DMP-Z1 Yup or Nope ?
Short version:
I bought it
*Warning: The Following Post Is Not A Review*
All characters, components and/or company names appearing in this post are entirely fictitious.
Any resemblance to real persons, components or corporate entities living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Recently I 'rather unintentionally' acquired a DMP-Z1 which I've been running into ABYSS Diana headphones, the pairing of which has resulted in me experiencing prolonged & profound periods of aural hallucination.
I'm wondering if the original model designation was not actually DMT-Z1....!
Before this most fortuitous event I had been considering replacement of my Hugo 2 (primarily used as a dac driving into a preamp/amp speaker system) with the Chord Hugo TT2.
It's frequently noted for having more body than say my Hugo 2 with M-Scaler, and that's a pairing which although I'd found made music sound more like the DAVE.. was likewise ultimately possessing a less corporeal and more
ethereal characteristic, one which I'm personally not deeply enamoured with... I desire to hear musicians with real meat on their bones, as is the case with live performance.
Flesh !... this is precisely how and why the DMP-Z1 has been a fundamental reboot for me, and coincides with my clarity of realisation that the Chord sound whilst a
very technically correct sound, is built from the top down (and from the outside, in).
Whereas I perceived the DMP-Z1 as portraying a super musical, tangible and no less immersive or natural sound.. but instead built from the bottom up (and from the inside, out) !!
It's one thing for a replay device to deeply 'portray' the ambience of a studio or live recording, a complete other for it to tangibly impart a 'feeling' of the actual presence of performing artists. This is the core difference I have sensed in my direct comparisons of the aforementioned devices and for me, it is not subtle
AT ALL.
YMMV, or not
A funny thing about this DMP-Z1 is that I had absolutely no interest or intent to acquire yet another piece of headphile gear, the Diana's themselves were an off-the-cuff listening test which put me so deep in the zone that I couldn't 'unhear' them... extraordinary transducers that they are.
The dealer whom supplied me the Diana's, noting my very simple tastes of 'only wanting the very best' hahahha, suggested that if I was so inclined, he could avail to me a listen of the very first DMP-Z1 to hit the shelves in my country, once it had cleared the warehouse later that week.
Truth be known is that that last piece of Sony audio equipment that I took seriously, and spent significant time with was during the late 80's recording in NYC recording studios... that was the PCM-3324 DASH 24 track multitrack recorder, which was at the time a state of the art (and high maintenance) beast !
The original 44.1/48kHz, 16-bit PCM-3324 weighed 440 pounds, had a maximum record time of 65 minutes and could easily be synched for 48-track work. Even with its $150,000 price tag, the PCM-3324 found many early adopters such as Stevie Wonder and Frank Zappa.
It was cutting edge and we made a lot of hugely successful albums with those machines... but back to the DMP-Z1.
I duly received a call and returned to the dealer for a listen, purely out of a very mild curiosity... I mean seriously I've been listening to some pretty classy gear in both the professional and audiophile sectors and recently the Chord dac stuff has been re-defining several aspects how well digital can be done to a significant degree...Sony on the other hand, well lets just say I wasn't holding my breath or anything
Without derailing this thread (as much as I'd like to !) by getting deeply into socio-anthropologic musicology/hearing perception discussions , and perception of music does indeed depend on many culture specific factors... what the DMP-Z1 (primarily in combination with the ABYSS Diana for the sake of this here post) does for my innate enjoyment is thus far unique.. presenting a completely different
culture of sound reality and one which I profoundly resonate with.
Fact is that any and all designers of audio gear, design around their 'set of truths', their individual interpretation of reality.
Which in some cases may become like religious beliefs along with hordes of their abiding followers.... it matters not one iota whether these truths are based upon 'pure science', the arts... or a blend of the two.
Science is defined after all as nothing more than peer reviewed theories, many of which which are continually altered and refined, or discarded entirely.. learning does not stop, it evolves..and as such is ultimately no different from Art if taken to the extreme
So do you prefer a '59 Fender P bass or a Fodera, discrete NOS dac or VLSI chip DSD upsampled 4096 times, solid state or tube amplification....everybody got choices, Yup !
I'll admit I'm a bit of tube freak, in fact I dig classic old crap, ...dusty vinyl and I also enjoy building tube amplifiers, preamps etc... I've got a walls of vintage gear, big ass horn speakers, NOS WE300B's, VT52's, 801's, 845's, mercury rectifiers etc...boxes of them, but frankly I couldn't care less regarding what components are employed in this here $10K box... Unicorn snot, proprietary hand rendered MangaFPGA's, Higgs Bosuns or 42 cent dac chips from last years Allied Electrical catalogue ??
When all is said and done, screw the technicalities....we're talking about music remember, and My ears, and solely my ears are the final arbiter.
Did the designers inner truths allow the the fat lady's lungs to swell, her buttons to pop and her voicebox to sing like no other ?
Indeed !
And so too did the explosive rhythms of Art Blakey, the mellifluous melodies of Roy Ayers, the bubbling bass lines of Sly & Robbie, the virtuosic violin of Rachel Podger etc.. etc.. etc..
Let
your ears, and solely
your ears be the final arbiter, muttered the deaf guy on the stool in the corner.
In the case of the DMP-Z1, after numerous hours of hardcore listening immersion I can go drink tea... and shortly return, no
, be drawn back to listening for many more hours with absolutely zero hearing fatigue.
Whilst still hearing every nuance, in fact more relevant cues in the music and of the musical intent, the entire fundamental depth & gravitas of proceedings are represented so tangibly and effortlessly with oodles of natural in body presence....
and out of head presence.
It's like a delectable Bento box which just keeps on feeding you
Amongst numerous other dacs I've previously owned or still do, the Aqua La Scala R2R tubed dac was one which offered more similarities than differences in regards to the DMP-Z1's innate sense of mass delivery, tonality & texture than any of the uber articulate Chord dacs... it too communicated the message more than the medium... but in addition the DMP-1Z also does so, so much more.
In my mind the DMP-Z1 is ZEN masterpiece of refined simplicity which in one fell swoop can eliminate all the previously required power supplies, conditioners, cables, computers, end-point renderers, more cables.. blah blah blah.
For one, it allows you to quit obsessing about endless external variables affecting the potential fidelity of the musical outcome, should you elect to defer to it's onboard storage & playback engine, but you're not limited to it either.. its USB C (USB B compatible) input also sounds freaking excellent from the numerous sources I've used, and the plethora of inbuilt DSP tuning choices allow for genuine high fidelity options, and options are always good !
I'm a recording engineer & éclectique music junkie (!) who is & has been way too side-tracked with all manner of gear in a continual effort to get the most out of the tunes.. the tunes man, the tunes... what most of us here are apparently all about... the combination of DMP-Z1 with ABYSS Diana have curbed my sound reproduction compulsions like nothing else I've bought in decades.
On another tip, last night I connected the DMP-Z1 via the single ended headphone output (only as I don't yet have a Pentaconn plug to solder up a pair of direct run balanced cables) to my balanced input ADAM Tensor Gamma's which as a pair, are 120kg's and 2.1KW's of fully active 4 way custom designed mastering grade speaker system.... and although the arrangement was sub-optimal, they've never sounded more immersive from anything else I've driven them from by a very large margin, (and that is quite a long list which includes the direct outputs of my fully rebuilt and ohh so glorious sounding vintage recording console) !!
What a simply massive sound, totally 3D knock all the walls out presentation.
So this stunning little black box is not simply a 100% fully self-contained &
transportable reference class system for headphones, it can also reside as the centre-piece source/preamp of a world-class loudspeaker system.
(I'm yet to, but intend to deploy several other headphones and also slot it in to numerous big systems in my travels...)
Of course most people simply won't understand its raison d'etre it at all... nor will they stomach its not inconsiderable (
although in my opinion based on outright performance, functional practicality and ability to emote positively enhanced auditory response; absolutely justifiable) price... but thankfully, the brilliant Japanese boffins who conceived this 'niche in a niche' device obviously have very little in common with most people, and neither do I !
!!
