PRELUDE
One way to stay young is to break your own hide-bound rules; one of my rules is to not buy high-end audiophile magazines – but today I bought the October 2007 hardcopy issue of Stereophile. One reason for not buying those magazines is that they don’t give SACD due credit, but this issue does.
The opening John Atkinson editorial documents an interesting blind test, where unsuspecting ‘golden ears’ reviewers (JA included) were invited in to The Listening Room to hear a familiar recording (Handel’s you-know-what). All were smiles through the first section, but then the audience began to question the acoustics of the room in the second section, grew uncomfortable in the third section and outright irritated in the final section. What were they listening to? It was a clever down-sampling of a SACD, starting with the original 24/88.2 DSD and then descending via 16/44.1 RBCD down to MP3 at 320kbps and 192kbps....
This month’s cover-girl is the Esoteric SA-60 ($4600), but two other SACD/Universal machines also get full reviews: Marantz SA8001 ($999) and Muse Polyhymnia ($6400)*. As if that were not enough, the issue includes what I assume is an annual index of recommended components, including numerous SACD machines (but you have to squint down through the text to spot them). –All of which leads me to exclaim ‘Blesséd is the child who is still shopping for an SACD player!’ since there are some very attractive options here. The general pattern is that manufacturers are now bundling technology from earlier machines into products at half the price.
FUGUE
The Esoteric is reviewed by Michael Fremer, whose heart lies in high-end vinyl, but he is also a strong advocate of SACD, no surprise. He begins his review with a short history of SACD. Of great interest to many on this forum, is the scandal Fremer shares regarding Philips SACD drives:
“...Philip’s launch, in 2005, of a poorly designed, ergonomically primitive OEM SACD transport. Aside from refusing to play a large percentage of ‘Red Book’ CDs that any $30 DiscMan would play without so much as a digital hiccup, this transport eventually produced an almost 100% failure rate in the field with no possible fix – much to the disgust, horror, and embarrassment of Krell, Musical Fidelity, T+A, and other makers of high-end players who value their reputations for making reliable, high-quality players. Philips then made matters worse by simply abandoning their manufacturer customer, leaving these companies to face angry customers who’d bought expensive products that broke and could not be fixed.”
Fremer also manages to slip in some delicious gossip into his review, and I’ll risk violating copyright by quoting one more acidic line concerning Sony’s cutting SACD production in Indiana to one day per week, which forced the ABKCO label to complete its reissue of Rolling Stones on red-book:
“Sony’s message, heard loud and clear throughout the industry, was that no independent label’s effort to support the SACD format with superb sound, a popular catalog, and low prices would go unpunished by SACD’s inventor and original promoter.”
Fremer goes on to update the SACD saga, and finishes by noting that against all odds and Sony policies, high-rez digital sound survives.
CODA
Jim Austin, who reviews the Marantz, doubts that redbook actually gives listeners headaches, as some complain. His explanation is that RBCD ‘shouts at you’, inducing stress (which of course can be manifested physically in many manors, e.g. headaches).
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* I noted no SACD discs being reviewed; no surprise since Stereophile doesn’t review many discs nowadays (cf complaints in Letters to Editor). This is obviously a task delegated to SA-CD.NET.
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