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Kern mod to Sony SCD-1, superclock etc., with turbocharging

Posted this in the tweaks/diy section. It's probably worth knowing if modding is your think, or likely to become your thing.

To add some follow up observations....

The gap between SACD and CD sound has narrowed dramatically with these changes to the clock + transport. SACD is essentially better,
but good CD, a major qualifier if there ever was one, pulls up to withing drafting distance of the frontrunner.

Disks that would hold my interest for two or three cuts, maximum, would play through with scarcely a distracting thought. This has to be one criterion for what is good stuff and what isn't. With the good stuff, not only is it easier to listen to music, but the mind becomes far quieter. It's like there is a 12 db. reduction in mental background noise.

Even the original Superclock couldn't pull this off so it must be that ultra tight timing is absolutely fundamental to musical appreciation.

====================================
The baseline was my Sony SCD-1 that had been extensively modded by Richard Kern... regulators, superclock #1, caps, resistors... everything available except the clock PSU, a small power board that
feeds the clock only. He also did a custom piece by taking out the (nasty) ferrites from the a.c. input board and putting Bybee filters on both primary legs of both the audio and the digital transformers, for a total of 4 bybees...
needless to say, the player didn't sound too bad, often exceptionally good, with differing levels of involvement depending on the music being played... easily up there with most upper niche
products.

The SCD-1 went back to Kern for Superclock #2. a PSU, and the "transport board mod"... a lot of small value caps are taken off the board and replaced.

The Superclock #2 was cryogenic treated for two cycles of immersion to gain maximum effect, and a small piece of ERS (a radio frequency
dissipating material) was placed on about 1/4 of the back of the Superclock #2 in order to absorb jitter inducing reflections from the clock circuit and to minimize interactions with other parts of the circuits the clock is installed near.

The PSU wasn't cryo treated as this may have cracked the transformer cover, but a piece of ERS cloth was placed over the top square of the transformer for maximum RF isolation and to reduce any interactions nearby. The PSU also had Marigo "black dot" material cut out from 32 mm. disks carefully placed to minimize PSU board vibrations.

The PSU fuse was removed, rigorously cleaned with Wenol to remove all traces of oxidation, contact enhanced with Setten Diatonic,replaced, and a marigo dot was placed on the removable plastic fuse cover.

So, we had a new hyper-superclock, a vibration and rf damped PSU, and a lot of new caps on the transport board.

All the ICs, rectifiers, and regulators were also coated with a thin film anti-reflective coating called Musi-Coat that I have had good experiences with on digital circuits, although it is marketed as an analog tweak...

The SCD-1 went back in, and everything was turned back on from dead cold, the preamp, the amps, and the player...

With no warmup at all this mod was a drastic change for the better. Kern said the transport mod would sound more "organic". This is exactly true in my limited experience. The Superclock#2 with the PSU
improves the timing cues so much, resulting in a sense of musical texture, presence, involvement, and so on that it is in some respects near to a live performance.

Next a warm up of 5 hours with the Purist Audio break in disk and an evening of listening. It felt like being able to attend concerts, club dates, studio sessions, in person, one after another. The mental
effort-distance to get into the musical illusion had shrunk to almost nil.

Did the ERS/cryo/marigo/musi-coat have a major (or minor) impact on all of this, or would you hear the same thing with a standard clock/psu/transport mod ? There was no way to tell without a control.

Whatever, this was among the best sound ever heard, and many parts of the system are decade old technology. Something about that transport board mod with the new clock gets the ineffable, elusive "IT" as right as it can be got in the 16 bit world of CD listening... SACDs may punch a hole all the way to a parallel universe





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Topic - Kern mod to Sony SCD-1, superclock etc., with turbocharging - tonemaniac 05:42:29 11/1/03 (1)


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