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Overture and Meridian present an extraordinary musical achievement... The Meridian 808/808i Reference CD Playback System. “When you invest in a Reference quality CD player, you want it to come from a world-class company with a history of excellence in Digital playback designs. Robert Stuart and the Meridian design team have spent more than 20 years pioneering, creating and refining high-end Digital playback systems. The awardwinning 808 Reference CD Player Series is the culmination of their relentless effort to create a Digital playback system that will please even the most demanding ‘analog’ enthusiast.” – Terry Menacker, President of Overture New Digital formats have come and gone, and more are on the way. We can’t predict the future with 100% accuracy, but we do know that new playback technologies used in the Meridian 808 Reference Series are finding more musical information on CDs than previously imagined, resulting in playback quality far superior to the newer formats. With tens of millions of titles available, and the huge investment that has been made in CD collections by music enthusiasts, the need for a Reference quality CD player is essential. The 808s’ “Resolution Enhancement” provides true upsampling from the original 44.1kHz, 16-bit audio up to 176.4kHz, 24-bit resolution. The results are simply stunning. With the Meridian 808 Reference CD Player & 808i Player/Preamp, both older and new CD recordings are a revelation! www.overtureav.com 2423 Concord Pike (Rt 202) • Wilmington, DE • 302.478.6050 • 800.838.1812 • No Sales Tax in Delaware Audio Research • Aerial Acoustics • Acoustic Room Systems • ASC Tube Traps • Audio Physic • Avalon Acoustics • B&W* • Basis Benz Micro • Cardas • Classé Audio* • Clear Audio • Day Sequerra • Grado • Graham Engineering • Harmonic Resolution Systems Kaliedescape • Koetsu • Lexicon • Magnepan • Magnum Dynalab • MartinLogan • McIntosh Labs • Meridian • MIT MIT MA • Quad • Rives Audio • Rotel* • Runco • Shunyata Research • Spectral • Theta Digital • Transfiguration • Van den Hul VPI • Wilson Audio • Yamaha... and many more *no mail order
which she played on this recording, but in her hands it sounds like a cannon. Between her emphatic downstrokes and assertive double-stopping, the Ciaccona of Bach’s Partita 2 in D Minor (BWV 1004) sounded huge. Once she’d essayed the first fugue, however, Haendel’s tone was rich, warm, and round. I didn’t need to know which fiddle she was playing; the Oppo let me hear that it was one in a million— and played by one of the great ones. Hearing Haendel play Bach is to be reminded that, for all of the formal purity of his work, Bach pére was a man of flesh and blood—and a passionate one at that. In the Ciaccona, Haendel invests Bach with the Beethovenian “shattering resignation of a man to his unavoidable tragic destiny,” as she has described it. That observation isn’t a gratuitous aside, but rather my way of noting how much drama and emotion the $149 Oppo was capable of delivering. Similarly, on Chesky’s fabulous Swing Live (DVD-A, CHDVD222), which features Bucky Pizzarelli, Peter measurements, continued OPPO DIGITAL DV-970HD (those marked in purple are of unknown origin). The jitter level was 4 nanoseconds peak–peak, around 20 times higher than the best playback systems I have measured. Concerned that I was being misled by my test gear, I repeated the test with the same 16-bit signal on a DVD-A, then with a 24-bit version of the data. Both jitter level and spectra were the same. I then repeated the test using a different analyzer, but again with no change in the result. Performing a wideband spectral analysis of the Oppo’s output while it played back a high-level tone at 11.025kHz from SACD gave the graph shown in fig.9. Not only are the jitter and noise-floor modulation still apparent, but the idle-tone spectral content at low frequencies seen in earlier graphs is still present. You can also see the rise in ultrasonic noise Fig.9 Oppo DV-970HD, spectrum of analog output signal, 11.025kHz at –3dBFS, SACD data (logarithmic frequency scale). Appleyard, Bernard Purdie, Allen Vache, and Michael Moore in 2-, 4-, and 6-channel 24-bit/96kHz, the Oppo’s analog outputs delivered seriously swinging sound with depth, spread, and vigor. This live, minimally edited performance had more room acoustic than the Russell CD or the Haendel DVD, but the spatial detail didn’t come at the price of the tonal information or the rhythmic drive. Pizzarelli’s relaxed riffing on “Lime House Blues” proves that high-energy guitar playing is not the sole domain of the young and hormonally overloaded—the man can just flat-out play, and if you can’t make the trip to hear him while you still can, you need to get this disc. If I had any real complaint, it was that Michael Moore’s acoustic bass sounded somewhat puddingy, which I initially thought might have been because of the room itself. (Chesky doesn’t “fix it in the mix,” because that wouldn’t be a ANY MISGIVINGS I HAD ABOUT PAIRING A $149 DISC PLAYER WITH A $50,000 SYSTEM WERE QUICKLY LAID TO REST. true re-creation of the event.) My current favorite SACD, Paavo Järvi and the Cincinnati Symphony’s disc of works by Britten and Elgar (Telarc SACD-80660), also got its workout in the Oppo. Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes had weight and breadth, with a great amount of lowlevel detail. However, once again, I wasn’t completely happy with the lowend sound, which was somewhat soft and overripe in the midbass. I’d also due to SACD’s DSD encoding, but this is low in level, correlating with the somewhat curtailed response above the audioband seen with SACD playback in fig.1. It is hard to predict the subjective effect of such high jitter, but a flat, rather uninvolving presentation would be my suggestion. I do note that Wes Phillips found that the Oppo player sounded somewhat soft and overripe in the midbass, which is one consequence of high amounts of random jitter, in my experience. He concluded that the DV- 970HD’s “performance as a standalone player wasn’t where I felt its true potential lies, but when connected to a good DAC it punched way outside its class.” I must admit that I had trouble checking the quality of the Oppo’s digital output because, for a while, I couldn’t get it to output audio data with a sample rate greater than 48kHz, even with DVDs that allow an in-the-clear hi-rez signal to be output. The trick, it transpired, was to turn off the HDMI output, which allowed the maximum sample rate of the S/PDIF jacks to be set to 96kHz or 192kHz. Even so, using RME’s DIGICheck program, I found that the DV-970HD’s digital output truncated the word length to 16 bits, even with true 24-bit audio (such as my own DVD-As, burned with Minnetonka Software’s DiscWelder Bronze program). Does this matter? Perhaps not, as Wes enthused over the Oppo used as a transport to feed 96kHz-sampled audio to the Slim Devices DAC. But I still would like to have seen all 24 bits active in the digital output words. —John Atkinson 106 www.Stereophile.com, May <strong>2007</strong>
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"After intensive listening sessions
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MAY 2007 VOL.30 NO.5 48 61 FEATURES
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The RAINMAKER will exceed any expec
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©2006 NHT, Inc. now hear this. www
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Bred Bred for for forhostile hostil
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call us today! 800-782-3472 shop on
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The Ultimate HD Viewing Experience.
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In 1981, John Beyer and Steve Keise
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Grand designs result from grand con
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points where I could see a squarewa
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These are great times for analog, a
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MEGALINE EUPHONIA HELICON • MENTO
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THE GLEAMING TENOR ROLANDO VILLAZÓ
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Wes Phillips DESCRIPTION Single-box
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Musical Magic! Magical Music! Stere
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Page 78: John Atkinson DESCRIPTION Two-way,
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