PD-75 tests

I had put my precious PD-75 up for sale.  But listening tests immediately remind me that, like several other things in my inventory of stuff, I do not want to sell this CD player.  It's magic, and I need to understand that magic.

I do not understand why it should sound so good.  It could be in large part, it's cheating with about 1dB louder output than most CD players...  That goes a long way btw to explaining the apparently more passionate and intense reproduction this player produces.  But I'm not sure it's the only explanation.  Anyway, it's a cool player to have.  It was the very last thing to get bounced out of the living room system (which continues to have the Oppo BDP-205 and Denon DVD-9000, the latter for HDCD).

When I first read about Legato Link, I hated the idea.  If it were only that easy (as described in the first slick Pioneer brochure).  Also I sort of remembered some review claiming the high frequency distortion was high, as if a lot of aliases were leaking through.  Like No Oversampling.

Well now I think it's just a proprietary name for Pioneer's first original high end digital reconstruction filter.  Virtually all CD players have this (some early players and modern tweak players use exclusive analog filtering...or NO filtering) in one shape or anothers.  Pioneer's seems to be especially good, that's all.  Does that matter say if your ultimate system runs at 24/96 digital?  Yes, the reconstruction up to 24 bits might well matter, this is somewhat a grey area in double blind research, though results are usually negative, many individual studies of new systems (eg MQA) have found otherwise.

As do their early 90's 1 bit chips, the highest end version of which only exist in this player and the even more over-the-top constructed PD-95, which was barely available in US in the non-transport-only version.  So for people in the US, the PD-75 was it, at least in the Pioneer camp.  I think Pioneer had Sony beat hands down sonically, and seemingly by magic, around the time of the PD-75 in spite of Sony's ever improving distortion specs.  Then, strangely, Pioneer stopped making their high end one bit chips and moved on the fairly pedestrian level of R2R type DACs, the PCM64, which didn't really get good until around the PCM1702.

Was there some kind of patent dispute?  Did Pioneer find that their high end one bit technology didn't scale well into consumer players?  BTW, this is why I believe that Sony's ultimate 1-bit technology, used in the first 3 SACD players (SCD-1, SCD-777ES, and DVDP9000--and good luck keeping the latter working with annual laser changes) suddenly vanished, replaced by a total embrace of multibit sigma delta converter chips.  My theory is the ultimate 1-bit technologies, while good in vastly overbuilt machines, simply didn't work well enough for cheap machines, and there was no good reason to keep making them.  Also the off-the-shelf sigma delta chips were far cheaper.

So anyway this is quite collectible and would be hard to replace as prices increase.  Pioneers 1-bit which just sounded better (according to many tweak audiophiles anyway) than anything Sony could come up with until SACD.  The even more overbuilt PD-91 has the PCM64 converters, possibly a step down and the PD-95 with the 1-bit converters is in the solid platinum category not far from Esoteric UX-1, if you can find it.

And does it measure bad, with rising noise or distortion at high frequencies.  From what I've seen so far the Pioneer measures about as good as can be, and with astonishing linearity and dynamic range.  Distortion is right at the theoretical limit or close enough not to matter.

The disc clamping mechanism is super cool also.  An all metal mechanism clamps the cd from the top down onto a metal rotating platter.  If you are at all concerned about disc vibration, which it seems hardly anyone is anymore, this is almost the ultimate.CD mechanism, equalled only by the higher PD's 91 and 95, and the most high end Esoteric mechanisms, VRDX, like UX-1 which I'd long lusted for but have little justification for. the vast expense

Audiophile tweaks spent a fortune on tricks to supposedly improve CD playback.  One very popular strategy was mats.  My friend and brother-in-law George sold (and still sells, I believe) a magnetic damper which you put on top of CD's to reduce CD vibrations.   I was skeptical that all CD players were engineered well enough for such additional weight and thickness, and in fact it does seem like it doesn't work at all with some players.  And it's really just a tweak, not a fully engineered solution.

What's done in the Pioneer Stable Platter mechanisms isn't a trick.  Holding the CD flat and free of vibration is on no account a bad idea, so why not do the job with a fully engineered solution as in the Pioneer in the first place?

Hardly any but the most high end players have bothered in some way to reduce disc vibration.  Apparently cheap mechanisms can handle the vibrations well enough by other means, mostly optical and electronic.  But those are compensatory, why not just do the job right in the first place?  This is the ultimate "source matters" audiophile religion.  It's mostly BS of course.

I remember being fascinated by the PD-75 the moment I first saw one at an audio show.  George hated it.  Of course, dampers didn't work with it, you had to use the pioneer-provided thin damper.

So that could have been the problem for Pioneer.  The solution engineered to address tweak concerns didn't sell well enough in the tweak market filled with sellers of more tweaky tweaks.

But they sold well enough to keep the old Pioneer in business long past this era, until the 2009 dvr collapse engineered by others because Millenium Copyright Act and market rejection of HD DVD.  Until then at least it was Pioneer who made some of coolest disc systems of each era which the PD-75 still exudes in a relevant way.

I was relieved to read that the PD- 75 also did well on rejection of defects on a famous test (which I have in my inventory never used).  I had a problem disc that PD-75 wouldn't track which the Oppo did, so however good the PD-75 is the Oppo is even better at handling defects, as you'd expect given it's a top model made 25 years later.

The PD-75 however is notably quieter in operation, and I like that.  You feel like it's pulling your CD into a bank vault.

My PD-75 is terrible at handling CD-R's and I wonder what kind of over-optimization causes that.  However it's fine at handling hybrids, and its possible in some cases I might prefer the CD layer to the SACD layer (I've gotten that feeling listening to some discs, like Music for Organ, Brass, and Typany sounds which so much more exciting than I recall on various SACD players).  How better to test that with a great sounding CD player rather than something which tries to do everything?  (Well, both, actually, I guess I need).

But how many extra microscopes do I need in my collection?  Most of the others can go, I think now.

One advantage of the PD-75 that's pretty obvious, at least compared with most other disc players the mechanism is very quiet.  But that's rarely a problem among the better disc players nowadays unless they are playing DVD's or SACD, which spin at much higher speeds, then such spinning IS often audible, and undesirable.

That wouldn't give it any advantage over streaming, however sometimes it's mentally easier to put on a disc.