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HIFIREVIEW arantz's elegant compact disc la er Marantz is moving up market. That's the very strong conclusion we came to after looking at their latest CD player, the CD-94. This machine leaves previous models for dead in terms of operating refinement, sound quality and, most of all, finish. Reviewed by LEO SIMPSON In the last few years Marantz has gone through its vicissitudes but now it has a new direction and commitment to the highest audio fidelity. This new direction has been mostly due to its chief audio designer Ken Ishiwata, a Japaneseborn engineer operating at Marantz headquarters in Eindhoven, Holland. His hand was clearly demonstrated in Marantz's award winning PM94 stereo amplifier and one can see that a great effort has been made to achieve the same standards with the CD-94. Let's face it. There are many cheap compact disc players on the market and as far as most people are concerned these do a perfectly satisfactory job; they play the music and they do it to a far higher standard than their delighted owners were probably used to with 32 SILICON CHIP their disc-based equipment. But there is more to the compact disc than just the basic CD players. There are a substantial number of people who want quite a lot more than the basic machines offer. And up till now, there have not been many machines catering to their needs. There probably never will be but this new machine from Marantz is certainly a contender for the very top of the market. Unfortunately, mere photos do not do the Marantz CD-94 justice. They can't show the very fine finish. They can't show the glasslike texture of the timber end panels, the subtle colouring of control panel illumination and major control lights. Nor do they show the solidity of the machine, or the action of its controls. We'll attempt to tell you something of the physical attributes of the machine but you really need to have it demonstrated "in the flesh" to fully appreciate it. At first it does not look all that different from other CD players. It is largish but not overly so and since so many CD players are black these days it does not really stand out as being really different; quite the opposite in fact. It is unobtrusive. It has very few controls visible on its front panel. Turn it on though and it starts to look more the part. Its display panel lights in a very subtle blue (it's a vacuum fluorescent display) with a large pair of digits for track number and then smaller digits to show index numbering and elapsed time in minutes and seconds. There is also a line of very small digits which show the number of tracks on a disc (up to 24) and those that have been played. What we like about this display is that it is bright enough without being at all gaudy. Press a very discreet open/close button and the disc drawer slides out quickly and smoothly. So many CD players give a poor impression at this stage. The drawer either makes graunching noises, or is too slow or is jerky. None of that with the CD-94. Once the disc is dropped onto the Inside the rigid diecast aluminium chassis of the CD94: note the generous transformer and all the capacitors which are specially made for Marantz. The player is particularly immune to shock and vibration, a legacy of the comprehensive error correction circuitry and the rigid construction. platform, you can either nudge the drawer to make it withdraw or you can push the open/close button to achieve the same result. Good. This is a most desirable feature since not a few players can be jammed or damaged if the CD drawer is physically pushed home. The only other controls visible on the front panel are the two large buttons to the right of the display panel for play/replay and pause/stop, and three small buttons below the display for FTS (favourite track selection) and track selection (forward/reverse). That may not seem like enough until you lightly press the lower part of the front panel. It then drops open smoothly (damped by a dashpot) to reveal a whole array of controls to enable you to make the machine do just about anything. Paradoxically though, most users will probably never use these controls because, as far as we were able to determine, it can all be done with the infrared remote control. Playing features The CD-94 has all the playing features of most compact disc machines and a lot more besides. One of these is shuffle play. Instead of playing the disc through from start to finish, you can press "shuffle" and have the tracks played in random order. This can be a pleasant change when playing anything except classical music. Another unusual facility on the CD-94 is "FTS" which stands for favourite track selection. This enables you to program the machine to play selected tracks on a compact disc and omit the others. Once you have programmed the machine for a particular disc it will always remember it. Thereafter, as soon as you feed the disc into the machine, it shows FTS on the display and you can then play the programmed selections by pushing the FTS button on the front panel or on the remote control. Depending on how you use it, the Marantz can store a hundred or more compact disc 'favourite track selections'. For example, 155 discs can be programmed to play an average of five tracks each. In some ways, we would prefer to think of this facility as the "disliked track non-selection" - you can program the machine to omit those tracks you hate. Good idea? The CD-94 also has "Index" play whereby you can program or select musical passages to be played by JANUARY 1988 33 The lower part of the front panel drops down to reveal an impressive array of control buttons for programming. There is also a headphone socket with its own level control. A nice touch is the gold plating on the ten track selection buttons. their index number. These are generally not used on pop music discs but are frequently used to identify movements within classical pieces. Another facility is "AMS" or automatic music selection. This goes through and plays the first ten seconds of every track. Repeat play is also featured, a common facility on CD players, but the Marantz also gives a similar facility with the Play/Replay. More often than not, pushing the Play button while play is in progress makes the machine move to the next track. On the CD-94 though, pushing the Play button makes it restart the same track and it does it almost instantaneously. Response times on the CD-94 are particularly fast. It can usually access and start playing any track on a disc within two or three seconds, and often much less. The worst case, going from the first track to the last of a 25-track disc, takes four seconds flat! Another feature which sets this machine apart from others is the provision of digital and optical fibre outputs on the rear panel. This is principally to allow it to be used with Marantz's special CDA-94 Digital-to-Analog Converter. This latter is a high precision multipurpose unit which automatically adjusts its sampling frequency to suit the selected input: 44. lkHz for compact disc, 48kHz for the new DAT (digital audio tape) machines, and 32kHz for the anticipated satellite broadcast audio. Removing the highly polished timber end pieces and the heavy aluminium lid of the case reveals another big difference with the CD-94 machine. At a time when other machines are going to all plastic construction and weighing only about 5 or 6kg, the Marantz has a very rigid diecast aluminium chassis and a diecast chassis for the player mechanism too. All up weight is 10.3kg. The internal circuitry is beautifully laid out and uses analog componentry unique to Marantz. This includes the large Elna electrolytic capacitors with ceramic filling and the damped copper styrol (polystyrene) capacitors in the Bessel output filter stages. The capacitor leads are also tinned oxygen-free copper instead of the usual tinned mild steel leads, a feature which Ken Ishiwata claims is important to sound quality. A relatively large mains transformer is used, considering the low nominal power consumption of 30 watts. The machine is double-insulated and we are glad to report that the mains wiring is of a much higher standard than a lot of equipment which sports the "double insulation" symbol. A sheathed two-core mains flex is used, which is as it should be. 16-bit dual D-A converters Marantz uses the new Philips dual 16-bit D-A (digital-to-analog) converters with four times oversampling. The beauty of this system, apart from much improved linearity, signal-to-noise ratio, separation and all that, is that it allows a digital filter to remove the 176.4kHz digital residual left over The CD-94 has digital and optical outputs as well as the normal analog outputs. There are two additional sockets for use with the Marantz bus system. 34 SILICON CHIP after conversion. A third order (18dB/octave) Bessel filter takes care of the remainder of the audio filtering. This is better than typical machines which use a very sharp "brick wall" filter to remove the residual digital artefacts which inevitably results in ripples (ie, small deviations) in the audio passband. Three better from the Best. Testing Our first objective tests of the CD-94 involved its tracking performance and error correction. We used the Philips No 4A defect disc and naturally it passed all tests without so much as a murmur. Then we fed it a badly scratched disc which many players refuse to load let alone play. Here the Marantz did very well and probably better than any other player we have come across. It played all but two tracks and even with these two, which are probably unplayable by any machine, it made a fair attempt before the laser pickup was thrown completely out and the machine came to a stop. The machine was commendably immune to shocks and vibration. Short of pounding on it with your fist, it is very difficult to make it mistrack. Without doubt though, the most impressive test results involved measurement of the frequency response. Marantz claim a frequency response from 2Hz to 20kHz within ± 0.0ldB. When I first read this spec I did not believe it. It would be an unprecedented degree of precision for any piece of electronic equipment, audio or otherwise. Subsequent checking proved that the spec is genuine although I still find it hard to believe. Up till this time, the tightest tolerance we have seen for any piece of electronic equipment has been ± 0.ldB. We knew darn well that there was no piece of measuring gear currently available (maybe in Standard labs there are) which would verify the spec. But we went ahead and measured the frequency response anyhow. It was uncanny, watching the millivoltmeter pointer come up to exactly the same reference point for every frequency between 20Hz The remote control duplicates all the facilities on the player. Very fast response times are a feature of the machine. and 20kHz. Clearly, the CD94 was far better than the millivoltmeter. Marantz quote similarly ambitious figures for signal-to-noise ratio, separation between channels and total harmonic distortion. S/N ratio is quoted as better than 104dB, channel separation at better than lO0dB and harmonic distortion as better than .0015% at lkHz and 0dB. These are truly excellent figures. Unfortunately, we were not able to verify them as we presently lack a suitable filter to remove residual 44. lkHz signal. In the CD-94, residual 44. lkHz is at a level of about - 70dB and this masks signals which are much lower in level. This is a consequence of not using a "brickwall" filter, as we mentioned above. Based on the performance te.sts we were able to carry out, we have no reason at all to doubt the machine easily complies with its specifications. I would go further than that. Of all the machines I have tested or used so far, I would have to rate the Marantz CD-94 as the best overall. It is a delightful machine to use and to listen to. I'd love to own it. For such a top-rating machine, it is something of a bargain. Recommended retail price is $1699.00. For further information, contact Marantz (Australia) Pty Ltd on (02) 742 8322. ~ For decades, Ortofon has been recognised as being without peer in the development and manufacture of sound reproduction cartridges. Today, the legend moves the leading edge a significant step further. You are invited to hear the introduction of the three latest Ortofon Moving Coil Cartridges each with 3 unique features: 1. Unsurpassed quality of the moving coil principle. 2. High output (2mVl directly into a . standard phono input, totally elimin~ting the need for a step-up transformer. 3. Trade-in and trade-up options at point of purchase. Ortofon MC X-1 Elliptical diamond. Ortofon MC X-3 Fineline diamond. Ortofon MC X-5 Van den Hui diamond. These 3 cartridges have been so well received by the hi-fi press that we will let them complete this advertisement: "It was one of the smoothest, silkiest, and leasHoloured cartridges we can recall using. 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For full details and free brochures, contact the Sole Australian Distributor, SCAN AUDIO or your nearest ORTOFDN specialist. SCAN AUDIO Pty. Ltd., 52 Crown Street, Richmond, Victoria 3121. Telephone: (03) 429 2199. ortofon accuracy in sound S& T SA 5042 JANUARY 1988 35