
I was also curious to test its DSD but it has to wait for a while.

Edit: I now realized it's 565A, mine is 656A , I caught the difference by the absence of the left button who kills video.
They should be similar though.

 

[ReDFoX]

Mains noise can be greatly reduced (goes down to about 110dB mark) just by rotating the mains plug, I would be curious to see if yours does the same.

Soo, just switch phase&neutral?
I have no grounding (as in most USSR built block of flats) in my flat, thus I can't tell for sure, who's to blame

 

[Sokel]

Soo, just switch phase&neutral?
I have no grounding (as in most USSR built block of flats) in my flat, thus I can't tell for sure, who's to blame

Yes, switch phase and neutral. I believe all of them are class II, haven't seen one with 3-prong mains plug yet.

 

[ReDFoX]

Yes, switch phase and neutral. I believe all of them are class II, haven't seen one with 3-prong mains plug yet.

Ok, will try later. Thanks for the tip!

 

[Blumlein 88]

That is a very interesting observation.

Do you have take note of or remember the value of the jitter at the beginning and after the 15 seconds elapsed time?

A Case of the Jitters Less than "CD quality" | Stereophile.com

Test Results 1: Less than "CD quality" McIntosh MS750 media server$6000, reviewed by Wes Phillips in January 2008.

www.stereophile.com

I already had one when Stereophile did this jitter article. They measured 457 picoseconds peak to peak. JA used a 30 second test track for jitter. I was already aware of the issue. Gordon Rankin of Wavelength audio sent me a copy of the exact file JA used. So half of JA's 30 seconds were terrible and half good, but I don't imagine he noticed it. My results pretty much matched his exactly with the 30 second track. I've checked a few other brand players and none exhibited that effect.

I don't remember the values as that was 20 years ago. But the first few seconds were sky high. Like maybe 5-10 times that much. I kept it around to switch tracks and see if people could hear the jitter. No one ever did. I seem to remember once it settled down it had less jitter than the other players I tested. I think I still have it stored away. Don't know if it still works.

I thought the manual claimed it did DSD directly via the analog output, but converted to 48 khz over SPDIF. That may be a faulty memory. I don't recall if I ever tested the output to see. I know I tested the SPDIF out to see if jitter fluctuated over SPDIF. I cannot remember the results however, I want to say it did not do the same thing over SPDIF out.

 

[Scytales]

The Pioneer DV-578 uses Burr Brown PCM1742 DAC chips which don't have any DSD input, so conversion to PCM necessarily happens.

 

[AnalogSteph]

Anti-aliasing filter behavior (255 averages) is extremely strange here: it looks like it got only 25dB of attenuation after passband, but when we overlay CCIF IMD measurement, we can see that all images are quite sufficiently attenuated.

That smells of digital filter overload. Archimago does testing with two different white noise signals for that exact reason, one with 0 dBFS peaks and another with -4 dBFS.

 

[Blumlein 88]

That smells of digital filter overload. Archimago does testing with two different white noise signals for that exact reason, one with 0 dBFS peaks and another with -4 dBFS.

Yes, I was not paying attention in the original post. I use -4 db white noise for that reason too. I first saw it suggested by Jurgen Reis of MBL in Stereophile. Some DACs don't play nice at higher levels and white noise. Had a Focusrite that was fine up to - 1db, but above that and especially at 0 db did some truly strange things with all sorts of imaging showing up. So probably a good idea to redo that test.