Editors' Commentaries

By Richard Hardesty

July 12, 1999

Sony SCD-1 Super Audio CD Player

Madison Avenue, Just Like You Pictured It

In late June I visited the elegant office tower that Sony maintains on Madison Avenue in New York City. Together with a small group of audio journalists, I attended a presentation designed to familiarize us with the inner workings of the Sony SCD-1 - the first Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD) player to be introduced in the United States.

The SACD uses the Sony-Philips Direct Stream Digital (DSD) process to provide an ultra-high fidelity music delivery system for the home. The SCD-1 player can provide two channels of analog audio from DSD-encoded SACDs and is compatible with regular 16-bit/44kHz compact discs as well. I should have one of these players to evaluate soon and you should be able to buy one in the fall for about $5,000.

Eventful Trip

My flight to New York included a stop in Denver where the second leg was delayed for three hours by a mechanical problem. When we finally did get airborne, it was too late to make it to Laguardia in time to land before the midnight curfew. I arrived three hours late at the wrong airport. The limo driver figured this all out and was waiting for me at JFK. I got to my hotel around two in the morning.

The trip home was even more exciting. Our 747-400 made an instrument approach to LAX through a dense marine layer. We made visual and physical contact with the ground simultaneously. After an extremely hard landing, the plane taxied directly to the maintenance hanger and nearly 400 people were loaded on buses and trucked over to the terminal. Woopee! This event did allow me the opportunity to stand next to a 747 engine, which was an impressive experience.

The engines on a 747 look pretty big through the windows of the terminal building, but standing on the ground next to one gives you quite a different perspective. The buses that took us to the terminal seemed dwarfed by these huge power plants.

The travel time to the meeting was about five times as long as the meeting itself, but now that a couple of weeks have passed, I think that the trip was worth the effort.

Engineers From Japan

The chief engineer responsible for the design of the SCD-1 player and engineers from the team that helped develop the DSD process made their presentations to our group in Japanese. Sony’s David Kawakami translated for the mono-lingual members of the audience. I got the distinct impression that these factory guys were personally involved in their work.

Many people assume that a huge company like Sony is simply interested in profits from licensing and cares little for the actual sonic merits of a new technology. I believe that judgement may be a little harsh. I don’t speak Japanese but I can sense sincerity and the individuals that I met seemed sincere in their stated goal of delivering better sound. I hope that magazine reviewers will give DSD a fair appraisal and not let it get buried under the pile of DVD-Audio hype that is starting to accumulate.

Why Not Multichannel?

The SACD format supports multichannel recordings but the first players will be two channel machines. Sony wants to position this product as a high-end source for music and they believe that serious music listeners would be turned off by gimmicky remixes of two-channel recordings. Almost all music recordings have been made for two-channel playback and that’s how most people listen. A hastily-assembled multichannel re-mix of a recording that was designed for two-channel reproduction usually sounds like just what it is.

It will take some time for a transition to multichannel music presentations if that does indeed occur at all. So the decision was made to introduce this product as a delivery system for high-end, two-channel music recordings and the early content providers will include some audiophile labels like DMP and Telarc. Sony will also release some classic recordings from their archives on the Legacy label.

The SCD-1 player has a digital output for 44kHz/16-bit PCM only. Sound from SACDs will be available from two analog outputs only. These players have no obvious provision for upgrading.

The Guts and the Egos

I had already seen the insides of one of these new machines and knew what to expect but I was very interested in Sony’s recommendations for testing. The SCD-1 player is an admirable piece of work that I’m sure will be appreciated by most equipment reviewers. This product will be a bargain at only $5k. The DSD technology will be more controversial.

The noise shaping techniques used with the DSD process require that some modifications be made to normal signal-to-noise ratio tests. Switching noise is shifted upward in frequency to prevent intrusion in to the audible range. This noise can be only -30dB from the signal at ultra-sonic frequencies and this is going to be the basis of lots of discussion from reviewers. The none-listeners among the group will decide whether DSD is better or worse than LPCM based solely on S/N ratios I fear.

The Sony engineers anticipated this problem and tried to explain why the DSD technology needs to be evaluated somewhat differently than LPCM. I hope reviewers will listen to the sonic results from both SACD and DVD-Audio discs before drawing conclusions based on their test instruments.

Comparisons, Finally

I’ve been writing about the theoretic aspects of linear pulse code modulation (LPCM) as used for CDs at 44kHz/16-bit, and with higher sample rates and expanded sample precision (96kHz/24-bit) in the DVD-Video and DVD-Audio discs. And I’ve written about 1-bit pulse density modulation at 2.8mHz sample rate as used for Direct Stream Digital, SACDs.

I have a 96kHz/24-bit player and processor and I can hardly wait to get my hands on an SACD player. I want to listen to both and compare the sound. Yes, I will try to perform some meaningful measurements to graphically demonstrate what I hear. I’ll tell you all about it when it happens.