New addition to the Baz Cave
New addition to the Baz Cave
My Sony CDP XB930 player has just been retired and replaced by a Studer Revox CD221 professional CD player. The Sony player has given sterling service and I’m more than happy with the SQ.
So why change? Well my mission is to have a system that is fully balanced, source to speakers. The amplification is fully balanced, and shortly so too will the record playing side of things. I’m also attracted to professional quality gear: for the reliability, robustness of construction as well as sound quality. The Studer Revox C221 is such a beast. Mine was made in Switzerland and is an ex-broadcast unit from Poland.
Being a professional design it has a number of features which are eminently desirable when used in a broadcast studio, but are somewhat quirky for use in a domestic system. The first is that the on-off switch is at the rear of the unit, so when the unit is rack mounted the switch is inaccessible. This makes sense when used for broadcasting, but could be inconvenient domestically. Now some are of the belief that source components ought to the left powered up constantly – my preamps and phono equalisation amplifiers are, however if the CD221 is kept switched on, the laser is also on. This could shorten the life of the laser, so to ‘switch off’ the player after the disc has finished one has to leave the disc in the drawer, select track ‘0’ and then press ‘Pause’. This stops the motor and switches the laser off. If the machine is switched off at the mains, it can reportedly take up to 45 minutes for the electronics to warm up!
The second feature that is not needed is the sophisticated cuing and time functions. When a disc is loaded, the player displays information such as the number of tracks, total playing time etc, just as do domestic machines. However if 'Play' is pressed, the timer counts down and when the first track has finished, the player stops and displays the next track. To play the second track the ‘Play’ button has to be pressed again, and so on. Again all this makes sense if the machine is used in a broadcast environment: the DJ needs to know how much time is left when playing a particular track and doesn’t necessarily want to play any subsequent tracks. To get around all this one simply switches off the timer, fade, cue and pause functions; the timer then counts upwards and the player will play all the tracks in turn.
For those who like this sort of thing, here’s a photo of the ‘inners’:
I wasn’t expecting much of an improvement in sound quality, if any. But my goodness - this machine rocks! The sound stage is massive: wide and deep, much more so than with Sony and the focus is amazing. I played Dave Brubeck’s ‘Time Out’ and I really felt as though I had been transported to the recording session. The sense of solidity of the players and of the space around them was palpable. Next up was Stevie Ray Vaughan’s ‘Couldn’t Stand the Weather’, and the track ‘Tin Pan Alley’ was astonishing: I was noticing detail that I hadn’t heard before. To say I’m delighted is an understatement.
Now that summer seems to be with us I’m employing my ‘summer amps’: Quad 510 monoblocks, which are replacing the Levinson ML-2s. No loss of quality has been noticed so far, which again demonstrates that professional audio equipment is not only about reliability and brute force, some of it can display great subtlety and finesse.
(Apologies for the dust!)
Anyway enough of typing, I’m off to listen to some more tunes: classical, jazz, folk, world – it could be a late night!
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Originally Posted by Anthony K
