newman (03/09/83)
This is a dual-purpose item for anyone who cares. I just got the new NAD 4150 tuner (new in Canada anyway), and the unit is very impressive. The sound is extremely clean and quiet, and it picks up an astonishing number of stations. It is also very cheap for this performance ($419 Cdn). I had the opportunity to A/B it to a Mac MR78, and in the short time I compared them, could hear no differences at all. (It wouldn't have been meaningful to compare number of stations because I was using just crummy dipoles, but the NAD was very competitive). The unit has very sparse controls, 5 FM and 5 AM presets (oh yeah, it's digitally synthesized). No wide/narrow bandwidth switch. The only sour note was the first unit I received was a lemon (sorry) - it had a lot of 60-cycle hum and didn't seem to pick up as many stations as the second one does. The second thing I wanted to drool about was one of the first things I heard on my new tuner was a one-hour demo of the Sony CDP-101 compact digital audio disk player on some good classical material. It was of course degraded somewhat by the fm transmission but they turned off all the limiters and processors they had, and turned down their mikes so you could turn the volume up. In a word, WOW. The clarity, rock-solid stereo imaging, and unrestricted frequency response are nothing short of spectacular even over fm. The complete lack of groove noise was very evident. The Sony unit will be available in Canada on April 1 for $1495 Cdn. (apparently the first official announcement). Approx. 50 other firms have been licensed by Sony/Philips to make the players, and thank god, there is ONE STANDARD FORMAT. There are supposed to be several hundred disk titles available now, and at least double that by year end. There will be lots of machines around so competition will improve things. An interesting point about these digital players is that when operated within their limits they will all sound essentially alike! So convenience features will be the things to look at. A welcome change if you ask me - enough of this crap about the "musicality" of a phono cartridge. Oh yes - the semiconductor laser and the disks themselves are essentially lifetime devices - small scratches do not affect the disks in any way and the plastic coating can be polished if it gets really bad, restoring the original condition! Now, hope the price comes down a bit. Ken Newman Univ. of Toronto
mat (03/13/83)
Ken Newman says that all digital audio disk players will sound essentially alike. I agree to a point. The DIGITAL side should be the same, assuming that there are no subtle kinds of distortion that can be introduced by marginal tracking (by the laser beam of the disk) or by slight resonances in the drive motors, etc. I don't know enough about the subject to really be convinced one way or the other. The analog side is another story. Here we will probably continue to be blessed, at least in lower--priced units--with TIM, IM, slew limiting, dynamic range (noise floor vs. power headroom) considerations, and the like. Still, it should be improved vastly over what we have got now ... BTW, for those of you into either into ``good loud music'' or ``the high end experience'', Telarc released, a few months ago, a test--and--demo record set called the OMNIDISK. Most of the interesting tests apart from equalization require no aids other than a stopwatch and the screwdriver that fits your cartridge screws. The last side is devoted to a couple of ``real music'' demos: 1) B Britten's ``Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra'' with narrator -- a nice demonstration of strhereo imaging 2) A remake of the Beach Boys' ``Good Vibrations''. This is really stunning, but PLAY IT SOFTLY the first time, or you may turn you woofers into ICBMs. Well worth the cost. -hou5e!mat Duke of DeNet
dmmartindale (03/14/83)
There may be differences in the quality of digital audio disc players, to be sure. Certainly in the analog section, but perhaps the digital part too. I understand that the discs are recorded with an error-correcting code, but that doesn't mean that all players will actually correct errors properly - they may just use the previous sample again, or something equally cheap and ugly. However, I would guess that once you had a DAD player that worked tolerably well at all, with all the "groove" tracking hardware, that improving the sound quality would not be such a large additional cost, and thus manufacturers would be more inclined to produce better hardware. It's also true that many records being manufactured today sound pretty awful on good equipment, but how many people have good equipment? The majority of the market for records doesn't care, so why bother? The entire market for DAD's will have disc-playing equipment better than most analog stuff available today, so more people will be able to hear the difference, and I hope this will be an incentive for higher-quality records to be produced.