Digital Drive: So I go and buy one of these cheap POS Toshiba 3950's... by Rick B

Before a Bottlehead meeting last Saturday here in San Antonio almost as a joke...

Raw just out of the box, the unit didn't make our ears bleed...in fact, one person said that there was a whole lot of spatial cues that the unit delivered...so we played the 3950 most of the afternoon.

We switched to an EAD DAC with an older Sony ES series CD player as transport (and different interconnects) and yes, the sound was smoother...

But, at the end of the day the unit only had about 5 hours of playing time on it...

So, I brought it home and started burning it in with a burn-in disk I made that has tracks with everything from 20Hz tones, to the XLO burn in track, to the Stereophile Test CD's burning track...then Sunday afternoon I stuck it in the main system....

It sounded pretty dang good, so I just let it play music on repeat until this afternoon when I got an undisturbed chance to listen critically to the unit...

First thing to be replaced were the JPS Ultraconductor interconnects for the Wire World Equinox...nice, better sense of space and clearer high frequencies....

Then, I moved it to a shelf in the rack by itself, stuck it up on darumas, and placed a piece of 3/4" MDF that has Dynamat bonded to it's bottom on top of the unit...Wow! the unit responded well to these tweaks and I sat down to listen for about 45 minutes...

Then, remembering that I have a set of the original Bybee Quantum interconnect filters, I stuck these on the back of the player and plugged the Equinoxes into them... I then plugged the unit into a One AC isolation transformer which is plugged into the digital AC outlets of my Tice Solo/AV line conditioner.

Hold on...this is a $60 cheap POS mass market DVD player with $100 footers, $150 cables, and interconnect filters that cost I don't know what several years ago, am I nuts? Yeah, but that doesn't count!

This little unit with about 100 hours on it now, sounds downright freakin' amazing! There's not much difference between the 3950 and my SACD 1000 playing CD's now, if any...my modified ART DIO never sounded this good...

What the 'ell is this thing gonna sound like when I mod it? I'm almost scared to find out!!!

Looks like Michael Percy and DigiKey are gonna get a few more bucks outta me!