Sure it sounds totally self serving, particularly since I am selling two of them to buy a MacbookPro. Hell, it is PURELY self serving- but there is no lack of truth in this post.
Why is it the best? hell- it's a player from the 1980's! How can that be any good? The 1980's and portable Cd was a funny time. There were no really cheap players and the fight was against the better sounding tape players like the top of the Line Sony Buddkan, Sony WM-D6 casette player (People were using nice vinyl and expensive cartridges to make tapes...sure the high end rolled off a bit, but with Metal tape it was minimized- people were using nakamichi 1000zxls and Tandberg 3014's to make killer tapes- these were some of the only good sounding cassette machines). So of course you had to make a great Portable Cd player to get these people's attention. Kids would never remember this or believe it given the garbage tape players that came out after the Portable Cd players killed the tape players off.
Well it was one of the few players that did not use cheap Op amps to save power or do other things to starve the player of curent robbing players of depth imaging, and a clean bottom end which has to support the entire stage.
It was a fully metal player.
It has a digital output.
Wireless remote
2 DAC/8FS digital filter
32 times over sampling.
It has some useless trash features like bass boost, and treble boost which you would never bother to use- unless you were piping it into a car's stock system.
It doesn't have anti skip- so forget walking with it. fine in a car or plane or train or work desk.
But if you are looking for the last word in sound quality for portable audio...this is it. Kills all MP3 players. Simply put it has clearly delineated bass, clean treble free of phase shift, excellent imaging- and far better sound quality than most home players. I also owned the Wadia 860...sure the Wadia blew it away- nothing touches the digimaster algorithum for digital (really... everyone else has it ALLLLLL wrong)..., but the player was on par with many so called "Hi End" cd players, yes I prefered it to Meridian, and California Audio Labs, Sim Moon, Rega planet- and also very strangely better than ALL of the other Denon home players (which were mediocre anyhow).
Don't believe me? Come and hear it. The weirdest thing....you can play this player into powered speakers and if you compare it to any other player....it will play louder with harder hitting and cleaner bass until clipping. How is this possible?????? Since all the wattage from the powered speakers is the same???? Something about a clean signal always sounds louder. I A/B'd the player against a SONY 555 cd player and consistently the DCP Denon whomps it in High end extension, smoothness of midrange, tonal balance, bass heft and slam, and pace.
I have 3 of them- 2 New in the orginal boxes and one that is used and given me years of satisfaction. I also have a DCP-100 as a Beach Beater-
yes and even the lesser DCP-100 with only 8x oversampling...-it also kills all the current crop of Hard disc players.
So this leaves me in a quandry.
I want better sound. I want access to a large library of music on the go.
I'm willing to pay for it.
What I want is a Nuvistor based (RCA's portable shock resistant metal sealed "mini tubes" - the ones that were developed for the military before trnasistors supplanted them- smooth sounding, long life, linear in frequency response, not harsh or cold like transistors and also not sloppy or overly lush like glass tubes) portable headphone amplifier with a digimaster algorithum based on 32 times over sampling d/a converter with error correction with the ablity to run 24bit 196 signals into a set of Ultimate Ears UE-10's or any better portable headphone. I am not as interested in Electrostatic headphones for portable use- but for desktop use..they would be great. I'm fine with 24 bit for digital signal because the best you can get out of a D/A converter anyway is 21 bit due to thermal noise in the circuit.
While I'm at it I may as well make it EVDO capable so I can stream on the fly from Musicgiants.com or magnatune.com.
While youa re at it...you might as well have selectible dither to cope with noisy environments. I've found that certain dither actually helps bring out the music...which sounds completely counter intutitive. I was on the beach listening to the DCP-100 with some ocean nose as "Dither" and for some reason I was able to hear deeper into the mix than ever before... Do i care why???Well i would if I was designing it...but all I really want is that amazing sound that makes me want to listen more and more.
Until that's around- the Denon Disc players still reign supreme- and that is a very sad thing considering it is based on technology from the 1980's. But then again Look at McIntosh re-releasing the 275 amps from many decades past...... sigh.... why don't people care....why do they have such tin ears?
Anyone wanting a listen contact me at my email I might even consider going to the Rocky Mountain audio fest or the next NYC show- you can hear it there.
I'm willing to blow a lump of cash to get this done...dig up Steve Huntley from Wadia, harvest some blown up Musical fidelity amp for nuvistors, and move from there.
I wish I could make it blue tooth to synch with a blue tooth phone like the audiovox 6700. then ,,,,,maybe I could get a high rez stream on the go.
Everything is impossible and unlikely,,,,,until someone does it.
