SMSL PL200 Review (CD Player)

[Fleuch]

Too bad no SACD support and only USB input to use as a standalone DAC.

If not for the above, I would have already purchased this unit.

It is an omission that SMSL have not included SACD capability in such an excellent product, particularly as the specifications state the PL200 can process DSD512 files.

The Sony UBP-X700 Ultra HD Blu-ray™ Player has a wide range of discs formats it can play, including SACD, and digital file formats. Unlike its UBP-X800 predecessor it does not carry the High Resolution Audio badge, Sony claim it has the same performance. The current price is around €275, which is a considerable discount on current SACD players.

There are other Blu-ray™ Players that have similar audio capability, but as no new products have recently been introduced to the market the audio performance may well be below standard.

@NTTY: are you interested and / or able measure the audio performance of one of these groups of players?

​

 

[Bacchusoo7]

I'm almost certain the answer is "no" as I think I read that the USB is only for the DAC, but I want to ask just in case. Can it be used as a CD drive with a computer, say for ripping discs?

 

[LTig]

The Sony UBP-X700 Ultra HD Blu-ray™ Player has a wide range of discs formats it can play, including SACD, and digital file formats. Unlike its UBP-X800 predecessor it does not carry the High Resolution Audio badge, Sony claim it has the same performance. The current price is around €275, which is a considerable discount on current SACD players.

There are other Blu-ray™ Players that have similar audio capability, but as no new products have recently been introduced to the market the audio performance may well be below standard.

@NTTY: are you interested and / or able measure the audio performance of one of these groups of players?

The Sony players (X700, X800) have no analog output, just digital. One can measure the drives though.

 

[NTTY]

I'm almost certain the answer is "no" as I think I read that the USB is only for the DAC, but I want to ask just in case. Can it be used as a CD drive with a computer, say for ripping discs?

No indeed. The computer sees it as an audio output only.

 

[Bacchusoo7]

No indeed. The computer sees it as an audio output only.

Okay. Thank you for the help.

 

[NTTY]

It is an omission that SMSL have not included SACD capability in such an excellent product, particularly as the specifications state the PL200 can process DSD512 files.

The Sony UBP-X700 Ultra HD Blu-ray™ Player has a wide range of discs formats it can play, including SACD, and digital file formats. Unlike its UBP-X800 predecessor it does not carry the High Resolution Audio badge, Sony claim it has the same performance. The current price is around €275, which is a considerable discount on current SACD players.

There are other Blu-ray™ Players that have similar audio capability, but as no new products have recently been introduced to the market the audio performance may well be below standard.

@NTTY: are you interested and / or able measure the audio performance of one of these groups of players?

These are transports only but it’s cool they read SACD. They will need a compatible receiver to process bitstream from HDMI, and I can’t verify that digital stream, so I would not know if the data remains untouched. I guess I could buy a DAC with HDMI input capable of reading DSD stream from HDMI, and analyze the analog output quality. Far from being equivalent to checking directly the digital data, but good enough to spot gross issues like I saw with the OPPO.

In my recent review of the OPPO BDP-105, I spotted a strange behavior, I think a bug in digital
domain when the player has to invoke its sample rate converter.

I’m testing another Blu-ray / SACD player at the moment, and it does not process DSD signal directly, it converts to PCM before conversion despite using a DAC that I’m sure could convert DSD.

Anyways, why not give it a try. Generally these players are nearly unusable if not connected to a TV. Their drive are also often extremely slow and front display not informative enough, but only a test would confirm all of that.

 

[Kaiju]

Thank you NTTY, I was eying for this.

 

[anibal66]

@NTTY thanks for another great review.
@ SMSL well done! top loaders are cool. in the next production batch you should delete that uncool  MQA sign and proudly display SMSL instead. please, it would be great if you could manage that EU dealers sell the unit at the price in China...

 

[Clara 7]

Thanks @NTTY for this great review. I am strongly considering getting the SMSL PL200T, so the review of this CD player put me over the top in favor of that idea. I have a massive CD Collection, mostly instrumental Classical, Jazz, and Ambient-Electronic. Your review is very much appreciated.

 

[NTTY]

I have a PL200T on its way to me. Since it has a clock input, I wanted to test what benefits we get from that

 

[Clara 7]

Thanks again @NTTY. I will look forward to your review of the PL200T with great interest. If SMSL would release an affordable top loading player with SACD capability in place of the MQA to keep cost down, I think they would have a CD Player / Transport that would be a benchmark product. I would love to see SMSL could go a step further and release a top loading Universal Disc Player that is also affordable, like the great Oppo players were. When SMSL released the PL200, I was really wanting to get that player. When the PL200T came out to great reviews, That pretty much sealed it for me to get the transport version of this player.

 

[PristineSound]

Thanks again @NTTY. I will look forward your review of the PL200T with great interest. If SMSL would release an affordable top loading player with SACD capability in place of the MQA to keep cost down, I think they would have a CD Player / Transport that would be a benchmark product. I would love to see SMSL could go a step further and release a top loading Universal Disc Player that is also affordable, like the great Oppo players were. When SMSL released the PL200, I was really wanting to get that player, and then when the PL200T came out with great reviews, I think I am going to get the transport version of this player.

The PL200T is just a transport, not too much to be measured; if SMSL gets that wrong, we got some serious problems at hand.

 

[NTTY]

Here are the tests I perform with all CD players, and that are applicable to a transport.

Drive tracking resistance tests:

• Variation of linear cutting velocity
• Variation of track pitch
• Combined variations of track pitch and velocity
• HF detection (asymmetry pitch/flat ratio)
• Dropouts resistance
• Combined dropouts and smallest pitch
• Successive dropouts

Digital output bitstream checks:

• 1kHz @0dBFS
• 997Hz @-90.31dBFS
• 5512.50Hz @0dBFS with 67.5° phase shift
• Jitter Test
• Pitch Error (19’997Hz)
• THD vs Frequency @-12dBFS
• De-emphasis compliance

Miscellaneous:

• Time to read the TOC of a 40 tracks CD
• Reactivity to skip tracks and FFW/REW
• Gapless Playback compliance

Actually, the above tests require more time than just testing the analog outputs, especially because I need to use 4 different test CDs for these.

The PL200 is one of the three CD Players (of all I tested), when tested as a transport, that nailed all above tests. So they can't be taken for granted, and I hope the PL200T will repeat the same.

In the case of the PL200T, and because of its additional features, I’ll have to add the below:

• External Clock tests
• Digital bitstream passthrough (via USB) quality checks, at various bit-depth and sampling rates

So yes there’s a lot to test and measure.

 

[tokyo_blues]

Just stumbled on this - thanks for the review.

Took delivery of one of these yesterday. It's exceptional. Doing the proverbial 'rediscovery' of my CDs as we speak. CD player into a Sennheiser headphone amp and then into my HD800 headphones. Listening to the Haydn string quartets by the Takacs Quartet on Hyperion, it's just.. jawdropping.

And the actual thing is so well made too. Tiny solid brick. Quiet, precise, fast, nice display. 1/4th the size of my long sold Marantz 6000 OSE Ken Ishiwata signature, and sounds so much better. It has everything I need and nothing I don't.

Luckily I kept all my 2K+ CDs after the time spent (EAC+FLAC) ripping them. That's ok. Any streaming and FLACs/OGG vorbis will be relegated to mobile phone use. My Raspberry PI, Moode, Volumio and all associated boxes and paraphernalia are going on sale or perhaps out of the window.

I'm back to CDs (and records, but that's another story)!

 

[Ilpiera]

Hi everybody
I finally understand very

Last, and not least, I wanted to talk about the filtering options of this player, because I think it's really cool.

I mentioned the 5 filters and the 4 "sound" options in the introduction, but I repeat them here:

• Five selectable filters:
  • Sharp (Default)
  • Slow
  • Short Sharp
  • Short Slow
  • Super Slow (aka NOS)
  • Low Dispersion
• Four selectable "Sound colors" which I understand allow to change the delta-sigma oversampling rate, and as per my measurements:
  • SC1 (5.6M) : Lowest Distortion, noise shaper kicking off at 30kHz (Default)
  • SC2 (5.6M) : 10dB more distorsion than SC1, noise shaper kicking off at 80kHz
  • SC3 (11M) : 5dB more distortion than SC2, noise shaper kicking off at 110kHz
  • SC4 (11M) : No measurable difference (up to 380kHz) with SC3

The difference between the "Sound Colors" probably refers to the Delta-Sigma modulator oversampling rate. Increasing the oversampling further pushes the noise create by the noise shaper up in frequencies.

So, time has come to look into more details about these 20 total options!

Let's start with the filters. This is a wide bandwidth view of their respective response (with SC1), from white noise:

View attachment 478650

We see the noise shaper kicking off at 30kHz, and it is common to all filters since this comes from "SC1" option which is the lowest oversampling rate of the Delta-Sigma (my guess).

Look at the blue trace on top of everything, the one that mimics a NOS (Non-OverSampling) DAC. This is a per the books, the standard sample-hold function of a DAC that creates many unwanted artifacts wrapped in a sinus cardinal function. What does that mean? It means that a DAC receives a sample to convert, a binary word to convert to a voltage. It does it and maintains the voltage until the next binary word comes in. The effect of holding the voltage for that short period of time is what creates many artifacts and that sinc envelope. All of that MUST be filtered. When it’s not, you get this:

View attachment 478797

Sorry, I suck at drawing. The first green section of the left is our converted original 20Hz to 20kHz audio signal (44.1kHz sampling rate). The red section next to it is a mirror copy around 22.05kHz of everything from 20Hz to 20kHz. It is all wrong, and has no meaning. It is the sample-hold effect, it creates unwanted artifacts. And then, there's a copy/paste of that, every times Fs, where Fs = 44.1kHz, it never ends. All of that is wrapped in a sinus cardinal envelope (Orange on the graph).

I'm happy the SMSL PL200 let me play with that. So let's continue and let me overlay to the graph the standard AES IMD 18kHz&20kHz test tones:

View attachment 478663

Everything I circled in red is wrong, an alias of the original dual tones. This is created by an unfiltered DAC. Look at the very high energy all of this has. If you want to try blowing a tweeter of yours, this is the good way to go!

Ok, now, let's filter properly (Sharp filter), just to see the difference:

View attachment 478664

Voilà, all the crap is gone with the green graph. It's a sharp filter that removes all unwanted artifacts, copy/paste of what we have from 20Hz to 20kHz, and that's all we need to have in the end.

You might wonder, though, if the crap we saw impacts the audio band. Yes it does:

View attachment 478666

See the massive amount of distortion (orange, up to -75dB) that comes back into the audio band, as intermodulation distortion. When properly filtered (green) we see nothing.

All of that to say if you want to experience the massive distortion created by NOS DACs, you have one very good opportunity here!

Ok, now let me talk about the "sound color" options. The below graphs are all from the Sharp filter, and from the CD audio (that means 16bits/44.1kHz). Let's start with the first option, SC1, wide bandwidth (up to 380khz) with my standard undithered 999.91Hz test tone at 0dBFS:

View attachment 478669

We see the noise shaper kicking off as early as 30kHz or so. Let's try the same with "Sound Color 2":

View attachment 478670

Interesting difference. The dashboard computes a little more distortion in audio band. But we see that the noise shaper kicks off later, roughly at 80khz.

Let's try the same with "Sound Color 3":

View attachment 478672

The low level noise of the noise shaper comes later again, at around 110kHz. But the computed distortion in audio band is a little higher again.

I spare you SC4 since it's the same as SC3. But what about distortion in audio band? This is better view:

View attachment 478673

Note this is from the CD, so it's limited to 16bits. We get odd harmonic distortion. That might have a sound indeed, but at such low level?


SMLS PL200 - Final conclusion

Being able to play with different filters and "coloring" the sound with a little more distortion or a massive quantity, is cool, I think. If one wants to test their abilities to hear distorsion at such low levels, you have a winner! This would also help you relax on your needs for high resolution devices.

I think this CD player is really cool.

Very impressive and clear explanations of the so hated NOS mode and the effects in the frequency domain of this filter (or no filter) .Whatt would be very interesting is an analysis in time domain. In fact those NOS filters create , in time domain, quasi-perfect impulse response with no ripples and so I am asking to myself (and to all of you) if wouldn't be better to have a more precise time domain response despite very poor frequency domain behavior.

 

[funkera91]

Hey, there is one CD and BluRay player Panasonic UB9000, which might be better than OPPO in listening to music. Also reads almost every scratched CD without issue.

 

[NTTY]

Hi everybody
I finally understand very

Very impressive and clear explanations of the so hated NOS mode and the effects in the frequency domain of this filter (or no filter) .Whatt would be very interesting is an analysis in time domain. In fact those NOS filters create , in time domain, quasi-perfect impulse response with no ripples and so I am asking to myself (and to all of you) if wouldn't be better to have a more precise time domain response despite very poor frequency domain behavior.

Hi,

No because they are the same thing viewed differently. If frequency domain tells you that you have one spike at 1kHz, then it is a sine in time domain that is completed every 1/1000sec.

If you get a perfect square from a CD player at say 1kHz, then it means it’s not properly filtered because a square is made of an infinite number of odd harmonics, and since the audio CD is band limited, you’re not supposed to get a nice square but see some ripples at the edges of it (or jump discontinuity). See what is the Gibbs Phenomenon if you need/want to know more.

Impulse response is something different, not easy to explain in few words. Ripples are necessary in the impulse response because the fourrier transform of a sinc(x) typical reconstruction function is a rectangular pulse. And that is the perfect brick wall in frequency domain, that we preferably use to filter out all the garbage generated by the conversion.

The conversion of one digital word (say 16bits) into a voltage, and maintaining that voltage until the next digital word comes in, the famous "stair steps", can be seen as a rectangular pulse, of which Fourier transform is the sinc function. And that is why, when unfiltered, you get a rectangular impulse response, and an infinite number of artifacts that are enveloped into a sinc function in frequency domain.

So a rectangular impulse response is unwanted, it is bad because it means the conversion from digital to analog is creating tons of unwanted additional artifacts way beyond what we need (20kHz or 22.05kHz if we talk Audio CD).

 

[Kagenohi]

I used it, and had a good time with it. Now I move to VMV T2 and I think T2 is even better although I did not do any measuring

 

[NTTY]

Hey, there is one CD and BluRay player Panasonic UB9000, which might be better than OPPO in listening to music. Also reads almost every scratched CD without issue.

Better than the OPPO-BDP95 to listen to music?

 

[funkera91]

Better than the OPPO-BDP95 to listen to music?

Probably they are at the same level of quality but there is also lack of information which DAC is using the Panasonic UB9000 - either AKM4493/53, either ESS Sabre. It is good that they still sell and support this model.