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Unison Research Unico CDP Review

milosz said:
As badly as this measures, I'd like to see a blind A/B to see if listeners can actually hear the defects. Seems to me that people can't actually hear nearly as acutely as they think they can.

...not because I want to say that this CD player is OK in some way, but just to use as an example of a measurably flawed audio source for testing if these flaws can actually be discerned by listeners.

My guess is that a few rare listeners would be able to hear this level of misbehavior, but at the same time I'd bet dollars to donuts that MANY "audiophiles" would not be able to tell the difference in this vs. a pristine player.

I conducted a small test with an Audio-GD DAC that I had which measured very poorly* vs a Topping DAC which measured great. Neither I nor any of the several people that listened to this A/B - including a pro musician - could reliably hear a difference.

*I sent the DAC to Amir for testing, the results appear here => https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...d-measurements-of-audio-gd-nfb2-192-dac.7807/
Click to expand...
I don’t want even the possibility that poor design & implementation might cause damage to the original musical signal. I would not spend my precious listening time from a source that has poor reviews compared to others (less expensive) that do not degrade the signal.
 
You have advantage of digital technology and then you add a tube into the mix? If I hear that "more musical" "more warm" one more time... My father had an old Edison cylinder player with the big horn. The ultimate in analog musicality and warmth. State of the art, it's been all downhill since.
 
Hart said:
You have advantage of digital technology and then you add a tube into the mix? If I hear that "more musical" "more warm" one more time... My father had an old Edison cylinder player with the big horn. The ultimate in analog musicality and warmth. State of the art, it's been all downhill since.
Click to expand...
At the time, audiophiles were hotly discussing the pro’s and cons of various woods for needles. :p
 
This level of performance in a $1000 CD player... and people crap on AVRs for "only" getting ~80dB SINAD at the speaker terminals.
 
AnalogSteph said:
Make that a CS8420.

This player is kind of the worst of all worlds. The distortion of a tube stage and the intersample-over handling of an ASRC combined with a crummy computer UI, what's not to dislike? Doesn't look like there's overly much ultrasonic filtering for all the shaping noise the CS4392 is dishing out either. (This is pretty much the same DAC as found in the CS4272.)
Click to expand...

Hang on ... they missed out on NOS !

I've a feeling this was released before the NOS craze got big enough to implement in commercial designs .
 
AnalogSteph said:
Make that a CS8420.

This player is kind of the worst of all worlds. The distortion of a tube stage and the intersample-over handling of an ASRC combined with a crummy computer UI, what's not to dislike? Doesn't look like there's overly much ultrasonic filtering for all the shaping noise the CS4392 is dishing out either. (This is pretty much the same DAC as found in the CS4272.)
Click to expand...
It's essentially a poster-boy for overpriced boutique crap.
 
NTTY said:
Nice review, thanks for the efforts!

I was about to ask if you checked the channel imbalance or output voltage / phase, etc... but considering the other results, not sure I want to know :)

About the digital output, and depending on the digital interface you use with REW, I'd suspect this player does not output 44.1kHz, but maybe 48kHz. You can try to connect it to another DAC and see what it reads as the input sampling rate.

As per your measurement of intersample overs, and as @AnalogSteph mentioned, the overflow you measured is typical of an ASRC, and I seem to recognize a CS8420 here, which would explain the results.

Thanks again for sharing!
Click to expand...
Good point! I forgot to mention the output level at 0dBFS. It was 1.7V and the two channels were pretty even, there wasn't anything between them. I updated the initial post.
Thanks!
 
I think they could have made it even better if the used a TDA1541 :facepalm:. In this way they would have checked almost all the boxes :D
 
horias2000 said:
Hello all,

This is a review and measurements of the Unico CDP CD Player from Unison Research (version with one tube). The company is from Italy and I'm not sure if they still exist or not. As with most of the units I get to measure, this came in as defective. The drive was not reading discs.

View attachment 498747

The unit is rather simple without any extra features. One of the main advertising point of these units was that it had a vacuum tube output buffer. The back of the unit is even simpler and I didn't consider it worth photographing. It has a mains input connector, the analog outputs and a COAX digital output. I was not able to use the later and I'm not sure why. Another "special" feature of these units is that it does not use a "classic" laser unit from Philips, Sony, etc. Instead, it uses a Teac CD-ROM unit with IDE interface. Yes, you read it right. It has a 5.25 inch CD-ROM unit made by Teac (52X if it matters :) ). This is an older (2002) IDE unit.

View attachment 498748

The problem with the drive was that it wasn't able to fully load the disc. There was a lot of dust and debris in the mechanical part of the tray and the belt was also worn. After a thorough cleaning and lubing and with the help of a new belt, the drive was loading and readinig the discs pretty nice.

On the inside, it's pretty straight forward:

View attachment 498749
There is a toroidal transformer for power and the CD-ROM drive is connected to the main board via de IDE ribbon cable. On the main board we see the power supply stage, the DAC IC (CS4392). This is a 24-bit and 192kHz DAC IC that boasts 100dB of THD+N in the datasheet. We can also see the tube buffer made with an ECC82 tube from JJ. Not sure if this is the original one or if it was replaced.


View attachment 498750

View attachment 498751

As you cabn see, there was a lot of dust inside and I tried cleaning it as much as possible.

Below you can see the detailed specs of the unit:

General
  • Manufacturer: Unison Research
  • Model: Unico CDP
  • Years of manufacture:
  • Made in: Italy
  • Color: black, silver
  • Remote control: yes
  • Dimensions: 435 x 95 x 340 mm (WxHxD)
  • Weight: 10 kg
  • Original price approx.: 1300,- - 1400,- €

Technical Data
  • Output tube: 1 X ECC 83 (Class A triode tube output stage)
  • D/A converter: 1 x Crystal CS 4392, stereo converter
  • oversampling rate: Crystal CS 8420 24 bit / 96 Khz
  • Output impedance: < 100 Ohm
  • Display: Toshiba LCD graphic text display. 128x64 pixel resolution
  • Remote control: System remote control made of plastic, wooden remote control optional
  • Drive: Highly selected Teac CD Rom drive
I was not able to find and THD or THD+N figures so I didn't know what exactly to expect. As it has a tube putput, I was expecting pretty poor THD+N performance. Let's see if I'm wrong or not.

For the measurements I used @NTTY 's test CD, version 7.2 (again, many thanks) and my Cosmos ADC (gdare A) + Cosmos Scaler.

Here is the 1kHz test tone:

View attachment 498753
WOW! This is really bad :). The second harmonic is through the roof at around -60dB and this dictates the overall performance of THD+N at -57.5dB. We can also see the evidence of high noise as the graph is tiled towards the high frequencies. The two channels were pretty well matched and the output level at 0DBFS was 1.7V. That being said, the third and fourth harmonics are pretty low. There is a debate on the audability of the 2nd harmonic and I can clearly say that I can't hear it at -60dB. I used my headphones and REW and added distorsion over the 1kHz test tone and I was not able to hear when the 2nd harmonic was added. I could clearly hear the 3rd and 4th but not the 2nd. This is just on the test tone. In real life, with a complex signal as music is, there's a high chance that you will hear it. Nevertheless, this is rather poor performance as I was expecting when seeing the tube buffer.

Let's see at -6dB:

View attachment 498754
We can clearly see the tube at work. With a lower amplitude signal. the 2nd harminic is lower, giving us a slightly better THD+N of -63dB. This is still abismal in my oipinion.

Frequency response looks pretty flat:

View attachment 498755

Here is the oversampling filter response:

View attachment 498756
The filter starts attenuating at around 21kHz and at 23.5kHz it hits it's maximum attenuation of around -75dB. Not great if you ask me. We can see rather large ultrasonic artefacts between 30 and 40kHz at around -60dB. We can clearly see the noise shaping happening after 30kHz.

Let's see the multitone:

View attachment 498757

As expected, this is not great. We have around 75dB of useful range, that is 12.5 bits.

Jitter:

View attachment 498759
This looks good.

THD vs frequency at -12dB:

View attachment 498760
Being at a lover level, this is not as bad as the full scale signal, but still pretty bad for a CD player. It's 20dB shy of what it should do.

Now the "intersample-overs" table with the units I measured so far:
CD player​
5512.5 Hz sine,
Peak = +0.69dBFS​
7350 Hz sine,
Peak = +1.25dBFS​
11025 Hz sine,
Peak = +3.0dBFS​
Marantz CD52mk2 - SE-34dB-27.6dB-16.2dB
Marantz CD67mk2-37.6dB-29.1dB-19.3dB
Marantz SA-14-47dB-32.6dB-21.4dB
Unison Reserach UNICO CDP (single valve)-34.6dB-27dB-29.6dB (only at -1.01dB) - H3 dominated

I did not perform the measurement for 11025Hz and +3dB as I could see clipping already at -1dB. The graph looks pretty bad when moving from +0.01dB to +1dB (see below):

@+0.01dB

View attachment 498773
and @ +1.01dB

View attachment 498774

This tells me that already at +1.01dB it is clipping and it going higher will not give us a diferent result.

Now let's see some IMD graphs:

View attachment 498761
View attachment 498762
View attachment 498765
View attachment 498767
The performance is poor at around -60dB. I like seeing the IMD graphs but maybe I'll switch to a list like @NTTY is doing in his reviews.

I did not perform any tests on the speed of the drive but I can tell you it's slow. For starters, it take 30s for the unit to warm up as it waits for the tube to get up to temperature. In this time, there's a countdown on the screen and you can't do anything but wait as the buttons do not respond. When going from one track to another it's ok, but when you want to skip several track, it takes a long time as you can't skip several tracks at once by clicking on the buttons, you have to wait for the next track to start and only after this, you can skip to the next one. This might be due to the fact that it uses a computer drive instead of a dedicated drive for audio.

Conclusion:

Well the measurements speak for themselvs. This is not a well pwerfoming device and I can't see any reasons why you would buy one, considering the price of around 1000EUR. There are many new options that perform far better. It doesn't sound bad as I can't really hear the 2nd harmonic but we can't deny what the measurements show. For some reason I was not able to test the digital output of the unit. I suspect it's a far better option to use an external DAC in order to avoid using the internal one. The internal DAC itself is not bad, but the analog stage containing a valve is not doing a good enough job.

I hope this review helps you if you were lookinmg at the uinit second-hand.

All the best,
Horia


Click to expand...
It is really bad
 
To your question of if the company still exists, yes they do. And they seem like good people. I have an integrated amp from the same era. I love it (probably it would test poorly, but it's so pretty). I recently wrote to find out if the phono preamp, which comes as a plug-in card, is still available. They said yes, quoted a price of a couple of hundred bucks, and asked for the amp's serial number, to make sure they sent the right one. Not bad after 23 years.
 
I recently read @NTTY's review of the JVC XL-Z335 CD player from around 1990. That player measured basically to the limits of the format. I would actually like to own one, or a nice 331 as they both use the same d/a and filters. I recently saw a video on YouTube claiming modern CD players sound superior to the ones of even 20 years ago.. Really? We kinda hit that wall nearly 30 years ago!
Anwyay, this was an amusing read. A cheap Teac CD-Rom drive (made by Lite-On, I think) put into a fancy box with a terrible output stage. Par for the course with some of this esoteric stuff!
 
Also, the name Unico... there's a US company by that name that makes arcade monitors and accessories. Totally different but I did a double-take!
 
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