dCS Scarlatti and Puccini CD/SACD Players

Digital Record Players

My colleague, the estimable Robert E. Greene, implies in this issue that the heyday of analog is finally over thanks to CD DACs like the Benchmark he reviews. For a guy who used to extol Stanton moving-magnet cartridges as state-of-the-art, maybe analog’s day in the sun is over—in fact, for REG maybe it never truly dawned. However, isn’t it just a little bit disingenuous to claim that vinyl’s superiority has been “trumped” and perfect sound forever is now perfected if you thought, as Robert did, that CD was more or less perfect to begin with? Before intoning final rites over the most lifelike playback system the world has yet known, I think it would behoove my pal REG to listen to some of the best record players and cartridges currently on the market—and then some of the best digital. If he does, I guarantee he won’t need a double-blind test to hear that they still sound different (albeit less so than they used to). What digital does well—clarity, transients, focus, dynamic range, (some kinds of) lower noise, bass—it still does exceedingly well. What analog does well—timbre, texture, low-level detail, space, air, dimensionality, bloom, treble—it, too, still does exceedingly well.

It used to be that opting for one of these two sets of virtues (digital or analog) kept you from enjoying the other set. You could have the slaw or the fries with your burger, but you couldn’t have both. Now, to a certain extent, you can. As with the transistor and the tube (to which these two playback media bear so many striking resemblances), CD/SACD playback and LP playback have gradually moved closer together sonically as each has improved.

It was only a year or two ago, for instance, that the Audio Research Corporation—which seems to make a specialty out of bridging the divide between solid-state and glass audio—sent me its Reference CD7 player, which in several key respects so narrowed the gap between LP and CD playback that it shocked me. What made the CD7 extraordinary wasn’t just the way it approximated some of analog’s space, bloom, air, and dimensionality, but the way it did this without surrendering (or at least without completely surrendering) digital’s superior transient response, dynamic range, bass extension, and clarity. No, the CD7 didn’t have the whip-crack attack or journey-to-the-center-of-the-earth bass of a top-line MBL player (or something like the exceptional new Bow Technologies’ ZZ-8), but its sound wasn’t soft or bland or pre-chewed, either. This wasn’t the ersatz tube sound of the throw-a-blanket-over-the-digital-nasties players of yore. It was something new and persuasively lifelike—a CD player that seemed to do some (not all) of the things that up until then only analog rigs could do, and to do them without giving away everything in its own toy chest.

Of course, the Reference CD7 is a hybrid player—virtually a mini-Reference 3 linestage coupled to a Crystal 24-bit DAC and Philips Pro2 transport. From a digital purist’s point of view, it was definitely a bit of a kludge job (although it did highlight—for me, at least—the key importance of the analog part of digital-to-analog conversion).

Come now two completely different animals—the $67k dCS Scarlatti stack (separate transport, DAC, and clock) and the $20k dCS Puccini (transport, DAC, and clock in one box)—that are unquestionably the work of some of the smartest and most innovative thinkers in digital technology, David Steven, Chris Hales, and Andy McHarg of the British firm dCS. There is nothing kludgy about the Scarlatti or the Puccini; there aren’t any glowing filaments in them, either.

For those of you who don’t already know it, dCS has long been a pioneer in CD/SACD playback. Under Mike Story, who has now stepped away from the firm, these Brits were the first to develop and implement upconversion (initially, from 16-bit to 24-bit, then from 16/44 to 24/96 and 24/192, and now from PCM to DSD); they were also among the first to address the problem of “jitter” (in a brilliant white paper by Mike Story, parts of which even I could follow, and the entirety of which you can still find on line at www.dCSltd.co.uk/technical_papers/jitter.pdf).

Though Story, Steven, Hales, McHarg, et al. are world-class engineers, what intrigues me about dCS is the role that close listening plays—and has always played—in the development of its products. For instance, there is some theoretical dispute about the benefits of upsampling PCM to DSD (and about the benefits of upsampling in general); in its literature, dCS concedes this, but points out that—whether the results can be rationalized completely or not—upsampled CDs sound better.