Review in image hifi magazine (Germany), issue 3/2006
Accuphase Super Audio CD Player DP-78
by Heinz Gelking
How carefully the man from the parcel service is heaving the cardboard box with the orange Accuphase logo through the door. Don't get stuck! Accuphase stands for expensive hi-fi as much as Leica for costly cameras or Porsche for expensive sports cars. Evidently, this is also anticipated by people who are not linked to the audio trade.
This may perhaps be due to the fact that Accuphase was already existing in the years when hi-fi fans were quite important and represented a large group. As I
was taking over the box and signed the electronic receipt book the guy from UPS
dropped just one word: "Äkjufäiss". And there was this certain timbre of acknowledgement in his voice which no million-dollar marketing campaign can buy from one day to the other. Accuphase, the Japanese luxury brand, have won this reputation since 1972. A different era indeed. No PCs, no fitness centres and merely three TV channels. And the compact cassette, the "data-reduced" medium of that
époque, auditioned through the tape deck in a run-of-the-mill hi-fi chain sounded so much better than today's MP-3-files via "active speakers" linked to a PC from the discounter. Those days have seen benchmarks for good sound. Nobody ever grasped music as being a conglomerate of data and nobody would have accepted the sound of tiny plastic speakers as standard.
I certainly do not want to moan here and I'm also far from telling you that everything was better then, with the exception perhaps that this might be true when we are listening to reproduced music. Apart from photography there was actually no technically oriented hobby to devote oneself as much as to hi-fi. Whereby both hi-fi and photography always contained a kind of cultural component, too, namely the pleasure an effective photo or listening to good music was to give us. This made the hobby so distinguished from tinkering around with cars.
It was the time when Accuphase started the business in Germany and I would not further waste my words if I wouldn't consider Accuphase still having a foot in those golden hi-fi times. The cooperation with the German distributor P.I.A. HiFi
Vertriebs GmbH was founded in 1975 and from the same year on Koichi (Nick) Iguchi was taking care of the technical service for all "official" Accuphase components. The quality of the P.I.A. service has become a legend, by the way. "Wish I also could rely on such a brilliant service at any time" I'm typing - with a sigh - into my keyboard after a two-and-half day struggle with the service & support of my online provider (still named Deutsche Bundespost in 1975) and their unexpected yet definite sacking me from the Internet. Eventually, I could solve the problem on my own initiative and two days later I was fortunate enough to have this review e-mailed to Gröbenzell just before deadline.
Accuphase and tradition: the front panels have the colour of champagne and the displays demonstrate a playful joy of putting luminous figures on stage. The typical ambience of colours - orange letters, smoked glass, champagne-coloured aluminium and the deep dark brown housing - is conveying harmony and furthermore is, in my humble opinion, not at all philistine. Something similar you can get only from
McIntosh. When trends are chased after by cool design-trailblazers, yet sooner or later are to become outdated, the front panel from Yokohama will still be around to
