Full review in AUDIO magazine (Germany), Issue 01/2009
Accuphase CD Player DP-400
Nobel Prize by Lothar Brandt
It comes in as noble appearance because it's a direct descendant of a noble house. It is adjuvant because it is good for a digital control centre. How good it really is has to be resolved, though. The least expensive CD player of the
Accuphase family is preparing itself for an exclusive review in AUDIO.
Such a reputation is certainly not acquired easily. "We must get it for the next issue" was the unanimous agreement among us - without having heard a single tone yet - when we got wind of the DP-400's existence before it was to be launched to the public. Which led to a nearly conspiratorial express delivery in order to have AUDIO
presenting, in the here and now, the brand-new and least expensive CD player in the portfolio of the Japanese noble maker.
Take it or leave it: we consider the price tag not being a bargain, though. In particular for a CD player which at the first sight plays nothing but the "antique" CD
format, from a today's point of view, that is. So, how come AUDIO dares to announce
"Super Price" on its cover? It's because our testers examined and, above all,
auditioned the DP-400 more than once. Like its discontinued predecessor DP-57, the newcomer also offers digital inputs. The internal DAC of the "Multiple Delta-Sigma"
type was made to process various digital sources, too. Network players of all kind and price classes are invited to dock to the co-axial input for sonic improvement.
Those notoriously hum-loop endangered satellite tuners may use the optical Toslink input instead in order to avoid any tedious ambient noise. At first, the network option seemed a bit weird to me because it somehow wasn't typically Accuphase. But then it was soon to open my eyes.
My colleague Bernhard Rietschel proceeded to dock the Sonos (see page 54)
and owing to the DP-400's nearly loss-less digital volume control he connected the latter directly to Audionet's MAX power amplifiers. Well, the transformation of the
DP-400 into converter/preamplifier/player could not only outclass the DAC inside the
Sonos but pushed all the incoming musical signals to unexpected sonic heights.
When - just for fun - Rietschel tuned in the web-radio station "Otto's Opera House" I
thought I couldn't trust my ears as to how wonderfully magic Humperdinck's opera
"Hänsel & Gretel" sounded with all its colours, power and depth. Simply stunning how the DP-400 could refine the data-reduced food.
In my opinion the converter section of the DP-400 is simply too good to be exclusively supplied by its own tried and tested, solid CD transport we know from its bigger brother DP-500. Although the processor - which Accuphase dubbed "MDS++"
- has to get along with merely two instead of four DACs of the PCM 1796 type, these chips from Burr-Brown (taken over by Texas Instruments in the meantime) are employed in a similar way. The wafers are good enough for a sampling rate up to
192 kHz / 24 bit in pure stereo operation. Accuphase has implemented them in
parallel configuration - hence "multiple" - and tapped each the phase-correct and phase-inverted signal. After a current-to-voltage conversion the voltages from both paths are added - hence "Sigma" (the mathematic sign for sum). Eventually, the phase-correct and phase-inverted currents are subtracted in the output stage - hence
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