Hi-Fi: Sony SCD-1 Review
Preliminary Findings
I've had the SCD-1 running for about 12 hours now and thought I'd give you my first impressions. This thing is heavy - I felt like I was picking up a power amplifier (the packaging says 30kg). Straight out of the box this morning, stone cold, I connected it up with my favourite Kimber Select KS-1120 balanced cables and PowerKord mains cable, set the bandwidth switch to 'custom' (for 100kHz bandwidth before the brick-wall filter operates), disabled digital output and fired it up.
I resisted the urge to turn the volume up, just left it playing quietly until it was at least up to room temperature. The build quality and mechanism are a work of art. The top loading 'door' slides noiselessly to reveal the sealed playing compartment and spindle, complete with puck to place on the disc. Loading and reading the TOC takes some time, especially when switching between CD and SACD, as it reads the disc and switches lasers. This player is not for the impatient.
Playing some of my favourite CDs later this afternoon, at my usual replay volume, I was staggered. Any preconception that my existing CD transport, upsampler and DAC were close to the limits of CD replay capability went right out of the window. This machine plays CDs with a resolution and soundstaging which defies belief. I just sat and listened to whole albums, unwilling to change disc and not yet prepared to try an SACD. Classical recordings have real presence, instruments and vocals are well focused and set spatially, not just left-to-right but with depth. My system's weakness is depth due to the proximity of the speakers to the rear wall (a function of my long, narrow room in which I listen across the width) and yet this machine makes it resolve to behind the plane of the rear wall.
The second difference that strikes me is dynamics. Not just big bang stuff, but the microdynamics of real life, cues which help us believe in the reality of a sound. 'Startle factor' may be a better description for what I'm trying to say. Playing Diana Krall, I was absorbed by her stage-front, palpable voice when a piano, stage-right, and brushed cymbals came in. All of them startling, all playing together, any one of them easily defined and separated from the mix.
I just tried an SACD. Verdi's Requiem with Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, recorded in 1964 and remastered to DSD from the original analogue tape. Oh my, words fail me.
This weekend is a write-off. Or, rather, has been redefined.
7 April 2001
A Few Words About Running-in
I'd read in the various forums (especially AudioAsylum) that the Sony takes a lot of running-in. Having listened to it fresh out of the box, my views above indicated to me that perhaps people had been exaggerating a little. I was to be proven very wrong.
The thing about the SCD-1 is that, not only did it take far more running-in than any other hi-fi component I'd ever bought, but that it got worse before it became better. Think of a u-shaped performance curve where it hit rock bottom after about 30 hour's use. Specifically, the bass went fat and tubby after about 20 hours, with a congested presentation and flattened depth. Into around the 36 hour mark, the bass went very light but the timing started to tighten up and the midrange became clearer. At 48 hours, the treble extended, midrange opened out and the bass started to come back, this time extended and tight. It took over 100 hours for the bass to develop its full authority again. Out to about the 300 hour point, the machine gradually opened out the sound stage and both width and depth improved incrementally. Something amazing happened at some point after 400 hours: tiny microdynamics, detail I'd never heard before, came through to heighten my sense of 'being there'. The SCD-1 had arrived.