Sony CDP-X559ES Review (CD Player)

[French Meloman]

Accuphase, because it looks nicer with rather minimalistic front

I would also choose the Accuphase, which benefits from a build quality that makes it almost indestructible, and it maintains a resale value that remains substantial. The only question is being able to replace the playback unit with an identical one in case of failure, which seems inevitable over time.

 

[GPx86]

I am loving all of these CD player reviews! Please keep it up! Love the comparison of old and new. Absolutely top notch content.

 

[Audioagnostic]

Nice review!

I was tempted to buy one but it convinced me to stay away from these classic CD players. Nothing special in terms of looks and specs for me.

These ES players still command more money than superior newer players such as the Tascam you reviewed.

 

[SuicideSquid]

Interesting and informative review as always.

As others have said, it's great to get more evidence that 16/44 digital audio was a solved problem, at least in well-made players, by the late 80s and early 90s.

 

[Tim Link]

It's great to see older gear reviewed. Hard to complain about its performance!
I used to own an X77ES back in the1990s. That transport speed and silence was amazing. It's weird that I felt the sound was somehow lackluster, lacking dynamic punch. I preferred my record player going through the phono stage on my Carver pre-amp. I now wonder what it was that I thought I was hearing. I'm thinking it was just gain. I needed to turn it up more for the Sony's analog output. But I could swear I tried that many times and was never satisfied. I later got a Theta Cobalt DAC that I used with the Sony CD player's digital output. Maybe my Sony had a bad analog output stage? I'll never know.

 

[AndreaT]

Excellent review NTTY. Since you mentioned the headphone output, would it be possible to test it, Amir-style? In my experience, the HP section of vintage (and contemporary) CD players is too often very anemic in power and quite high in distortion.

 

[capslock]

Wow, the circuit board looks like something I designed in my student days: single sided, no ground plane, lots of through hole components and more than a few carbon composition resistors. It's amazing that it achieves this kind of performance.

And it is important to remember how quickly CD player technology progressed within about a decade.

 

[BeeKay]

Wondering how this slightly younger SCD-555ES would do here.

 

[Scytales]

Wondering how this slightly younger SCD-555ES would do here.

Patience...

 

[Scytales]

Wow, the circuit board looks like something I designed in my student days: single sided, no ground plane, lots of through hole components and more than a few carbon composition resistors. It's amazing that it achieves this kind of performance.

As astounding as it sounds, according to a testimony from Andrew Demery, a well-known former Philips employee who worked to implement SACD and DSD production tools in the early 2000s, one of Philips's lead engineers and father of 1 bit conversion, Carel Dijkmans, favored carbon resistors to make its ADCs and DACs, including for pro use. Don't ask me why.

 

[NTTY]

@NTTY, as you have the Pierre Vérany Digital Test CD, did you check the many players you have measured with the inter-modulation by crosstalk test signals (tracks 47 and 48)? It would be interresting to see, especially with old devices but also with newer ones, if there is something to measure. Perhaps it would give an hint about the care taken in signal and ground routine both inside and outside DAC chips.

Interesting, I never played with these tracks.

Here you go with the results:

Problem is that the chosen frequencies (1kHz and 5kHz) generate lots of idle tones, so it's not easy to see what's from the quantization errors or the IMD.

I guess I could create a modernized version of that test. Usually I run IMD tests with dither, but here, since we are searching for very level interactions, I guess no dither is required. I'll give it some thoughts.

 

[Scytales]

I think you should try to invert the channel under scrutiny : look at the channel on which the 5 kHz tone is playing and search for a 4 kHz spurious, which is the difference frequency between 5 kHz and 1 kHz. The reasoning is as follow. By analyzing the channel on which the 1 kHz tone is playing on an FFT, it would not be possible to distinguish a possible beat tone at 4 kHz from the regular 4th harmonic of the 1 kHz tone (especially if the effect is small), whereas if the channel on which the 5 kHz tone is playing is analyzed, the 4 kHz theoretical beat product is lower in frequency than the 5 kHz fundamental tone, which would exclude any visible tone at 4 kHz as being harmonically related to 5 kHz.

As an illustration, I got this result with a Pioneer DV-868AVi:

It's the only player I have tested so far, so I have no idea if this measurement is meaningful or not, or even if I got the method right. Some thoughts and input from your part would be useful for cross-checking. Maybe this measurement have no longer any relevance (if it had any, in the first place), maybe not. Only a body of sufficient samples of measurements on many players would tell.

 

[NTTY]

REW can’t do a backward IMD calculation but yeah it’d be possible to look at the 5 kHz tone and manually report the level of the 1kHz side tones, if that is what we are searching for.

I’ll think about a more automated version of that, if possible.

 

[NTTY]

Here you go with the results, I think I managed to make REW process the calculation correctly.

So, that will be a new test: IMD crosstalk.

In the first result below, Right channel plays a 1kHz @0dBFS dithered test tone, and Left one plays a 5kHz test tone at 0dBFS too. We analyze the resulting intermodulation distortion from the Left channel:

And the same but Left Right channel (analysis from the Right channel):

Interestingly, the side bands have moved away at 2kHz distance from the fundamental, so are theoretically not of out interest, but let's see with other CD players (for later).

Note also that I left the plot on the 1kHz test tone which comes from the other channel and shows respectively -111dBr and -113dBr "standard" 1kHz crosstalk.

 

[Scytales]

Thanks ! Perhaps a view when the two channels both replay a 5 kHz tone may set a useful reference to compare to the above results.

 

[Anatols_Dad]

IMO, design-wise many of the Sonys in that period were cutting edge - clean and timeless, they had (and still have) a very sophisticated elegance,
I'd say "still sexy (and fresh-looking) after all these years" with that posh finish and the soft curve on the front. Really remarkable despite the Armada of buttons, compared to the Accuphase!
And the are so reliable!

But hey, both are (still) fantastic.

 

[NTTY]

Excellent review NTTY. Since you mentioned the headphone output, would it be possible to test it, Amir-style? In my experience, the HP section of vintage (and contemporary) CD players is too often very anemic in power and quite high in distortion.

Hi, unfortunately I don't have all the cabling and necessary loads for a decent review of headphones amps. Sony's specifications are 32mW max with 32ohms, not much, but it was good enough for my ears with my DT-770Pro (32ohms).

All that said, I could run a measurements into 400 ohms load (my Cosmos E1AD ADCiso has a unbalanced input of roughly 400ohms). So here we go with the 999.91Hz @0dBFS, close to the limit of clipping of the phones out:

We have only 2dB more low level noise compared to fixed RCA outputs, and equally very low distortion.

 

[horias2000]

As always, really nice to see your review. I've been looking for one of these Sony units for a while now. The X559ES goes for around 6-700EUR but I'm always thinking at the Denon DCD 900NE that is around 500EUR new. It's really hard to decide as the performance is very similar and being new it's usually a plus. I could just stay with my two Marantzs but that is no fun

 

[Fleuch]

Great reviews.

Is there a reason for leaving the odd CD player, such as the Yamaha CD-2000, out of the comparative performance tables?

 

[NTTY]

Thanks ! Perhaps a view when the two channels both replay a 5 kHz tone may set a useful reference to compare to the above results.

No side bands in that case