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Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it. |
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Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it. |
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In Reply to: How do other makers fare? posted by Jimmy2615 on May 14, 2008 at 10:29:05:
< < how do companies like Accuphase, Meridian, and Sony fare in these 'shared' platforms? > >Sony is big enough to make its own transports, and that is what they do. Unfortunately, they haven't made an "audio" grade one for many years now. They are all rather ordinary affairs with plastic trays and frames. Furthermore, none of the Sony transport/decoders (the two parts are essentially joined at the hip) ever has or ever will support DVD-Audio due to political considerations.
Meridian has used computer ROM drives for many years now. When their ultra-expensive 800 series disc player came out many years ago it was a bit odd to see a door drop down and expose a $50 ROM drive, but that's what they do. It's getting to be one of the only viable long-term solutions out there as most other sources of optical drives keep drying up. The drawback to this approach is that it is impossible to support SACD.
I'm not completely sure what Accuphase does. I was at the Tokyo Hi-End show several years ago and am pretty sure that they were using a standard Pioneer drive with some metal parts as "window dressing". Their brochures for their DP-700 and DP-800 show a similar approach -- take a standard plastic mechanism and replace the tray and "bridge" with metal parts and add a metal support tray underneath. In audio, everything makes a difference, and I would expect these changes to make some audible improvement but probably not a big one.
Esoteric has set a very high bar with their top-end mechanisms. Everyone (including Esoteric themselves with their less expensive models!!!) is trying to make it look like they have some "bomber" transport but without breaking their budget.
But currently the only two drives that are appreciably different from anybody else's drives are the two top Esoteric models, used in the "1" series and the "3" series. These drives place the spindle motor in the "bridge" *above* the disc. The laser remains below the disc (as it must in order to read the data). But now the spindle motor's drive "puck" can be the full size of the disc as you don't have to worry about it getting in the way of the laser. It's a pretty good idea, but remember that it was copied from the old Pioneer "Stable Platter" transports of about ten years ago. The big improvement is that the whole thing is turned upside-down so that the disc can be inserted right-side-up. (The Achille's heel of the Pioneer Stable Platter was that the consumer had to insert the disc upside-down and it was very confusing for non-audiophiles.)
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Follow Ups
- RE: How do other makers fare? - Charles Hansen 05/14/0820:23:46 05/14/08 (0)
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