Review in image hifi magazine (Germany), Issue 2/2007
Accuphase CD Player DP-500
by Dirk Sommer
Accuphase has ventured a step back: the new digital player is to render CD
only. However this was all but a half-hearted decision and rather carried out in an uncompromising manner, as the device itself is clearly demonstrating. And this is why already at this stage I'm paying my highest tribute to the Japanese.
In the past year I was more busy with "digital things" than may be assumed by merely looking at the various topics I've been contributing to image hifi. But haven't I
often confessed that my hobby is to make musical recordings the classic way,
namely with analogue tape recorders? Well, those who have not read my respective articles may perhaps not have missed the ironic remarks on this issue by my colleague Petra Kirsch in one or the other company's portrait she wrote.
But why all these "digital things"? On the one hand, it is advisable to always have a backup recording made in view of the vintage Studer and Nagra machines employed. For this purpose an easy-to-operate HD recorder can be integrated in the device rack. On the other hand, the more or less successful recordings should also be made available for the artists, after all. However a carefully edited copy of the master tape is regrettably not feasible and hence a self-produced CD will be a more practical choice. Nevertheless, the drawback here is that the method of digital postproduction has eventually a great influence on the sonic properties of the CD when compared to the analogue master tape. In the beginning I experimented - quite reluctantly though - with various sampling frequencies and bit lengths for the conversion from analogue to digital. The result however will always be a CD
according to the Red Book Standard, i.e. with 44.1 kHz and 16 Bit, and therefore - in my admittedly humble understanding - it should not make any difference if the music signal is "chopped down" and temporarily stored in a 44-thousand-fold or
96-thousand-fold format before it's send to the CD burner, either directly or after some extended computing. Somehow it would seam reasonable that the quality may be bettered if the conversion is made with the frequency being exactly doubled, i.e.
88.2 kHz. Far away from that! The higher the sampling rate and number of bits before,
the better the sound on the CD. That this is true and certainly no autosuggestion I
may have been subject to, I could already demonstrate during some of the platforms organised by the Analogue Audio Association, and I shall demonstrate it once again in Eschborn during a tape recorder workshop (!) from March 17 to 18. Anyone interested is most welcome to join us.
Another example to show the potential of the "old" CD format, provided one is prepared to spare no efforts, is the "24bit master edition" launched by the renowned jazz-label Enja in Munich, about which you could already read in the "Blue Notes"
elsewhere in this publication. Enja is publishing landmark jazz productions, partly as first and partly as re-issues, which had once been recorded in the seventies or eighties and put on the market in LP format. In the early days of CD some of them
however were available as compact disk also, yet from a today's point of view with rather mediocre sound quality. It was Enja's Thorsten Scheffner (who also edited the current image hifi LP "Live at the Domicile") to take care of the analogue master tapes. He recorded and edited them with the help of a 24-bit converter by Lavry whereupon they were transferred back to the 16 Bit/44.1 kHz Red Book Standard.
Now, the new CDs are sonically far superior to those from the old days and, in the
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